A Risk to Your Mental Health

Episode number 79, a risk to your mental health. Hello and welcome to the Fighting for Connection podcast. I'm Brett Nicola, a husband, father and fun lover. Listen in as I share stories, tips and inspiration that will move you toward the connection that you want in your relationship. Inspiration that will move you toward the connection that you want in your relationship. Hello and good morning. I hope you all are finding a moment of calm and connection.

I'm back from a wonderful weekend spent with about 40 or so couples on the cozy, drizzly west coast. I think I shared in my last podcast that I was headed out to Seattle for a couples camp and the setting for this camp was so amazing. If you've ever been to the west coast, like the Seattle area, you know the lush, green mossy environment that is there this camp is settled on. I believe the lake is called Black Lake and it's tucked into like a mature wooded area. Over the weekend the sun peaked out a few times, but mostly it was just damp and drizzly and cool and cozy. I love visiting that area in the winter. I've been able to a few times and I always just love like the feeling I get in that environment. It's just one of those environments where I don't know. It has a mood, it has a feeling, and I find it to be pretty cozy. That being said, I don't live in that environment. I'm typically just visiting and I like it. I like visiting there. More than that. We got to spend the weekend in the middle of all those people who were there to support me in my relationship, and they were there freely, sharing their thoughts and their experiences around marriage, and it was so amazing. My wife and I were able to make so many new friendships and reconnect with so many old friends and family. My sister and brother-in-law attended the camp as well, so I got to see them. They live in the Spokane area, so it was a fun weekend. I was healthy enough to enjoy it and, safe to say, we just really enjoyed our time and we look forward to many more weekends like that, where Kelsey and I can focus on our relationship and we can learn how to take care of it, which is so important for us.

That leads me to today's topic. This weekend at that camp, we discussed how mental health challenges in marriage can affect the relationship, and it had me thinking about this one risk that we all have in our marriage and this risk to our mental health, and that risk to our mental health that we all have in our marriage is our spouse. That's right. If your spouse has a mental health struggle, you are much more likely to struggle with your mental health. It's contagious is what it is. I was sick last week. My wife didn't get nearly as bad as I got it, but passed it on to her, and mental health struggles are much like that. When we have them, we can pass these things on to the people around us. It's just the way it is.

So what do we do about this? Do we go back to like COVID times, where we're isolating and we have like distance and separate ourselves from each other? No, I don't think that that's the solution here. Rather, I think we have to make sure we do our part to make sure that we are staying well. Having good, healthy physical activity and a routine built around that is important. Having a good diet is important. Having a supportive network is so valuable.

If you do recognize that your spouse is struggling with their mental health, I find it so important that you you get professional support so that you can stay well and mentally healthy as possible. This is important because if you can stay healthy. You can give your spouse a stable environment for them to reach out and get the support that they need, a stable environment for them to navigate through their struggle and for them to hopefully improve their mental health and become healthy. And because you love that spouse and you want to take care of them, you're in an amazing position to do that, to support them. When we are taking care of our spouse in a healthy way, we're not looking to fix them, but to love them, to give them support, a place to turn and a constant shoulder of reassurance. Now, if you are struggling with a mental health struggle, this isn't something we should expect. It's a gift if our spouse is able to do this, but something that we can't expect.

If we're struggling with our own mental health and you're listening to this message in the most loving, caring way possible, I would encourage you to reach out to get the help that you need from a professional. Don't use this as see. This is what you're supposed to do. Do this for yourself and take a step to get the support that you need so you can become healthy, no-transcript something that is possible. The more we take care of our own mental health, the clearer it will be for you to manage yourself within this marriage, within the mental health struggles that your spouse is facing. You'll have a better understanding of what your abilities are. You will know when you can serve your spouse in a loving, caring way and where you need your boundaries to be, where resentment and frustration and anger and all these things kind of creep in. Because, by the way, we're human we all are human but we can turn outside of our relationship to get support, so that we can support our relationship and that's what we're talking about here so that you are able to manage yourself much more efficiently, so that you don't need to manage your spouse. I want you to take care of your spouse, not manage them.

So often we don't know how to manage ourselves, and what happens when we don't know how to manage ourselves is we need to, like, manage our spouse? Let's take a look at an example and let's say that your spouse is yelling so often. We don't like that, we're uncomfortable with it. What they're saying hurts us and in order to regulate ourselves, we need them to stop yelling. So what we'll do is we'll try to show them how yelling is wrong. We'll yell back at them, we'll call them names and we're really trying to manage them so that we don't get the feelings that come up when they're yelling and when we work on ourselves and we have an idea of our own mental health.

We've managed our mental health and we've taken care of ourselves and we can really see what's happening in these kinds of situations and we can be in this type of mental space where we don't need to manage them and yet we know that their yelling is telling us about them and their pain. This allows for us to stay curious and remain curious about what's really going on for them. We don't need to defend ourselves, we don't need to prove ourselves, but we can care for them and if it's something that we can't tolerate, we don't want, we don't want to participate in, from a good, healthy mental space, we can just calmly remove ourselves until our spouse stops yelling. And these are the skills that we can develop that allow us to manage ourselves without getting angry, without getting frustrated, without getting resentful and things like that.

When we don't have these types of skills, we often become activated by our spouse yelling. We feel like it's something about us. We get reactive to their yelling and we try to manage our feelings by getting them to say different things or do different things, and this is really where we can get so stuck and really struggle in our relationship and our mental health can deteriorate with this. We can be left so confused and go down this pathway of becoming mentally unwell. So if you are one who worries that your spouse is struggling mentally, the best thing that you can do for them, the best thing that you can do for you, is to reach out for support and to make sure that you are doing everything you can to support your own mental health so that you don't get pulled into the confusion that can come with mental health struggles in a relationship.

That's all that I had for this week. I so appreciate everyone who has reached out and given words of encouragement, given words of feedback. It's fun to bump into you guys, and I really do appreciate all of those people who have just touched base and let me know that you're here, something that I don't know that I could thank you enough for, and there's so many friends that I don't know about that are here listening in. It's an interesting relationship, one where I know you're out there, I care about you, and yet I don't always know who you are and where you are, but I do know that you're just like me. You're wanting to have the best relationship possible, but, more importantly, so that your spouse can clearly see how much you care about them. I think that that is something that's pretty amazing. Have a great week, everybody. Bye-bye, this has been the Fighting for Connection podcast. If you've enjoyed this podcast and want more content like this, check out my Connected Couples Campus, which can be found on my website, wwwpivotalapproachcom, and become the difference you need in your relationship.