The very nature of depression often thwarts efforts to treat it. After all, it’s difficult to change when you have no energy, no sense of hope, and no capacity to concentrate. How can we challenge these chronic states? Trauma expert Janina Fisher breaks down nine interventions from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy—all easily worked into video sessions—that she uses with her own depressed clients.
“Given the way our lives have been turned upside down by the pandemic—causing isolation, joblessness, fear, anxiety—a lot of our clients will exhibit signs of depression,” Janina writes. “Even we therapists may feel the weight of our own challenges as well as the pain of our clients.”
Janina Fisher
Janina Fisher, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and former instructor at The Trauma Center, a research and treatment center founded by Bessel van der Kolk. Known as an expert on the treatment of trauma, Dr. Fisher has also been treating individuals, couples and families since 1980.
She is past president of the New England Society for the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation, an EMDR International Association Credit Provider, Assistant Educational Director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, and a former Instructor, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Fisher lectures and teaches nationally and internationally on topics related to the integration of the neurobiological research and newer trauma treatment paradigms into traditional therapeutic modalities.
She is author of the bestselling Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021), Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation (2017), and co-author with Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Attachment and Trauma.(2015).
