Have you ever wondered, “Am I depressed?” Most people will experience depression at some point in their lives. At the same time, many people may feel the symptoms of depression without knowing it. Depression is a sliding scale of emotions, thoughts, actions and chemical imbalances in the brain–it can be a mild sense of being “off” to a debilitating experience. Signs of depression include:
- Lack of energy/physical fatigue
- No longer enjoying activities
- Feelings of hopelessness
- Feeling an indescribable “dark cloud”
- Changes in appetite and/or weight
- Increased irritability and other personality changes
- Crying and unexplained sorrow
If you feel any of these for a period of a week or longer, it’s a good time to ask yourself “Am I depressed?” Recognizing depression is the first step to addressing it. The second step is understanding where depression comes from. A marriage can be both the trigger and victim of depression. This is the story of Bonnie, a real patient of Dr. Heitler:
Bonnie is a stay at home mom of two young children. She is a strong, creative woman who enjoys spending time with her kids and is usually very positive and energetic. Lately she has been feeling tired and has a hard time being enthusiastic about anything. She finds herself criticizing herself: “Your house is so messy,” “Why can’t you keep track of anything,” “You look old and worn out.” She is uncharacteristically snappy and irritated with her children.
One night she and her husband have an argument. She is unhappy that he works so late at his new job and comes home too tired to interact with her. She is so excited to see him and she feels abandoned. Her husband snaps back: “I’m doing this to support the family! I can’t risk asking for fewer hours. When I come home, you hover over me and the kids are so worked up…I need to relax, I can’t take it.” Bonnie drops the subject.
Interestingly, Bonnie hadn’t wondered “Am I depressed?” while experiencing these dark times. Is Bonnie depressed? Yes. Is she depressed because she feels abandoned and she’s fighting with her husband? Well..yes and no. Depression, Dr. Heitler reveals, comes from an imbalance of power. We feel depressed when we feel powerless. In Bonnie’s case, part of her depression stems from feeling powerless over her lonely situation. Her husband has dominated the conversation, while she defers to him in a submissive role.
Depression is a common result of dominant-submissive conflict resolution. Many people believe that an argument is resolved when you have a winner and a looser. This comes from the mistaken idea that
Am I depressed? Depression comes in many forms
power is the same thing as control–having control over another person. In fact, power is the ability to get what you want, but not by definition at the expense of those around you. Truly powerful people are able to reach satisfying solutions that also satisfy others–win-win solutions.
In reality, when you solve a conflict with a clear “winner” and “looser,” you don’t solve anything. Especially in marriage, a pattern of winning and loosing will lead to depression in the submissive spouse. It simply causes more problems.
To help Bonnie get the the root of her power imbalance, Dr. Heitler used a visualization experiment. You can try this, too.
First she asked Bonnie, “If you could be angry at anybody right now, who would it be?”
“My husband,” Bonnie replied.
“Close your eyes and image the last argument you had with your husband. Picture you two together. Now, who seems bigger.”
“My husband,” Bonnie replied again. “He’s huge. He’s towering over me.”
“Ok, now I wan’t you to look up in this scene and see above you a light powder sprinkling down on you. It could be green, or gold, or like snowflakes. As it falls on you, you find yourself growing, like Alice in Wonderland. Tell me when you’ve stopped growing.”
“Ok, I’ve stopped”
“And where are you now? How big are you.”
“I’m towering over him, at least four times as big.”
“Now that you’re so big, you can look down and see things you couldn’t see before. What can you see about him now?
Bonnie reflected for a minute. “He’s all puffed up. He’s not really that big, he’s puffing himself up like pufferfish.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s scared…and he’s covered his ears because he doesn’t want to hear what I’m saying”
“Why is he scared?”
Bonnie thought again. “He’s scared because he thinks that I’m telling him he’s a bad person. But I’m not, I know he’s a good person. I know he works late because he feels anxious about supporting the family.”
Knowing this, Bonnie was able to have another kind of conversation with her husband. This time, she brought it up delicately, talking about her feelings and clarifying how much she respected and appreciated him. Together, they came to a surprising solution. Bonnie is a highly educated woman with a lot of energy and drive, and she realized that staying home all day with the kids wasn’t stimulating enough. She was feeling bored and frustrated, which contributed to her feelings of powerlessness and led her to get worked up when her husband came home. Bonnie decided to go back to work part time. She found she was excited to see the kids again after her morning’s work, and less frantic about seeing her husband when he came home. Also, the extra income she brought in allowed her husband to be more assertive about setting limits for his hours at work.
Power embalances in marriage can come from one spouse being domineering through aggressive behavior and, in the worst case scenario, violence and insults. Or, as in Bonnie’s case, it can come from the one spouse deferring and “giving up” (this becomes easier the more depressed he/she already is). Usually the truth has aspects of both.
Just as both spouses contribute to the depression of one, both must be part of finding a solution. Whether or not your answer to “Am I depressed?” directly involves marriage problems, it is imperative that you go to joint counseling as part of the treatment. It may surprise you that getting individual counseling for depression leads to a higher chance of divorce. Your counseling sessions should give you the tools to find the root of the problem and move through it, while providing skills to face similar problems down the road. Remember, you and your spouse are a team! That is a huge strength. Working through depression in marriage will leave your marriage stronger, wiser, and closer.
something is to be done–this is only the surface level of the decision. As soon as couples see themselves preferring different plans of action, they switch from launching a tug of war over their preferred solutions to exploring the concerns that underlie each of their preferences. As they come to understand their own and their partner’s underlying concerns, then they can look for a solution. They can then use shared decision making to form a plan of action responsive to all the concerns of both of them.
