Overcoming Depression: What It’s Really Telling You, and How to Finally Let It Move

Why depression keeps coming back

The medication took the edge off. Or it didn’t.

Therapy helped you understand it. But understanding depression and actually moving through it are two different things

So you’re still here. Waking up flat. Going through the motions. Wondering why nothing fully lands.

Depression is dark, heavy energy. It isn’t sadness – it’s more like the absence of aliveness. A dimming. The body’s way of shutting the volume down when what needed to be felt was too much, too soon, with nowhere safe to put it

It started as protection. And then it just… stayed.

In my work, depression belongs to its own family – a spectrum that moves from apathy and discouragement through despondency and despair. Your deep inner knowing called in exactly this level of heaviness. Which means it has something to say. This work teaches you how to hear it.

When you can finally access it, the depression stops being a wall. It becomes a door.

 

What I work with instead

Depression is almost always sitting on top of something else. Grief that was never allowed. Rage that had nowhere to go. Shame so old it feels like identity.

The nervous system didn’t malfunction. It did exactly what it was designed to do – it protected you from what you couldn’t process at the time. The problem is it never got the signal to stop.

Positive thinking doesn’t reach this. Neither does talking about it indefinitely. Emotional Liberation® works at the level where the trauma actually lives – in the body, in the tissues, in the patterns that run underneath conscious awareness.

But we don’t start in the body. We start with awareness.

The first step is cognitive – learning to read your emotions. What is this feeling? Why is it here? What is it actually telling me? Most people have never been taught this. Once you have that map, the deeper work becomes possible.

Then we drop down. Three things make that possible:

• Psycho-Spiritual Inquiry – guided inner exploration that goes beneath the story of your depression to the emotional material driving it. What’s been unexpressed. What’s been unfelt. What your system has been organizing itself around
• Expressive and active movement – depression lives in stillness. Moving expressively – rooted in ancient Eastern esoteric practices that have worked with the body for thousands of years – interrupts the holding pattern and begins to wake the body back up.
• Conscious plant medicine – used with clear intention, proper preparation, and skilled facilitation, plant medicine can dissolve the defensive layer and allow what’s been stored to finally surface and move. More on this below.
  

What this looks like in practice: I help you name what your inner world is actually signaling. Then, through my Psycho-Spiritual Inquiry, expressive movement, and specific breath support, we stir what’s been held in the tissues – the old grief, the suppressed anger, the places life force went quiet. Some call this composting. The material comes up, gets processed consciously, and releases. The body knows how to do this. It just needs the right conditions.

 

What the research says

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide – affecting an estimated 280 million people. And yet standard treatment leaves a significant gap. The search for what actually works continues to point toward the body.[1]

The landmark ACE study established a direct link between adverse childhood experiences and long-term physical and mental health outcomes. What doesn’t get processed doesn’t disappear — it reorganizes. And a 2024 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found that practices integrating intentional movement with inner awareness consistently reduce anxiety and depression.[2,3]

“Depression is not the absence of feeling. It’s the presence of so much unfelt feeling that the system had to shut the volume down. The work is not to ‘feel better’ – it’s to feel more.”
– Becca Williams

Plant medicine and depression – what’s worth knowing

Psilocybin has attracted more serious clinical attention for depression than almost any other emerging treatment. The reason isn’t mysterious: antidepressants manage the chemistry. Psilocybin seems to touch something deeper — temporarily quieting the default mode network, the part of the brain caught in the loop of self-criticism and rumination, and opening a window where new patterns can actually form.[4]

The results have been striking enough that researchers are calling it a potential paradigm shift for treatment-resistant depression. A living systematic review updated to July 2025, the most current synthesis of all randomized controlled trials, found consistent, significant antidepressant effects across the body of evidence. (Note: preprint, not yet peer-reviewed.)[5]

A real-world clinical study of 115 patients found meaningful reductions in both depression and anxiety with no serious complications.[6]

A 2024 systematic review of randomized controlled trials confirmed psilocybin’s antidepressant effects with a favorable safety profile.[7]

Cannabis, used ceremonially and with intention in a supported setting with a skilled facilitator, can open access to grief, tenderness, or old anger that’s been locked away. Without that container, it can deepen the flatness or amplify avoidance. The context is everything — and I’m thorough about it.

