Marriage Problems? 2 Causes of Depression That Might Lurk Under Them
According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) “Major depressive disorder affects approximately 14.8 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year.” This is pretty scary to me.
Not only do these 14.8 million American adults suffer from their disorder but so do their spouses and whole families. Depression is the source of many marriage problems and overcoming depression rebuilds the marriage.
In this article I present 2 common causes of depression and what you can do to overcome it so you will eventually be able to solve your marriage problems.
1. External Validation. A defective, unhealthy, but (sadly) common, belief that causes depression and a lot of marriage problems is when you judge your self-worth by other people’s opinion of you. When you receive a compliment, you feel good about yourself; when you are criticized, you feel rotten.
When you think of it, this reasoning is SO irrational.
Try this little exercise. Remember a time when you criticized someone else. Try to recall an event that you have, presently, no emotional connections with it right. Now, looking at the incident from today’s standpoint ask yourself:
Was your criticism based solely on something they did or, now that are looking back at what happened, it was really because of YOUR bad mood?
Did you have the complete picture of what happened, or were you missing a few pieces that puts the incident in a totally different light?
Do you still feel that your criticism is based on and objective observation or only an interpretation of what happened based on YOUR previous personal experiences?
Now take the logical next step: Just like your criticism of what other’s did are not based on hard evidence and in retrospect was wrong, so too the criticism that you hear from someone else is also not necessarily true but only someone’s fantasy. Isn’t it unfortunate that you suffer from marriage problems because of somebody’s “mirage”?
2. Victim thinking. This means that you think and feel that your worth and moods are a product of what is going around you. You have no control over it. Obviously, if you think like this you will become depressed.
The truth is, though, you can life in “hell” and not be depressed. Victor Frankel, the famous psychiatrist and author of the classic, “Man’s Search For Meaning”, lived through the unspeakable atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps. He lost his whole family either by murder or gas chambers. He lost all of his belongings. He lost his homeland. Even with all of this stacked against him, he describes how people in this horrendous unimaginable situation didn’t fall into depression!
His conclusion; a person has the power to choose how to react to ANY situation. This power to choose keeps him out of depression. The Nazis took everything that he had; his family, his belongings, and even his name. The one thing, though, that the Nazis couldn’t take from him was his thoughts and the way that he looked at his situation.
I don’t want to curse anyone to life through such a tragedy, but we can learn from him that YOU have the power to stay out of depression no matter what situation you are in.
There are a tremendous amount of people and their spouses who suffer from depression. Don’t allow yourself to become addicted to other people’s opinions and don’t fall in the “victim thinking” so you will not be part of this unfortunate statistic.
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