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
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