Relationships | Overcoming Depression

Quit begging for love

All our behavior is motivated by a need and the Need for Love is a big one.

Who doesn’t want to be loved? But so often when you come across as desperate for love your attempts fail and it actually has the opposite effect – it drives people away and your love tank remains empty.

Quit Begging for LOVE!

STOP begging for love and admiration if your loved one isn’t willing to give it.

How do you beg for love?

You beg when you constantly whine and complain, or in some cases, get upset, when your emotional or physical needs aren’t being met.
You beg when you allow that person to send you into depression because you don’t feel attractive or wanted.
You beg when you silently cry because you feel they doesn’t love you. (Feelings don’t always represent the truth)
You beg when you show your signs of hurt and despair each time you see someone else getting the love that should be reserved for you.

Let’s look at some examples

When you see your partner enjoying another person’s company you get upset. The only possible reason to get upset is because you see this as a sign that they don’t really love you. Can you think of another reason?

When your loved one doesn’t hold your hand or shower you with compliments, or send you flowers you get upset. So you sulk and withdraw expecting them to figure out what they did wrong. How unfair! Nobody is able to mind-read.

Nobody is able to fully meet your need for love … so quit all this trying!

Focus on loving yourself for the truly amazing person that you are.
Compliment yourself on the things you do.
Stop waiting for someone to validate you – it might never come and life will pass you by.

Inner love is very appealing to others and is a sure way of getting others to love you. Basically you’re taking the pressure off the other person. You’re allowing them to be the person that they are meant to be without them having to be hyper-vigilante at doing ‘the right thing’ to keep you happy and feeling loved.

All the things you’d like others to do for you focus on trying to do these very same things for others … You might be surprised at what happens. Make a list so this doesn’t just become a theoretical exercise.

‘So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets’. Matthew 7:12

If you are in a dating relationship and experiencing these issues, I strongly suggest you re-evaluate your expectations in the relationship. If you find it difficult to accept your partner for exactly who they are before you marry, I assure you it’s not going to get better after you’re married.

If you’re in a committed marriage, re-evaluate your expectations. When your partner does something that you interpret as a sign that they don’t love you, ask yourself if your interpretation is correct. Your reaction could stem from your great neediness for love.

Two pieces of marriage advice that changed my life.

When I was newly married (36 years ago now) an older friend said to me. “Do not expect your husband to meet all of your needs, just as you won’t be able to meet all of his”. Wow! I thought my role as a wife was to meet all his needs. This insight was truly freeing!

When your partner does something that you interpret as them not loving you, ask yourself: Was my partner intentionally trying to hurt me? Usually the answer is no as we all do or say things that unintentionally hurt others. In this case, let it be, ignore it and move on.

Self love is what you’re aiming for, rather than nagging, complaining and sulking. Self-love is what will ultimately get your need for love met.

Rejection? Who’s to blame?

Could YOU unconsciously be setting yourself up for rejection?
Were the seeds of rejection planted in you as you were growing up?

A person growing up with rejection will ultimately internalize that rejection into a belief about themselves. The belief is that they are only worthy of rejection. .Unconsciously this belief gets built into their psyche…. and has disastrous consequences in a relationship.

Bear this statement in mind.

Our behavior is motivated by a belief and our behavior ALWAYS matches our beliefs.

If your underlying belief is that rejection is what you deserve, you’ll allow yourself to be abused, because this behavior matches what you believe about yourself. That’s how the cycle of abuse gets passed down from one generation to the next.

On the other hand a person who values themself won’t tolerate abuse. After all you can’t let someone treat you badly unless you feel that their abuse is correct and matches what you believe about yourself. .

But what happens when you expect abuse but get unconditional love and acceptance?

Self-fulfilling prophecy!

That will really put you in a quandary because this ‘love’ doesn’t match what you’ve come to believe about yourself. You (unconsciously) reach a conclusion something like this:

“There must be something wrong with that person to love me when I’m actually only worthy of rejection”

So what do you do?

You ruin your chances of love by rejecting that person. ‘After all they can’t be worth loving if they think you’re okay’.
Or you behave in a way that forces the other person to change their mind about you and reject you.
Or you chase after a person who is ‘unattainable’ and experience rejection

The result: You’re rejected, which only proves that your initial belief was correct.

That might sound crazy, but it’s true. Being unconditionally accepted doesn’t feel right and you have to conclude there’s something wrong with anyone who accepts you unconditionally.

The remedy:.Your behavior matches what you believe, so if you’re going to have any chance of changing your behavior, you’ll have to consciously change your belief about yourself. Change your thinking to something like this:

“…………………. rejected me as I was growing up, but actually that was their problem, rather than mine. I believed them to be speaking the truth, when they rejected me. So I came to believe that I didn’t deserve love. But that was a lie and being a child, I couldn’t be expected to know better.

