Does depression after trauma look different from other kinds of depression? Not necessarily. The symptoms—loss of interest in life, emotional flatness, irritability, difficulties with sleeping, and so on—can be identical to the symptoms of other kinds of depression. But when depression is trauma based, it’s essential that we identify and understand how the trauma is contributing to a person’s depression. It’s important to emphasize that this doesn’t mean that a person needs to relive his or her trauma in order to gain relief from it. Many people avoid coming to therapy because they’re afraid they’ll be asked to re-experience the painful things that happened to them. This is not the case. We need to understand what happened. You don’t have to relive it.In order to understand depression after trauma, it’s important to understand what trauma is. When we feel traumatized, we feel overwhelmed by our feelings. Sometimes this happens because we’ve experienced an unusually painful event—a car accident, a war injury, a sudden, unexpected death of a loved one. Often, trauma is not the result of a dramatic event, but of everyday interactions that leave us feeling alone with unmanageable emotions.Many people feel overwhelmed by their feelings because they’ve never had the experience of having their emotions understood and accepted by others. If you didn’t have a parent who was attuned to your feelings—whether those feelings were “negative” feelings like anger or sadness, or “positive” ones like exuberance or enthusiasm—you may find these feelings frightening. You might think that there is something wrong with you for having them. You might use a lot of your emotional energy trying to suppress them, or completely remove them from your awareness.What happens in trauma that creates depression?Trauma tells us that it’s dangerous to feel our feelings. If our parents couldn’t tolerate our anger, we’ll suppress it in order to secure their approval. If they couldn’t tolerate our enthusiasm, we’ll keep it under wraps. But our feelings tell us what matters to us, what we care about. If we can’t feel our feelings, it’s very hard to have any enthusiasm for life. Everything feels flat and meaningless.How can you treat depression after trauma? Recent research suggests that psychotherapy is particularly effective in treating trauma-based depression (“To Treat Depression, Drugs or Therapy?” New York Times, January 8, 2015). Therapy provides a safe environment in which you can begin to experience the feelings that seem to overwhelm you. With the help of an accepting and understanding therapist, you can stop berating yourself for feeling depressed, and start to see how you came to believe that your feelings were unacceptable. As your feelings begin to make sense to you, you can integrate them into your life. As you begin to experience a wider and deeper range of feelings, your depression will lift, and you’ll experience a renewed interest in and enthusiasm for life. The process isn’t always easy but, in my experience, if you stick with it, you’ll be rewarded with a richer, more emotionally satisfying life. Click here to read more about depression and how it relates to grief and loss. Click to learn more about depression therapy and treatment with Jane Rubin, Ph.D.