That's a pretty good summation. Of course, you know as well as I that all of that's easier said than done.
If we've been depressed for a long time, we often don't even know exactly what the Root Cause is. I'll tell you a personal story. I was about 4-5 years old, very young, visiting my grandfather's house. I had just finished taking my bath, but I didn't know where the towels were. So, I came out into the living room and asked for a towel. I was naked, and my grandfather had company. He flew into a rage and terrified me. Now, did I suffer from low self-esteem and low confidence because my grandfather yelled at me? Even that event itself was as you call it, a trigger. Even at that age, my family's tendency to yell and call me names was building the real problem; a gigantic hole in my heart where my self-love was supposed to be. So, when we tell people the stories of the traumatic events in our lives, they are often just signposts pointing to the deeper problems, and if we work REALLY hard, we can actually look directly at our own broken heart and see how it's broken.
"Forcing" yourself to face it seems pretty harsh to me. You don't deserve to be forced into anything. As part of my shamanic work, I've gone down into the darkness with a few friends who suffer from depression, gone right down into there, and I would describe it as going down into a rack of wires that looks like it's straight out of /r/cablefail . You have to shine the light of awareness on this mess you've improvised to hold yourself together. You pull on cords here and there and see what they're connected to. You try to find mechanisms. I call it dark circuitry. For example, if I had a single event like the one with my grandfather, that made me feel ashamed of my body and behavior, I can go down into the engine room and discover something amazing: when little things were happening in my daily life that embarrassed me, I got WAY WAY WAAAAY embarrassed, out of normal proportion. Well, my system was wiring those little daily events right into the feelings that made me feel like a naked 4 year old again.
The process could also be compared to carefully weeding a garden. Just facing them isn't enough; we have to look at them with acceptance and try to clean up and fix things gradually and gently, and allow the light of realization to illuminate us.