Are you experiencing the “dark night of the soul”? Are you among the one in four Americans who suffer a serious depression some time in their lives? Are you wondering, or even afraid, that you will never feel better? You are not alone!

Even Mother Theresa of Calcutta experienced her “dark night of the soul.” Prior to her death, reporting serious doubts about her worth and value, she believed she had been a failure to God and others. Depressive feelings occur in all of us at various times and intensities. Depression typically follows loss; any kind of change from one's expectations about how life would, or should have been. Sometimes an outside event precipitates it. Often it occurs because of physiological changes. When depression is more than mild and transitory, it usually is a mix of both outside and inside changes.

There is help! Not through acting to 'pull oneself together', to exert will power, or to improve one's moral character, but through counseling, medications, or a combination of both. Cognitive behavioral therapy helps to focus our thinking more clearly and concisely, so we can make decisions and changes that will cause us to feel better. CBT therapists act as educators and coaches, encouraging clients to accept challenges (rather than define them as problems), and to anticipate healing and change.

Depression is alleviated through learning to allow oneself to accept and adapt to changes and to think about shoulds differently. Learning about boundaries in relationships, making new kinds of choices and altering the way we perceive and think about our life circumstances-even our feelings, causes one to experience freedom from depression. The past is not the focus-getting one's life on track now, is.