But as an adult, I now know better. I deserve to be treated with respect and to treat myself and others with respect. I will no longer allow the expectation of rejection to dominate my life, and I will love and respect others as they deserve….”

Make this into a statement of belief that you repeat to yourself or stick up on the wall where you can see it frequently.

Expectations When a person has a history of relationships fraught with fighting and rejection it’s difficult to imagine anything different. A pattern is set in place that seems correct.

Some people enjoy a relationship full of tension purely because the ‘make-up sex’ is so great. I have a friend who loves fighting with her husband for this very reason. The ‘make-up sex’ is terrific! But what a stressful life they lead between the times of ‘make-up sex’!

Actually all that stress is so bad for you as it puts your body into a ‘fight or flight’ response, releasing harmful chemicals into your system.

Moving forward … If someone likes you, stop thinking there must be something wrong with them. Focus on relationships that are peaceful, even if they might initially feel boring. Learn to love and value the other person for who they are.

Critical Parents

THE EFFECTS OF CRITICAL PARENTS

When I counsel a person with depression sooner or later they will talk about their childhood and critical parents. As children, no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn’t please their parents. And even in old age, with the parents long since dead and buried they’re still trying to please their critical parents.

WHY DO PARENTS CRITICIZE THEIR CHILDREN?

Critical parents often had critical parents themselves, this is how they were taught to parent. To a child parents are God-like, all knowing and whatever they speak is the truth. Constant criticism leaves a mark on the child’s self-esteem.The child then enters adulthood with low self-esteem and a lack of confidence to try anything new, including a lack of confidence in how to love unconditionally.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

A person’s most important emotional need is for unconditional love. Knowing what unconditional love is like enables us, in turn, to love unconditionally. Children need the security of knowing they are loved even when their behavior is not so great. Unconditional love means never having to feel a threat of love being withdrawn. Giving unconditional love to ‘bratty’ children can be difficult, especially if you never received it while growing up yourself. In fact if your children are being ‘bratty’ focus on the behavior you don’t approve of rather than criticizing the character of the child.

The belief that has been instilled in the child that has been brought up with constant criticism is that nothing they ever do is good enough, so why try, when you’re just going to fail.

But then their own children arrive on the scene…

And they certainly don’t want their own children to have this same sense of inadequacy. Being unfamiliar with unconditional love these parents do to their own children what their parents did to them. They criticize them in an attempt to improve them. And so the cycle passes down from one generation to the next.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?

If this seems to sum up how you’re feeling it’s time to take stock of your life.

Try to figure out why your parents were so critical – look to their own upbringing.
The reality of parents is that they are not God. They make mistakes and have feelings of inadequacies, despite how they might come across. Forgive them for being imperfect.
Try to work out what faulty believes you are carrying around with you making your life miserable.
Assess if these beliefs are worth holding onto – you can let them go.
Any good story has a consistent beginning, middle and end. Your life story also needs to make sense. The good news is that you can re-script the rest of your life and discard the unwanted baggage that you took on when you were an innocent child.

Click here to read more about how parenting can be a factor in children developing depression later in life.

Stop child depression developing

Facing the future without fear

No-one in their right mind wants their child to develop depression in later life, do they?

In reality, this doesn’t always seem to be true. Parenting involves teaching our children how to deal with the world.Unfortunately sometimes, as parents we do a bad job of this!

Beliefs taught in childhood can lead to depression in adulthood

We usually pass on our own beliefs on how to cope with life to our kids. Unfortunately, It follows logically that a depressed parent teaches their child the faulty beliefs and attitudes that lead to depression, namely approval seeking and perfectionism. This is all in an attempt to get their child ‘liked’ and ‘accepted’ but it backfires for the child in adulthood. In reality child depression starts with learning incorrect attitudes and beliefs about themselves.

There may be a genetic tendency for depression but I believe the greater cause of depression is faulty thinking and this is what is passed onto the child. Teaching a child correct thinking will inoculate them to a degree against depression in later life.

Inoculate your children against depression, stop depression developing

Think about this for a moment…
Perfectionists, and approval seekers are the most prone to depression. Not really surprising is it? By trying to be perfect or trying to please everyone, you’re reaching for the impossible, you’re always going to fail and feel stressed and depressed. You have what is called an ‘external locus of control‘. It is other people who determine who you are. An internal locus of control is what you’re aiming for yourself and your children. Ask yourself if what you’re doing is to meet the expectations of others, or are you doing it because it’s what you want. I’ve heard of so many people even into middle age, whose main concern is to get approval from their now elderly parents. You’re trying in vain – if you didn’t get this approval as a child you won’t get it as an adult. The approval needs to change and come from within.