The endocannabinoid system plays a central role in emotional regulation, stress response, and the processing of fear, which means it is directly implicated in the emotional patterns this work addresses.[8] A preliminary study published in Psychopharmacology found that low-dose THC reduced threat-related activation in the amygdala in trauma-exposed adults, suggesting potential as a pharmacological approach to stress and trauma-related conditions.[9]

Everything I write about plant medicine covers dosing, contraindications, preparation, and integration, because those aren’t details. They’re what determine whether the experience is healing or just an experience.

Where healing meets real life

Depression doesn’t just affect how you feel. It affects how you show up – in your work, your relationships, your sense of what’s possible for you.

Understanding where it came from is meaningful. But it’s not the same as being free of it.

Because even after real insight, you still have to go home. Back to the relationship that exhausts you. Back to the job that drains you. Back to a life that was built around the version of you that was managing, not the version that’s beginning to wake up.

This is what some of my students have come to call the shaken snowglobe. Something is genuinely shifting inside. But the outside world doesn’t reorganize itself to match. People still expect the version of you they know. And that gap – between who you’re becoming and the life that was built for who you were – can feel disorienting. Even terrifying.

A lot of healing work ends right here – at the insight. Before the hard part.

We don’t stop there.

Once the emotional root begins to move, we work on what that means for your actual life. How to re-engage with things that have felt dead to you. How to communicate what you need when you’ve spent years not knowing. How to let yourself be seen when hiding felt safer.

The inner work opens the door. Aligning your outer life with your inner awakening – that’s where lasting transformation lives.

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Sources

1. World Health Organization. (2023). Depressive disorder (depression). WHO Fact Sheet.
   https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/depression
2. Felitti, V. J. et al. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245-258. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8
3. Dong, Y., Zhang, X., Zhao, R., Cao, L., Kuang, X., & Yao, J. (2024). The effects of mind-body exercise on anxiety and depression in older adults: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. Frontiers in psychiatry, 15, 1305295. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1305295
4. Carhart-Harris, R. L. et al. (2012). Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(6), 2138-2143. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1119598109
5. Singleton, S. P. et al. (2025). Psilocybin treatment for symptoms of depression: a living systematic review, meta-analysis, and data resource. medRxiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.13.25333530
6. Aboulafia-Brakha, T., Buchard, A., Mabilais, C., Alaux, S., Amberger, C., Furtado, L., Seragnoli, F., Briefer, J. F., Thorens, G., Sabé, M., Szczesniak, L., Iuga, R., Zullino, D., & Penzenstadler, L. (2026). Real-world effectiveness and safety of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: Outcomes from a large-scale compassionate use cohort in Switzerland. Psychiatry Research, 358, 116992. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2026.116992
7. Li L-J, Mo Y, Shi Z-M, Huang X-B, Ning Y-P, Wu H-W, Yang X-H and Zheng W (2024) Psilocybin for major depressive disorder: a systematic review of randomized controlled studies. Frontiers in Psychiatry https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1416420
8. Lutz, B., Marsicano, G., Maldonado, R., & Hillard, C. J. (2015). The endocannabinoid system in guarding against fear, anxiety and stress. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(12), 705-718. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn4036
9. Rabinak, C. A., Blanchette, A., Zabik, N. L., Peters, C., Marusak, H. A., Iadipaolo, A., & Elrahal, F. (2020). Cannabinoid modulation of corticolimbic activation to threat in trauma-exposed adults: a preliminary study. Psychopharmacology, 237(6), 1813–1826. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-020-05499-8