The disorders that bring you to therapy such as Anxiety and Depression are what we call stressor related disorders. We nearly always find that these disorders develop after a very distressing event or events, or after a particularly stressful period of time.
All distressing events, big and small, activate stress chemicals in your nervous system, which alter the way that your brain is able to encode information about your experience as it happening. But your brain is amazing, and it can usually reprocess the encoded information in the days and weeks after the event, in a way that you feel able to move on.
However, we see that these stressor related disorders develop when your brain’s natural ability to reprocess the distressing information becomes stuck, and remains unprocessed in the months and sometimes years after the experience.
Instead of you feeling better with time, even just ordinary daily stress can reactivate the stored sensations and overwhelming feels of anxiety, despair and powerlessness in the unprocessed encoded memories again and again. Your ability to cope with this activation is likely to decline in time.
Psychological treatment is available to help your brain reprocess this stored information effectively, to alleviate your symptoms.