As I look out the window today, things look gloomy. It’s cold and rainy with the likelihood of continuing all day. When the weather gets like that, it has ways of impacting my moods and thinking.
The days filled with blue skies and sunshine are uplifting and inspiring, yet days like today inspire me in other directions. The gloomy surroundings fit more with moodiness.
These kinds of surroundings make it a great day for dealing with the subject of depression and affairs. With regularity, I hear questions about what the connection between the two of them are.
Take for example the question, “Can depression cause someone to have an affair?” Knowing how depression impacts so many decisions, the simple answer is yes.
When you’re depressed, you see the world in a different way. You start looking for ways of alleviating the pain you’re in. You evaluate your option in terms of whether they’ll get you out of the pain rather than whether they are good for you or the right thing to do. You are on the lookout for what will reduce the pain in the shortest period of time.
You are vulnerable to poor choices. At times of depression, there’s also the tendency to make risky choices you know are bad for you, yet you don’t care about the consequences at that moment. It’s this kind of thinking that makes it easier for someone to have an affair.
Depression can also make it hard to connect with other people and build meaningful relationships. When you don’t feel connected you start looking for something that will take the pain away for a while.
Not everyone who experiences depression has an affair. When you’ve entertained thoughts of an affair or a way out of the pain, the depression takes you to a place where you don’t care about what happens without realizing it.
You may make bad choices without even realizing you made a choice. When your ability to make choices gets so clouded that you don’t realize you made the choice, you’re in deep. At those times, you do things and claim you had no power over it. The ability to make choices is outside of what you thought was possible.
When you’re in that kind of depressive state, you may even feel that your mood is making all the choices rather than your mind. Undoing that pattern is possible, yet requires effort along with knowledge.
In my video “Help for the Cheater: Starting the Road to Recovery”, I address many of the important items you need for breaking out of those kinds of patterns. Order your copy today and start regaining your ability to make choices and change the patterns in your life and marriage.
Change is possible. You can take control of your choices and your life again.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
