Lifestyle Choices

FAMILY QUARRELS

Quarrels between husband and wife or between parents and children can create an atmosphere that is tense or depressed. There may be many reasons for the quarrels. A husband may strongly resent the fact that his mother-in-law has come to live with his family, or a wife may hate spending every Christmas with her husband’s family; both may repress the anger, in an attempt to avoid hurting their spouse’s feelings. Children of unstable marriages may become depressed when they see their parents fighting— they bottle everything up rather than risk adding to the fraught atmosphere.

Some families, in an attempt to stop the quarrelling, repress all emotional reactions. When you walk into such a household, you can feel the repression in the atmosphere, and it seems that it would be a relief if someone would say what they really felt. But within your own family, it is usually much harder to see what is happening. You may have had the experience of bitter battles in the past leading nowhere, and decided it was a better policy to keep quiet. Eventually the quietness becomes a way of life, and you hardly even notice the feelings you have underneath. Although many families survive in this depressed fashion, the quality of life is inevitably lowered.

SEPERATION AND DIVORCE

When your marriage, or indeed any relationship, has broken down, you may find separation preferable to keeping up appearances. But the separation itself is hardly ever easy. You may feel anything from relief to grief, and often both at the same time. When there has not been very much interaction between you, when your relationship really has become nothing more than a formality, and particularly if the recent period has been full of stress, it may just be a relief to get away from each other. But when you have been very involved with each other, whether in love or hate, the loss of your partner is often hard to bear. You may need to grieve and if you do not, you may risk becoming depressed.

Separation and divorce are particularly hard to tolerate in those of a dependent nature. If you are more or less dependent, you tend to rely on your partner to supply you with incentive, and your valuation of yourself tends to depend on your partner’s valuation of you. It is as if your investment is made outside yourself rather than in the development of your own capacities — so when the outside support goes, you collapse: you have lost incentive and self-value and may become depressed.

Whether you are dependent or not, it is very difficult to be alone after years of being together. Your previous life has been set in various patterns which are now mostly upset and in disarray; it is easy to feel disorientated and confused. There are so many disrupting and isolating influences that it can be hard to maintain hope. It is often a time when you need to talk to someone.

If you have children, you have to bear the pain of their disappointment as well as your own loss of seeing them every day. Yet if your marriage is truly ended, if you do not involve the children in your battles and even, for their sakes, tend to stress positive aspects of your old partner in front of the children, the children will probably be happier in two harmonious homes than in one divided one.

CHANGES IN YOUR CHILDREN

In the natural progression of events, your children start life wholly dependent on you and gradually grow to achieve full adult independence. It is not unusual for a parent to find this transition difficult. It is hard to see yourself being needed less and less, and finally not at all, especially if your career has been your children.

Starting School

For most mothers, the children starting at school is a blessed relief from the strain of 24-hour care, but for some, especially those who rely on their children for a sense of meaning in their lives, the children going to school is felt as a loss so strong that depression may result from the suppression of these feelings. Mothers who rely on their children for a sense of purpose tend to be more dependent people, with a susceptibility to depression when outside sources of support become less available.

Independency

When children become teenagers they often need to test out their strength and feel their independence. As the verbal mastery of the expression of feeling is at its beginning, this burgeoning independence is often expressed as a recalcitrant silence, which can be difficult to live with day after day. Some parents react by repressing their reactions and energy.

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