PROVO, Utah — For every challenge a person faces, the Lord sends

resources. Carrie M. Wrigley, a counselor and a singer-songwriter, told

a crowd at BYU's Campus Education Week on Thursday, Aug. 20, that they

could avoid depression by changing the way they think.

Wrigley said that some theories about depression disagree with her. "It

is a common message ... that depression is a devastating illness that

begins in the brain and just comes and gets you," Wrigley said.

Such a view requires years of therapy. "People don't expect to heal."

Wrigley said that depression usually begins with a triggering event. A

trigger could be grief, transition (good OR bad), conflict, lack of

interpersonal skills, abuse, loss or disappointment.

Wrigley herself once had a bad case of depression that came on after

she graduated with a master's degree as a counselor. "(Graduation) was a

happy change. I had looked forward to graduation for over 20 years,"

she said. But the transition was a trigger that led to thoughts about

being unemployed and fears about the future.

The problem with depression triggered by good, but huge transitions is that guilt can make it worse.

The first thing Wrigley does with a patient is to validate the pain.

"To listen, to understand, to validate," she said. A person can even do

this for himself or herself through writing a journal, for example.

The next thing to understand is that triggers are NOT the depression.

Wrigley compared triggers to flour. You can take flour and other

ingredients and make a dark chocolate cake. You can also take flour and

make bread, cookies or an angel food cake.

The biggest ingredient that determines how a trigger works in our lives

are our thoughts. "Thoughts are basically the force by which an

adversity, a triggering event, is turned either for our good or for our

destruction," Wrigley said.

One psychiatrist, Aaron Beck, discovered that depressed people had

something in common. "They could be different, so different ... but

there was a way in which they were almost identical, and that is in the

way they thought," Wrigley said.

Depressed people think negatively about themselves, the world and the future.

Beck hypothesized that this thinking wasn't just a feature of

depression, but was part of the cause. In her counseling with members

of the LDS Church, Wrigley noticed four common forms of "twisted

thinking" that people used to interpret their triggers. She also

counseled them about the better ways of thinking that lead away from

depression.

1. All or nothing

All or nothing thinking is like a light switch. Something is either

good or bad. Wrigley remembers feeling pretty good one day in church

when a teacher asked if everyone had finished their visiting teaching

yet. It was like turning from "on" and feeling good, to "off" and

feeling bad. "It doesn't matter how much I do," she remembers thinking,

"it's never good enough."

A priesthood leader told her later, "The greatest temptation for Carrie

Wrigley will always be to think that she's not doing enough, to think

she is not being enough."

Wrigley never had thought of such thoughts as temptations. Now she

replaces the all-or-nothing light-switch type of thinking with

continuum thinking. Continuum thinking is like a dial that goes from

zero or all bad to 10 or all good. It is a scale that helps keep things

in perspective. Something bad might only bump the dial down a few

notches.

2. Self-blame

Self-blame thinking says "it's all my fault." Wrigley replaces this

with blame pie thinking. A blame pie divides fault like a pie —

assigning it around to the different parties or situations responsible.

"(You take) responsibility for your portion ... but not taking on the

rest of it," she said.

3. Jumping to conclusions

There are two ways to jump to conclusions: The first is fortune

telling, where you predict the future. The second is mind reading,

where you know what people are thinking about you. Wrigley's suggestion

is to use explanation menu thinking where you look at the possible

outcomes. What is the worst thing that could possibly happen? What is

the best possible outcome? What is the likely outcome?

"When people do that, they can absolutely train themselves out of that

depressing and especially anxiety-producing mental habit," she said.

4. Mental filter

The mental filter focuses on the smallest, tiniest portion of what is

going wrong — like the one word you mispronounced in a talk. Grateful

awareness thinking looks at the wider picture and looks for the

positive items. "We hear this all the time in general conference, we

sing it in a hymn," Wrigley said.

"When we learn to recognize the things that are bringing us down — the

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interpretation of our triggers that make us depressed ... and we

learn to trade them in for a more positive perspective we can literally

learn ... to change the way that we feel."


E-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com

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