It’s Not Always Depression by Hillary Jacobs Hendel, LCSW
Learn how It’s Not Always Depression reframes anxiety, emotion, and vitality through neuroscience and compassion—and what it teaches us about healing.
Discover six powerful lessons—from the science of emotion to the art of self-compassion—that can reshape how we understand anxiety, depression, and vitality.
In It’s Not Always Depression, Hillary Jacobs Hendel invites readers to look beneath the surface of symptoms to see what’s truly happening inside. Many of us learned early on that it wasn’t safe to feel. Many of my clients struggle to connect with their anger, for example. When, as a child, they showed anger or other intense emotions, they were shamed. That rejection disconnected them from their primary caregiver—and that is one of the most painful, even terrifying, experiences for a child. They learn to suppress the anger to avoid that disconnection.
Often this happens because the parents, too, were shamed. They find their own emotions uncomfortable to deal with, so they suppress them. When someone else—such as their child—freely accesses emotions, it can be deeply unsettling.
Hendel shows us what happens when those emotions, long buried, are finally welcomed home.
The Cost of Emotional Inhibition
When children are punished or dismissed for their feelings, their nervous systems learn a painful lesson: connection depends on suppression. As Hendel writes, “Emotion and bodily sensations often reveal us to ourselves.” But if our environment made that revelation unsafe, we learn to disconnect—from the body, from emotion, from aliveness itself.
Hendel draws from affective neuroscience to explain how core emotions (like anger, fear, joy, and sadness) are meant to move through us, but inhibitory emotions (like anxiety, guilt, and shame) block that natural flow. What we call “depression” is often this emotional gridlock—a system frozen in protection.
And yet, she reminds us that the antidote isn’t to think our way out. It’s to feel our way through. “Make the implicit explicit,” she writes, “and make the explicit experiential.”
Making the Implicit Explicit—and the Explicit Experiential
When Hendel says, “Make the implicit explicit, and make the explicit experiential,” she’s describing the two essential movements of healing.
The first—making the implicit explicit—means bringing into awareness what has been automatic or unconscious. These are the emotional patterns, protective strategies, or bodily reactions that once kept us safe but now operate outside our awareness. In therapy, this might sound like noticing, “I shut down whenever someone raises their voice,” or “My stomach tightens before I even realize I’m angry.” Naming these patterns is powerful—it turns vague unease into something knowable, something we can work with rather than be run by.
The second—making the explicit experiential—is about moving beyond insight into felt experience. It’s one thing to understand, cognitively, that you feel angry or sad; it’s another to feel it in your body, to stay with the sensations long enough for them to complete their natural arc. When we allow an emotion to be felt instead of analyzed, it transforms.
The benefit of this two-step process is integration. Awareness without experience stays abstract; experience without awareness can feel overwhelming. When we combine them, we create a bridge between mind and body, thought and feeling. That’s where real change happens—the kind that doesn’t just make sense, but feels true in the nervous system.
✨ Hey, by the way…
We all have our own ways of protecting what hurts—patterns that once kept us safe but now keep us stuck. Sometimes the first step toward healing is simply seeing those patterns clearly.If you’re curious which protective pattern shows up most for you, take my Healing Pathway Quiz.
It’s gentle, quick, and eye-opening—and it helps you understand what your nervous system might actually be needing right now.[Take the Healing Pathway Quiz →] click here: Quiz
The Somatic Signature of Healing
One of the most powerful insights in the book is Hendel’s observation that vitality—that sense of feeling “alive,” “right,” or “true”—is the body’s compass for transformation. When we finally allow ourselves to feel what we’ve avoided, there’s often a deep sense of relief. It’s not that the sad thing won’t be sad anymore. But what’s different is that, truly feeling it feels honest. It feels real.
As Hendel puts it, “Vitality and energy equal somatic markers of transformation. Positive is anything that feels right and true to the individual.”
So often, clients in therapy fear that if they touch the hard thing, they’ll be overwhelmed. Yet it’s not experiencing the hardest thing that is the hardest thing. It’s experiencing the hardest thing alone that is the hardest thing.
That is the heart of therapy—bearing witness so that the unbearable can be felt, and therefore released. When pain is met with presence, the nervous system learns safety in real time. That’s when vitality returns—not because the feeling has gone away, but because it finally has somewhere safe to land.
The Wisdom Hidden in Emotion
“Emotions tell us what we want and need and what is bad for us,” Hendel reminds us.
They are messages, not problems. When we learn to decode them, we reconnect to our authentic self and to others in a truer way.
Grief leads to acceptance.
Anger to strength and clarity.
Fear to safety.
Joy to exuberant energy.
