The challenges you face in life—including and especially Mental Health Disorders—affect your relationships with others. The question is whether these problems will become insurmountable for you and your spouse.
Mental Health Disorders such as Depressive Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, Personality Disorders, Eating Disorders, Addictive Behaviors, Substance Abuse Disorders, and more will adversely influence the way you relate to and treat the people around you. These disorders can create problems with communication, ability to adaptively relate, intimacy issues, and power dynamics within your relationship.
Mental Health Disorders and their related symptoms are common challenges that hinder your ability to be happily married. Learn more about these issues and see why seeking professional intervention from a skilled Clinical Psychologist is the key to treat underlying Mental Health Disorders or addiction issues in order to heal and build functional relationships.
Depressive Disorders
Depressive Disorders—including Major Depression, Persistent Depressive Disorder, and Seasonal Affective Disorder—can change the way you feel, think, behave, and interact with the outer world and within your intimate relationships. Depressive Disorders revolve around persistent feelings of sadness, guilt, hopelessness, and grief, which can change your relationship dynamics.
Fatigue, numbness, lethargy, lack of libido, changes in appetite, loss of interest, anhedonia, and low energy are also symptoms of Depressive Disorders. This makes it harder to take care of yourself or your obligations, which in turn makes it harder to care for your partner and share responsibilities such as chores and errands. Depressive Disorders can leave you feeling overly reliant on your partner, creating feelings of shame, resentment, and fear that exacerbate your symptoms.
Isolation is another symptom of Depressive Disorders. It can cause you to close yourself off both physically and emotionally, which can lead to communication issues and feelings of uncertainty and loneliness for you and others.
Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety is a normal part of life, and everyone experiences it. But when feelings of anxiety become overwhelming, they start to negatively impact your ability to properly connect with people or feel comfortable and confident in intimate relationships.
Anxiety Disorders contribute to feelings of worthlessness and a negative self-image—two of the most common issues that hinder your ability to be happily married. When you struggle with a poor sense of self, you often rely on others for reassurance and validation. This reliance can lead to clinginess, codependency, and other unhealthy dynamics in your intimate relationships.
Anxiety also causes feelings of irritability, dysregulation of affect, lack of impulse control, paranoia, poor anger management skills, and inability of distress tolerance. Being constantly on guard against real and perceived threats puts you in a state of heightened tension, high impulsivity, reactiveness, and hyperstimulation that can shorten your temper and feelings of increased frustration. These struggles lead to poor communication patterns, chronic arguments, relationship discord, and other conflicts within your intimate relationships.
Past Trauma
Traumatic experiences of childhood and adulthood make it nearly impossible to let yourself be emotionally and mentally vulnerable around others, including intimate partners. Hyperarousal, numbness, and other trauma responses create extreme stress and fear that affect all aspects of your life. This stress and fear can lead to avoidant or impulsive behaviors, making it hard to work through the issues with intimate partners.
Trauma can also lead to you feeling as if you have no control over your emotional and behavioral responses. You might experience overwhelming anger, sadness, or helplessness to even insignificant triggers. These feelings are valid, but it can be hard for both you and your partner to work through them in a healthy and collaborative manner.
Furthermore, depending on the types of traumas you may have experienced, you might struggle with certain aspects of your intimate relationships. For example, someone who has experienced domestic violence might learn to associate romantic relationships with abuse and loss of control. This can drive the person to subconsciously pursue domination, manipulation, and full control in their intimate relationships, which can destroy the integrity of their partnership. These thought patterns affect the way you view healthy relationships. It is necessary to work with a well-versed Clinical Psychologist to recognize the impacts of childhood and adulthood traumas and seek proper interventions to change thought patterns, associations, and adaptive behaviors by healing the ruptures of the past traumas.
Addiction Disorders
Alcohol Addiction, Substance Abuse Disorder, and other Addiction Disorders negatively affect your Mental Health and can lead to feelings of anger, shame, guilt, and isolation. Addiction Disorders are often comorbid with other Mental Health Conditions, such as Trauma Disorders, Mood Disorders, Personality Disorders, and Anxiety Disorders. As these Mental Health Disorders worsen, so do the symptoms of addiction issues or addictive behaviors.
Addiction Disorders also create external problems that can harm your relationships. Addiction takes up your time, emotional resources, mental faculties, and thoughts, turning your energy away from yourself, your career, goals, intimate relationships and toward the object of your addiction and addictive behaviors. As a result, you will experience increased discord, arguments, financial stress, poor work performance, inability to communicate effectively, medical health issues, comorbid Mental Health Disorders, and other issues that will invariability create significant conflict in your intimate partnerships.
Intimacy Issues
Mental Health Disorders influence physical, emotional, and mental intimacy. Conditions such as Depressive Disorders can lower your libido and your interest in sex. The low self-esteem of Mood Disorders and Anxiety Disorders can make it difficult to be emotionally and mentally vulnerable or be able to uphold the clear communication necessary for healthy intimate relationships. Miscommunication and feelings of uncertainty, dissatisfaction, and resentment can also build up as a result of any Mental Health Disorder causing other intimacy issues.
Insecure Attachment Styles
Secure attachment styles allow you to have the necessary tools and skills to enjoy a secure connection with romantic partners and other intimate relationships in your life. A secure attachment is the foundation of a secure base, an adaptive internal working model, a solid sense of self, proper self-esteem, self-respect, confidence, ability to regulate emotions and impulses, stable self-image, adaptive responses to life stressors, and emotional resilience in the face of adversities. Individuals with secure attachment styles are comfortable with both emotional and physical independence, emotional vulnerability, humility to accept feedback, allowing for healthy dynamics within intimate relationships.
Insecure childhood attachments, on the other hand, lead to significant and enduring challenges with emotional vulnerability, intimacy, humility, adaptiveness in life and work, proper functioning in relationships, inability to communicate effectively, proper social skills, necessary insight and judgment, to make healthy decisions making it difficult to create stable relationships.
Avoidant Attachment Issues
An avoidant attachment style stems from an insecure relationship with caregivers during infancy. When you learn as an infant that you cannot rely on your parents or guardians for help, you internalize that lesson and carry it with you throughout your life. This idea leads to strict independence and a reluctance to show vulnerability or participate in emotional or physical intimacy in your romantic relationships.
Ambivalent Attachment Issues
Ambivalent attachment involves an intense fear of abandonment stemming from unreliable guardian-infant relationships. If you have an ambivalent attachment style, you resort to clingy, desperate behaviors in an attempt to avoid rejection, separation, or abandonment. This often leads to codependency, boundary violations, and other unhealthy behaviors in your relationships.
Disorganized Attachment Issues
Disorganized attachment often stems from traumatic experiences such as neglect or abuse during infancy and early childhood. A volatile and insecure relationship with caregivers at such a young age can lead to an inconsistent and unpredictable attachment style in adulthood. Disorganized attachment features behaviors from both ambivalent and avoidant attachment; you might desperately crave intimacy one day but feel overwhelmingly afraid of that same intimacy the next.
Marriage Help From Blair Wellness Group
When Mental Health Disorders, attachment styles, and other mental, emotional, or behavioral issues affect your marriage, it is crucial to seek professional help from a Licensed Clinical Psychologist. If you are looking for Marriage Therapy in Los Angeles, Irvine, Beverly Hills, Newport Beach, Bel Air, Century City, Brentwood, Westwood, Huntington Beach, Mission Viejo, Aliso Viejo, and the surrounding areas, contact Blair Wellness Group to see how our evidence-based treatment plans can help you.
