How To Prevent Your Marriage From Making You Depressed
When two individuals choose to form a marital union, their decision has enormous power, for better or worse, over the quality of their lives. Their marriage can bring them infinite blessings or can usher in disappointment, strife, anger and depression . Understanding how to fix relationship problems therefore is key to sustaining both personal well-being and a positive partnership. Otherwise chronic anger or it's opposite, depression, may set in. My theoretical model for explaining how depression forms in a marriage is as follows: Interactions in which one partner takes a dominant and the other a one-down or submissive role are likely to trigger depression in the partner who feels the lessor power or victim role (Heitler, 1990). As a clinician who treats couples, I have worked for multiple decades with couples whose marriages have been “for the worse.” In most cases, changing the dominant-submissive patterns to coll...