Ask yourself these questions
Are you a perfectionist, believing you’ll only be accepted if you’re perfect? If the answer is yes, it’s natural that you’ll teach your child the same attitude. Typical attitudes include:

if you can’t do it perfectly, don’t do it at all

Or maybe you’re a person-pleaser, an approval seeker? Do you believe you’re only acceptable if people approve of you. The motivation for seeking approval is usually an underlying fear of rejection. Typical attitudes include:

“You can’t wear that to go out! What are you thinking? What will other people think of you. The other children will laugh at you.”
“Just do what Granny says. You don’t want her to be cross with you do you?” Internalizing that adults are ALWAYS right is wrong. Just think of the dilemma for a child faced with abuse. The child thinks “Got to do what adults say – they’re always right.”
“You don’t really feel that way”. In other words don’t trust your own feelings, everybody else knows better.
“Don’t get angry! Nobody likes children who get angry”.

I’m sure you can think of many examples of faulty thinking patterns that are taught to children. Please write them in the comment box, I’d be interested to add more to the list.

Perfectionism and approval seeking lead to depression because it places our well-being at the mercy of others. Until there is self-approval and self acceptance, there will always be a ‘bottomless pit’ that is constantly seeking or manipulating others to fill with love and approval.

Children need to feel competent, feel that they are to some degree in control of their lives. They need to make choices and learn that mistakes are fine, mistakes are part of learning to live in this world. This type of acceptance gives children confidence to deal with the world, to see the world as an exciting place rather than as a fearful place.

Research has shown that adolescent boys that tended towards some delinquent behavior were more successful in adult life than boys who were taught to fear the world because of what others might think of them. Makes one think!

You might be a perfectionist or an approval seeker, but please try to break the cycle of depression by not teaching them that these are the way to find acceptance. Passing on these attitudes is equivalent to giving your child a mill-stone to carry into adulthood, which is not something a loving parent would intentionally do.

Also see article on developing good self esteem.

Stop pretending!

I always find people’s life stories interesting, especially when they succeed despite all odds. What lessons can we learn from them? The story of the actor Joaquin Phoenix (Time magazine-October 1 2012), struck me as such a story.

Phoenix’s parents were missionaries with the hippie cult Children of God. They moved around a lot and when they moved to Caracas they cut ties with the cult and ended up facing crushing poverty. To start again, the family stowed away on a cargo ship to Florida. Can you imagine being so desperate as to do this with five children! The family later moved to Los Angeles. where they changed their surname to Phoenix, a symbol of new hope, a new start, “rising out of the ashes”.

When their mother found a secretarial job at NBC she sought out auditions for her older children who were already experienced street performers. “We all used to sing and play music, and we were all very outgoing. My parents always encouraged us to express ourselves. And so it seemed like second nature to start acting,” said Phoenix.

Phoenix loved being a child actor. After a break during his teens he returned to a fully fledged acting career with films such as ‘To Die For’ (1995), ‘Walk the Line’ (2005), ‘I’m Still Here’ (2012), ‘The Master’ (2012).

Celebrities can go to enormous lengths to keep up appearances, ensuring that the public never see them looking stupid. Phoenix went to the other extreme, inviting opportunities to look stupid.

“Once I became a total buffoon, it was so liberating,” he says. “Part of why I was frustrated with acting was because I took it so seriously. I want it to be so good that I get in my own way. It’s like love:when you fall in love, you’re not yourself anymore. You lose control of being natural and showing the beautiful parts of yourself, and all somebody recognizes is this total desperation. And that’s very unattractive.”

Phoenix also supports a number of causes. One of these causes is the Lunchbox Fund, which gives healthy meals to children in need.

I can think of several lessons that we can learn from the life of Phoenix.:

Never give up hope even when life seems hopeless. Keep looking forward.
Look at your abilities and use the talents you have. “Invent yourself with the ingredients you already have.”
Be thankful for family and friends who open doors for you. Don’t be stubbornly independent, you don’t know what opportunities you might miss out on. We’re meant to be interdependent.
Encourage your children and don’t criticize them. Experience is the best lesson in life.
Stop pretending to be someone you’re not. Accept yourself, ‘warts and all’ because that’s truly liberating. Pretending just takes up too much precious energy! If you think people won’t like you if they know what you’re really like, give and go! Test your belief and see if it’s true.
Give back to the community. We can’t just be ‘takers’ in this life. We need to give back to the community as well.