Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist.
and I make mental health education videos.
Today I'm talking about dealing with relationship problems
in this period of quarantine and social distancing.
And this is based on a question from Claire.
"Hi Dr. Marks.
"I know everyone is having a hard time with this coronavirus
"and being stuck in the house.
"I'm thankful that no one in my family is sick,
"but I'm not sure if I'll be able to stay with my husband
"when this is over.
"I didn't know how much he bothers me
"until we have been together like this all day.
"I'm even getting sick of my kids,
"which makes me think something is wrong with me.
"How do I deal with this?
"I'm afraid to say something to him
"when he gets on my nerves
"because I don't wanna fight
"then not be able to get away from him.
"He's a good man, but I really don't like him right now.
"Should I be honest with him about how I feel?"
Thank you Claire for your question and your transparency.
You are so not alone with this problem.
Remember, everyone is affected by this pandemic.
We're all hurting,
so none of us are operating at our best right now,
and we all handle stress in different ways.
You're not a failure because your family isn't
sitting around holding hands and singing.
Not everyone is rediscovering the strength
of their marital bond
or on the threshold of reaching oneness at a different level
than they've ever experienced before.
Why?
Because we're in a catastrophic situation
and we're all wounded to some degree
and those wounds make us fall back
on our native coping mechanisms, whatever those are.
That's a different situation from spending
a lot of time together on a vacation getaway,
where all of your needs are being met
and all you have to do
is focus on having fun with your husband.
In that situation, you have the mental reserve
to appreciate the positive aspects of your partner
and tolerate the negative aspects.
What do you do about this?
First, you pick your battles.
You only wanna deal with the most pressing issues,
now is not the time to fix your relationship
or fix your partner.
And I don't even think now is the time to come clean
about your feelings toward him.
In other words, no brutal honesty talks right now,
just put all that on pause for now,
because your outlook may change
after all this settles down.
Next, you wanna create some personal time away,
and this can give you a sense of control
of having your own time and space.
If you have a small home or you're in an apartment,
find some part of your home or even outside,
as a place where you can go to be alone.
Schedule that alone time, so that the people in your home
can know when to give you your space.
If there's nowhere to go without being around someone,
try wearing headphones as a makeshift way to tune out.
Lastly,
you wanna look at how you're coping with this crisis.
You can't change other people,
but you can work on yourself.
Here are four common coping styles.
There's active coping,
surrender,
passive coping and over control.
Active coping and surrender are adaptive and helpful,
and passive coping and over control
are maladaptive or unhelpful.
Active coping is when you take charge of the situation
and look for options.
You also take charge of your emotions.
If you can't change the situation,
you deal with your emotions.
Here's some questions that you may ask yourself
when you are actively coping,
what can I do to make things better?
How can I take care of my needs in this situation?
What can I learn from this?
Surrender is a coping style
where you let go of the things that you can't control.
You take responsibility for the things that you can control,
but you recognize and accept your limits.
You can also recognize when you've exhausted your efforts
and just need to let go.
Some questions you may ask yourself
with this coping style are,
what are things that I should invest my energy in
and what should I not?
When will what I'm doing make a difference?
If there's nothing that I can do to change things,
is there anything else left to do?
Those are helpful coping styles.
Passive coping is when you're not taking charge
of the changeable things.
You become overwhelmed with helplessness and feel helpless.
You think things like,
it's no use trying to change things,
I don't have what it takes to deal with this,
why do things always happen to me?
I can't do anything because X is to blame for this.
Over control is when you spend too much time
micromanaging your situation to guarantee a certain outcome.
You fear things will turn out badly,
if you don't rigidly control the details.
With this approach,
you overestimate the effect
that your efforts will have on an outcome.
Some of the things that you may say to yourself are,
if I don't fix this, everything will fall apart,
I must succeed no matter what it takes,
I have to keep pushing myself to get what I want.
So in times like these, when you're under a lot of stress,
maladaptive coping styles like
passive coping or over control
can come out in certain situations,
and this is even if you didn't have problems coping before,
it can be a threshold issue.
You can just be pushed into the direction
of having unhelpful thoughts
and so can your loved ones.
So take notice of how you're dealing with
certain situations.
Pick a challenging situation that you're dealing with.
And you don't want this to be broad
like the pandemic in general.
You wanna narrow it down to a specific conflict
or obstacle that you're facing.
Then, take note of how you feel about the problem
and how you're handling it.
Do you find yourself saying
or having some of the passive or over-controlling thoughts?
If you are over controlling,
think about ways that you can surrender.
Are there things that you can feel comfortable
letting go of?
What would you lose if you let go?
Sometimes your efforts aren't as important as you think.
If you fallen into the passive coping style
of feeling hopeless and helpless,
think about what you can do
to make things better for yourself or your situation.
At the very least, take charge of taking care of yourself
while weathering through this situation.
With passive coping,
you tend to let go of everything and feel like,
what's the point?
So even making self care priority is an active intervention
that pulls you out of the passive mode
and helps you take charge of some aspect of the situation.
For more information on dealing with worry
in this catastrophic setting,
watch this video.
I hope this was helpful for you.
Stay well and see you next time.