First session with my counsellor… what do I say?
I think it is highly probable that your depression is directly related to whatever happened in your past that is still affecting you. In fact, the odds of those two things NOT being related are very small. When something traumatic happens in your past and you continue to have bad memories, flashbacks, crying, depression, nightmares, etc. and those things impact your personal life, that is called post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. Therapy is fantastically helpful for PTSD, far more so than medication. I can tell you this as someone who has dealt with PTSD personally, from childhood abuse. Medication never helped me, because PTSD is such a unique disorder in that it is tied directly to those events in an unequivocal way that cannot be ignored if you want to get better. Trying to “just forget about it” will never work, you have formed too strong of an emotional attachment to that memory, you’re never going to just forget about it. Things that have strong emotional presence are stored t
