Wedding Blues Unveiled: Avoiding Post-wedding Depression
When I began researching the wedding transition thirteen years ago, some of the first information I discovered was in the area of post-wedding depression. I was in a graduate program for counseling psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and I read a Master’s thesis by a woman named Leah Heidenrich on postbridal depression. Her research revealed that 90% of women experience post-wedding blues or depression. I found that figure astonishing, and I wanted to know more: why did so many women fall into depression after what was supposed to be the happiest day of their life? And why had I never heard of post-wedding depression? We hear about wedding cold feet and the wedding stress that arises between family members, but never had I heard the words wedding and depression in the same sentence. I needed to know more.
I spent the subsequent years researching, writing, interviewing, and counseling women on the topic of the wedding transition. What I’ve learned can be encapsulated in one sentence: it’s the degree to which a woman subscribes to the phrase “it’s supposed to be the happiest time in my life” that directly correlates to her post-wedding depression. And the truth is that no matter how conscious and aware a woman is, we’ve all grown up in a culture that espouses this belief from the time we’re little girls.
We don’t grow up hearing the truth, which is that getting married is one of the biggest transitions in a person’s life, and transitions are typically challenging for people. Transitions mean letting go of one phase of life so that we can prepare ourselves for the next stage. Just as spring cannot occur without the letting go of autumn and the stillness of winter, so transitions in human life cannot healthfully occur without a conscious letting go, a still time, and then, joyously, a new beginning.
But how can a person let go when she (of he) has been told from the time she could understand words that the wedding and all that surrounds it (proposal, engagement, honeymoon) is supposed to be the happiest time of her life? How can she grieve the end of the old life when grief and sadness are not culturally allowed? How can she explore her commitment fears (and who doesn’t have commitment fears to some degree?) when she’s told that she’s not supposed to feel scared, that if she really loved her husband-to-be she wouldn’t have any fear or doubt at all?
When a woman subsumes her uncomfortable feelings, she’s more likely to turn into bridezilla and then experience post-wedding blues or depression when the party’s over. Contrary to the culturally popular belief, the wedding is not supposed to be only a happy time. The conscious bride replaces this erroneous and harmful belief with the truth and allows herself to feel sad, scared, confused, alone, disoriented, and doubtful. These are all normal feelings associated with life transitions. It often takes several sessions before my clients can assimilate this truth and begin to replace the phrase “it’s the happiest time of my life” with more realistic phrases like “this is huge and of course I’m feeling everything from anxiety to joy.”
Post- wedding blues is avoidable to a large degree. Women must realize that the gamut of feelings following a proposal is normal. Nearly all of my clients express some variation of, “I was so excited for my boyfriend to propose to me, but then when he did, I felt anxious and scared.” Of course you feel anxious and scared! You’re about to make the biggest commitment of your life! Commitment fear is normal. Doubts about marriage are normal. It’s normal to put your fiancé under a microscope and examine in detail every single one of his habits. What calcifies these thoughts and feelings into a knot of anxiety is when women assume that her marriage doubts and commitment fear mean she’s not supposed to marry. Certainly there are cases when the doubt and fear indicate red-flag issues (see my website article http://www.consciousweddings.com/bridesArticles/CW_facesOfFear.html). But for the vast majority of my clients, the fear of marriage has nothing to do with the person they’re marrying! The fear, the grief of letting go of the old life and every other possibility for a lifetime partner, and the doubts are normal. What these feelings need are a safe place to be validated, expressed, and released.
There is an aspect of letdown that’s normal – what I call the day-after-Christmas blues. Whenever we spend a lot of time and energy focusing on one day, we can expect to experience some natural letdown when the day is over. What comes up must come down. But when letdown turns to wedding blues that then lead to depression, it’s time to explore the uncomfortable feelings that you may have stuffed into the wedding cake or hidden inside your wedding dress and allow them to come to light. It’s never too late to complete the transition into marriage, and sometimes this happens days, weeks, or months after the big day occurs. What matters most is that the feelings are expressed in some way and ultimately accepted so that you don’t carry the remnants of an unfinished transition into your next transition.
Sheryl Paul, M.A., pioneered the field of bridal counseling in 1998. She has since counseled thousands of people worldwide through her private practice, her bestselling books, "The Conscious Bride" and "The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner," and her website, www.consciousweddings.com. She’s regarded as the international expert on the wedding transition and has appeared several times on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”, as well as on “Good Morning America” and other top television, radio, and newspaper
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