The therapeutic process often involves helping clients re-establish this internal trust—teaching that emotions, even the painful ones, are guides leading toward integration.
Anxiety as an Inhibitory Emotion
Hendel offers a refreshingly clear and compassionate reframing of anxiety. In her model, anxiety is not a core emotion like fear—it’s an inhibitory one. While fear helps us respond to danger, anxiety shows up when a core emotion is trying to surface but feels unsafe to express or even acknowledge.
In other words, anxiety is a signal. It tells us that something deeper—perhaps sadness, anger, or fear itself—is being blocked or suppressed for a reason. The body is trying to protect us from feeling what once felt too threatening to feel.
When we understand anxiety this way, the goal shifts. Instead of trying to get rid of it, we can learn to listen to it—to ask, What emotion might be underneath this right now? This gentle curiosity helps the nervous system soften its grip, allowing the blocked emotion to move into awareness at a pace that feels safe enough.
Hendel offers this wise reminder:
“Remind yourself that you are anxious, and therefore it is not a good time to draw conclusions about the future until you’re calm.”
It’s such a simple instruction, but profoundly regulating. It invites us to pause, to wait for safety, and to remember that anxiety is not the enemy—it’s an invitation to look beneath the surface.
From Traumatic Memory to Ordinary Memory
One of Hendel’s most clinically useful distinctions lies in how she defines trauma memory:
“When we think of memory, it is clear that the event is in the past. When we recall a traumatic memory, the past and the present become harder to tell apart.”
A traumatic memory isn’t just a thought—it’s an experience that hijacks the body and brings the past flooding into the present. Healing involves turning traumatic memories into ordinary ones: events that can be remembered without being relived.
In therapy, this often looks like slowing the process down, naming what’s happening in the body, and helping the client orient to safety. Over time, the emotional charge softens; what was once unbearable becomes integrated.
When Feeling Feels Impossible
Sometimes emotions feel so big we want to “jump out of our skin.” Hendel explains that, one of the things that amplifies emotion most is self-judgment. When we criticize ourselves for feeling, the distress multiplies.
Her solution is simple but profound: kind self-talk. When we replace judgment with curiosity, the body relaxes, and the emotion can move through rather than build pressure.
In those moments, the goal isn’t to suppress the feeling—it’s to differentiate between the emotion itself and the thoughts inflating it. That distinction is where regulation begins.
Five Lessons I’m Carrying Into the Therapy Room
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Emotions Are Guides, Not Problems
Each feeling carries information about what we need and value. When we decode emotion rather than suppress it, we move toward authenticity and vitality. -
Anxiety Is a Protector
Anxiety signals that a deeper emotion is trying to surface. Instead of fighting it, we can learn to feel what’s beneath it. -
Feeling Alone Is the Hardest Part
The presence of another—therapist, friend, or loved one—can make the unbearable bearable. Connection transforms pain into healing. -
Trauma Lives in the Body
Turning traumatic memories into ordinary ones requires engaging the body, not just the mind. Safety, presence, and pacing are key. -
Kindness Regulates the Nervous System
Self-criticism amplifies suffering. Gentle self-talk helps emotions move and the body settle, making healing sustainable.
Favorite Quotes from It’s Not Always Depression
“Emotion and bodily sensations often reveal us to ourselves.”
“Make the implicit explicit and make the explicit experiential.”
“It’s not experiencing the hardest thing that is the hardest thing. It’s experiencing the hardest thing alone that is the hardest thing.”
“Emotions tell us what we want and need and what is bad for us.”
“Remind yourself that you are anxious, and therefore it is not a good time to draw conclusions about the future until you’re calm.”
The Beauty on the Other Side of Feeling
What makes It’s Not Always Depression so extraordinary is its compassion for what it means to be human. Hendel reminds us that we can trust our emotions—that however painful they are, they’re leading us somewhere beautiful. When we stop running from what we feel, we stop running from ourselves.
In my therapy practice, I’ve seen again and again: when clients learn to let emotions move, energy returns. Relief arises. Vitality follows. Emotions become portals to deeper understanding—each one an invitation to grow in wisdom, wholeness, and well-being.
✨ Don’t forget…
If this reflection resonated, you might love the Healing Pathway Quiz.
It helps you identify the protective pattern that most often shows up in your healing journey—and offers three grounded ways to start finding relief.Clarity really can be the first layer of compassion.
[Find your Healing Pathway →] Quiz
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It’s Not Always Depression
Written by Jenny B. Smith, LCSW — therapist, educator, and author of Softening the Shadows. She helps readers heal patterns of self-abandonment and reconnect with their bodies through compassion and nervous system awareness.