Pankaj Suneja

I sit with a woman in her 40s over a Zoom session. We sit together in the quiet tension of her inability to function—a depression so heavy that it has quietly eroded her desire to exist.

When she moves through the world outside the therapy session, she is a different person. She performs. She becomes the person the world expects: the smiling, peppy, vibrant woman who always seems to be having a good time. But in the safety of this space, the costume begins to fray. “I can’t carry the weight anymore,” she confesses, her voice thin. “I can’t keep the performance up.”

“It seems,” I offer, “that you are no longer able to be authentically yourself.”

She bristles. “Why should I bother becoming an authentic person?”

“Because you cannot carry the weight of the performance,” I say, leaning into the discomfort of the truth. “You long to live as you are, but you find yourself unable.”

“So, ‘authentic’ means to live as you are, really, deeply?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” she sighs, a hollow sound, “that was never important to me. I never aimed for it. All I feel is this hopelessness, this depression—how do I fix it? What does ‘authenticity’ have to do with fixing my depression?”

We sit with this stuckness. It feels tiring, exhausting, almost tactile in its density. We are caught in a dance—a natural, human urge to fight, to intellect, to rationalize, to offer solutions as a way of fleeing the pain. We want the “how-to” manual for feeling better. We want the map that bypasses the forest. But intellect is a flimsy shield.

In the silence of the room, our defenses begin to dissolve. The performance breaks down, and slowly, we are pulled down into the raw exhaustion, the bedrock of her heaviness. This is not a failure; it is the beginning of something real. When we stop running, we stop using our precious energy to maintain the facade, and we finally have the space to witness what has been waiting for us in the dark.

She sits with the mounting discomfort. “Why are you making me feel this sadness?”

“I am not making you feel this sadness,” I reply, holding my ground. “It is already there. It has been waiting for us.”

“But why aren’t you helping me? Why won’t you let me distract myself?”

“Because distraction is a temporary anesthesia. It won’t change the anatomy of the pain. You will only find yourself returning to this same loneliness. Why not let us just stay here? Let us spend this time together, to be with it, and face it as it is.”

“I don’t like this feeling.”

“Which feeling?”

“The sadness.”

We take a moment to truly breathe into it. The room is suddenly thick, heavy with the texture of her despair. There is a deep, aching pain in her chest. I feel the somatic resonance of it—a sinking sensation in my own chest that migrates toward my stomach. This is the phenomenon of intersubjectivity, where we carry the weight together, bridge to bridge. I wonder if she is aware of the sheer depth of what she is holding, or if she will instinctively snap back to the surface and plead for a “fix.” I hold a silent hope that she stays. I hope she goes deeper.

To my surprise—and my profound pleasure—she does. She rests in her sadness fully. She surrenders. There is a strange, quiet dignity in her willingness to stop fighting.

After a long pause, while she stares intently at the ceiling, the atmosphere shifts. She says, “I feel like I have become seven years old.”

“That’s good,” I encourage. “What are you remembering?”

“I am at a party. Family and friends are everywhere. We are at dinner. They are all eating, drinking, talking about something I can’t grasp, and laughing. I had no clue what they were talking about. I was trying my best to pay attention, to mimic their understanding, but I couldn’t. I kept pretending and smiling. It wasn’t working. I didn’t understand anything in the world. But deep inside, I felt so sad. I felt so deeply, profoundly unseen.”

This is the moment the dam breaks.

“Can we allow that seven-year-old girl to feel her sadness?” I ask, my voice low. “Can she realize that she does not have to pretend anymore? That nobody is watching her? She can be herself. She can finally feel her feelings.”

The tears come—a torrential release. She cries with the weight of a lifetime of being lost, a child who had no one to look up to, no one to offer direction, no one to share the burden. She had been carrying everything on her own. It is a lonesome, desolate image. It is like being lost in a jungle, surrounded by life but utterly severed from it.

In this therapeutic space, I am merely a witness to this loneliness. I am a container for the emptiness.

When the weeping subsides, she looks at me, surprised. “I didn’t even know that memory existed. I didn’t know I felt like this.”

This is the alchemy of our work. In therapy, we are not just talking; we are excavating. We remember the past which our conscious mind—in its desperate, protective efficiency—has forgotten. Listening to the feelings is the roadmap that leads us back to the ruins of what has been buried.

This is the archaeology of the psyche: an iterative, rhythmic process. We go back again and again, moving historically and developmentally through the various stages where unreleased feelings have been held captive. We do not rush this. We move slowly. We pause. We breathe. And we actually feel the feelings, layer by layer.

Many people ask, “How long will this take?” or “When will I be fixed?” But this is how we engage in the slow, meticulous work of healing developmental trauma. We don’t “fix” a person like a broken appliance. Instead, we gently move what has been stuck—the unprocessed grief, the forgotten terror, the unmet needs—allowing the person to reach toward the ultimate goal of therapy: the capacity to be authentically alive.

We must recognize that depression, deep inside, is rarely just depression. It is often a landscape of deeper, unacknowledged feelings that have been frozen in time. What we call “depression” is often the exhaustion of holding these feelings back. This session was but one anecdote, one moment where the resistance to pain began to yield. Where there was once a frantic need to distract or “fix,” there is now a budding acceptance. She is becoming a little more hospitable to her own pain.

We go there, slowly. We build on this small, fragile foundation. We deepen our work together, not by discarding the shadows, but by finally allowing them to exist in the light.

When she leaves the session today, she will not be walking alone. She will be walking with that seven-year-old girl. She will be walking with the part of her that was once lost, and she will have a new mirror—one that brings courage.

Can they walk together now? Can they live authentically, even with their sadness, even with the invisibility they have fought so hard to hide? That is the journey ahead. It is not about “fixing” the depression; it is about finding the girl who was left behind in the noise of the party, and finally, after all these years, letting her be seen.

In the work we do, we learn that the path is not a straight line toward “happiness.” It is a spiral that brings us back to ourselves, over and over, until we can embrace the full spectrum of our humanity. We learn that we don’t have to be perfect, or peppy, or performative to be worthy of belonging. We only need to be real—to ourselves, to our history, and to the small, unseen child who has been waiting for us to return. And when we finally stop trying to fix the pain, we find that the pain, in its own time, begins to transform.

We often believe that to heal is to erase—to smooth over the rough edges and silence the ache. But perhaps healing is not an erasure; perhaps it is the courage to sit in the room with all the parts of ourselves we have hidden away. If you find yourself carrying a performance that has become too heavy, you do not have to carry it alone.