Depression and the Question of Meaning: Finding Your Way Back to a Life That Matters
One of the quieter faces of depression is the one that looks, from the outside, like someone who has everything and is still not okay. High-functioning, professionally accomplished, seemingly settled. And yet there is a hollowness underneath. The things that used to matter no longer land with any real weight. The work feels mechanical. The relationships feel distant, not because anything has gone wrong in them, but because the person behind the eyes has gone somewhere harder to reach. This experience, which clinicians sometimes call anhedonia, is one of the most disorienting aspects of depression. It is not sadness. It is the absence of feeling. And in communities like Hidden Hills and Calabasas, where maintaining the appearance of wellness is almost a social expectation, it can be profoundly isolating to be living inside that absence while the world around you assumes you are fine.
When Life Loses Its Color
Depression has a way of narrowing the world. Activities that once brought pleasure begin to feel like obligations. Plans get cancelled not out of laziness but out of a genuine inability to summon the energy that presence requires. Even relationships, which most people think of as a natural source of comfort, can feel like too much: too much performance, too much expectation, too much of a reminder of who you used to be and are not currently able to be.
Beneath much of this is a profound disruption in the relationship to meaning. Depression does not simply affect mood. It affects the interpretive lens through which a person makes sense of their life. Things that were once genuinely important begin to feel arbitrary. Questions that once felt settled, about purpose, about direction, about why any of it matters, resurface with an urgency that can feel both necessary and terrifying.
The Gift Hidden Inside the Crisis
This is a perspective that surprises some clients when I first offer it: the loss of meaning that depression brings is painful, but it is not always wrong. For many people, a depressive episode is the first time in years that they have paused long enough to ask whether the life they are living is actually the one they want to be living. The relentless forward motion stops, and in the stillness, genuinely important questions emerge.
This does not mean that depression is good, or that it should be left untreated because it might be instructive. It means that within the experience of depression, there is often a signal worth attending to. What am I doing that no longer serves me? What have I neglected that matters deeply? What kind of person do I want to be when I come out the other side of this? Good therapy holds both things at once: relieving the suffering and staying curious about what the suffering is asking for.
How Therapy Approaches Depression at Its Roots
In my work with clients experiencing depression, I do not start with symptom management, though we do address practical daily functioning. I start with the person. Who are you beneath the role you have been playing? What did you want for your life before other people’s expectations began to shape the answer? What have you been carrying that was never yours to carry?
This kind of inquiry is not navel-gazing. It is the beginning of building a life that is genuinely livable, not simply one that looks good from the outside. Many of my clients describe the work not as recovering what they had before, but as discovering something more honest: a self that has survived difficulty, that knows itself more clearly, and that is building a life based on actual values rather than inherited expectations.
What Recovery Actually Looks Like
Recovery from depression is not a straight line. There are better days and harder days, and part of the therapeutic work is learning to hold both without interpreting every difficult day as evidence that recovery is not happening. The trajectory, over time, is toward greater capacity: more range of feeling, more genuine engagement with daily life, more of what I often call the texture of being alive, the small things that once again feel like they count for something.
That return is possible. I have watched it happen across forty years of this work. It begins not with optimism, which depression makes impossible, but with something more modest: the decision to show up and see what happens when someone truly listens.
Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with over forty years of experience providing therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, and across the Greater Los Angeles area, in person and via secure telehealth for California residents.
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Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, offers compassionate therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Malibu, Agoura Hills, and throughout the Greater Los Angeles area, with secure telehealth available for all California residents.
📞 (818) 618-4762
✉️ Susie@susierome.com
📍 24933 Kit Carson Rd, Hidden Hills, CA 91302
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