Valerie E. Whiffen, Ph.D.: For women, the quality of our relationships is intimately linked to our emotional wellbeing.  

When our relationships are close and harmonious, we feel good about ourselves and we enjoy high levels of emotional support.

 Both factors protect us from becoming depressed when we encounter life stress.  The opposite is true when we lack close relationships, or when our close relationships are filled with criticism and conflict.  
 

Difficult relationships with the people who are most important to us – our children, romantic partners and families – make us feel badly about ourselves and they deprive us of the emotional support that is so crucial in combating depression.  
 

Dr. Whiffen: We know that women who experience depression tend to have grown up in families where they didn’t feel loved and valued.  
 

One or both parents may have been critical and rejecting or the woman may have felt overlooked and ignored as a child.  Some depressed women experienced extreme adversity in the form of sexual or physical abuse, or neglect.  
 

Children who have these kinds of experiences grow up with a low opinion of themselves.  They don’t expect other people to treat them with respect or to truly love them.  These low expectations often lead women to choose romantic partners who treat them similarly, who are neglectful or detached or even abusive.  
 

A woman who did not have such distressing childhood experiences wouldn’t tolerate this treatment from a romantic partner, but someone who has grown up with indifference, criticism or abuse thinks being treated that way is a normal part of a relationship.  The belief that to be treated badly is normal keeps these relationship patterns hidden from view.  
 

An important aspect of change for depressed women involves helping them to acknowledge the hurt they experienced as children and continue to experience in their adult relationships.
 

Dr. Whiffen:  Absolutely!  As I mentioned above, the first step is acknowledging how much a relationship hurts.  Denial is a powerful thing – it keeps us in bad relationships and blaming ourselves for how we feel!  
 

Once we can look at our relationships more realistically, we can decide what to do about the problems we see.  Some women try to change their relationships so they don’t hurt so much anymore.  Others decide that their partner really can’t change and that they must leave the relationship to give themselves the chance to find someone who truly loves and respects them.

Dr. Whiffen: Emotion serves a very important purpose.  For instance, good feelings like joy prompt us to keep doing what made us happy.  This may seem perfectly obvious when I talk about good feelings, but people often don’t apply the same logic to bad feelings.  We feel bad because something is wrong in our life; the bad feeling is signaling us to look at ourselves and our relationships to see what the problem is.  
 

However, many people in our society aren’t comfortable with bad feelings.  We try to push them aside or ignore them or talk ourselves out of them.  Pushing our feelings away makes us stay in the situation that made us feel badly in the first place, so over time we feel worse and worse, until finally we feel so bad that we become depressed.  
 

I believe that a good therapist is vital to helping us accept what we feel.  Therapists are trained to help us access feelings that we might not want to admit, and to understand what those feelings are telling us about our lives.
 

Dr. Whiffen:  In my clinical experience, there is really only one way, and that is to go through the painful experience rather than trying to go around it.  Depression comes about when women spend their lives trying to go around what hurt them, by denying the hurt feelings or by distracting themselves with jobs and romantic partners and children.  
 

For some women, this strategy works for awhile, but when they hit a rough patch, as we all do, they experience depression.  The only way I know to leave depression behind and experience sustained joy in life is to process the bad things that have happened to us so we’re able to let them go.
 

Dr. Whiffen: We can reduce our reactivity to stress by getting regular exercise.  Women who tend to get stressed out report that regular exercise keeps them more stable emotionally, and makes them less reactive when upsetting things happen.

 Meditation is another strategy that has scientific support.    

We also can learn to recognize when we’re getting stressed, and develop strategies for soothing ourselves.  This can be as simple as taking a hot lavender-scented bath.  Talking to people we love and trust also is soothing when we’re upset.  One research study showed that having just one person to confide in protects most women from experiencing depression.
 

Dr. Whiffen:  The kind of parenting that is most beneficial to children’s emotional development is called “authoritative.”  This parenting style involves being warm and supportive of the child, giving lots of hugs and praise, and showing interest in him or her.
 

 At the same time, the parents set reasonable expectations about achievement and good citizenship, and clear limits about what behavior isn’t acceptable.  Authoritative parents don’t physically punish their children, but they do use “time outs” with younger children and suspend privileges with older ones.  
 

Generally, parents in our society know how to be warm and loving, but they have difficulty with the other side of the equation, which they mistakenly think of as punishment.  

This is unfortunate because the research shows that when parents have clear expectations for their children and set clear limits for their behavior, the children feel safe and loved.
 

It’s also important that parents talk with their children about emotions, especially upsetting ones.  Children need help labeling their feelings and problem solving about how to address the situations that created bad feelings.  This is called “emotion coaching.”  The research suggests that when parents coach children about their emotions, the children are less likely to experience depressed mood.
 

Dr. Whiffen:  Attachment theory is a psychological theory about how children develop emotionally, which gives a central role to how parents respond to their children’s emotional needs.  The term “insecure attachment” means that the child is not sure the parent will be emotionally available to them when needed.
 

 Children in this situation have two choices: they can either “turn up the volume” by becoming angry with their parents and acting up to get their attention, or they can tune out their emotional needs.  
 

Women who have learned to turn up the volume tend to feel insecure and jealous in romantic relationships, and to angrily demand that their partners be more attentive and responsive.

 In contrast, women who have learned to turn down the volume tend to distance themselves from people, particularly in romantic relationships.  
 

They tell themselves that their partner will only disappoint them and they shouldn’t count on anyone.  Obviously, both strategies create problems in adult relationships.
 

Dr. Whiffen: Find a good therapist and talk about what’s making you unhappy.  I’ve never met a client who wasn’t depressed for a good reason.

Valerie E. Whiffen, Ph.D., has been a researcher, professor and psychologist in private practice since 1986. For twenty years, she was a researcher and professor of psychology, first at the University of Western Ontario then at the University of Ottawa where she attained the rank of full professor.  As a university professor, she taught undergraduate courses in the Psychology of Women, and graduate courses in Psychopathology, Interpersonal Theory and Basic Clinical Skills.  She also supervised the clinical work of graduate students learning to do interpersonal therapy with depressed women and emotion-focused therapy with couples who are struggling with one partner's depression.  
 

 

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