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A “dispositional explanation” attributes your depressed moods and maladaptive behaviors to internal factors, like personality traits or personal characteristics.
A “situational explanation” attributes those dark moods and dysfunctional behaviors to external factors, like the environment, social context, or specific circumstances surrounding the situation.
A dispositional explanation for depressive feelings focuses on “who someone is” while a situational explanation focuses on “what the situation is.”
Learning to switch from dispositional to situational explanations for negative feelings makes it easier to change and is a useful tool in regulating your emotions.
Everyone experiences ups and downs — days they feel competent and contented with moments of happiness, and days they’re down or even depressed.
How you explain your moods can make a big difference in how easy it is to recover from those times your heart drops and darkness settles over you.
Furthermore, while — as a child — you may have learned how to explain your feelings from your mother and how she explained her darker moods, you can change those habitual explanations for feelings of depression by learning a new skill.
Learning to walk back in time, until you identify the moment your “heart sank,” is the door to relief from a depressed mood.
Every week at least one client shows up looking more miserable than usual. I usually ask: “What happened?”
Last week, a 46 year old woman, a team leader at a small tech company who is often excited about her team’s latest project, appeared sleep-deprived, red-eyed, and darkly depressed.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Nothing happened; I just got depressed again.”
I ask again: “Come on, when did your mood drop?”
Her response: “You know, I’m usually depressed, so what’s new.”
She’s making a “dispositional explanation” for her mood. That means she believes she gets depressed because of her personality, her “disposition,” or how she’s wired.
I challenge her explanation. “That’s not always how you are. Last week you were feeling proud of the work you and your team are doing, and things were going well at home. You seemed even cheerful.”
She’d heard me challenge this kind of explanation for her moods before. Sighing, she said quietly: “I know what you’re thinking; don’t get impatient with me.”
I understand. It takes time to change your habitual way of explaining things that happen to you, especially those things with depression-tinged feelings attached.
This client is not always depressed. Her mood drops when a higher-level manager complains to her: “Your team seems to be moving too slowly.” Or when someone she admires suggests she made a stupid mistake by interviewing and hiring a new team assistant who turned out to be chronically sloppy. Or when her 17-year-old son decided to have a “deep talk” with her; he’d decided to tell her “in all honestly” about all the mistakes he thought she’d made as a mother —going back to middle school.
In other words, she gets depressed when something upsetting happens, especially when she feels put down. Her drop in mood is “situational” —it’s her response to a specific situation. There’s nothing mysterious about it.
While there’s almost always a situational explanation for her darker moods, she forgets that when she feels down. She’s not always depressed. She’s not even prone to depression. But when a situation really bothers or humiliates her, she forgets she felt quite contented the day or the week before. She forgets her mood dropped when something specific happened.
The reason this matters
If you find yourself down and you believe it’s just how you’re wired, you also tend to believe it’s permanent. Therefore, you’re unlikely to search for a solution.
You may think there’s no hope of changing and you’ll always feel the same dismal feelings.
But when you learn to look for the situational explanations for your drop in mood, you’ll start figuring out how to change the situation. You don’t have to sit around depressed for long; once you locate the moment your heart sank, you’ve found the explanation.
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Finding situational explanations for your feelings opens you up to the idea of change.
Moving from dispositional to situational explanations
It’s not so hard to learn how to change your thinking about the way you feel.
Step One: Learn to identify a drop in your mood quickly. When you find yourself depressed or moody, notice it. Become aware of it. Quickly.
Identify it when you’re thinking: “That’s the way I am.” or “I have a depressive personality.”
Step Two: As soon as you realize your mood dropped and you’ve begun that habitual explanation for feelings of depression — “This is just the way I am; I’ll always be on the edge of depression” — stop yourself.
The way to do this is with a mini-meditation. As soon as you feel your heart drop, pay attention and, for a moment, stop what you’re doing. Start paying attention to your breathing. Notice your breath going in and out. Begin to count (to yourself) each breath as you exhale. Do this very briefly — like for two or three minutes.
Step Three: Then recollect the details of when your mood dropped. At first, you might return to insisting this is just how you are. But try again. Seriously, when did you get so down?
Go an hour at a time, a day at a time, and soon you’ll remember. Perhaps you ran into an old friend yesterday, and you felt a moment of joy when you saw her. And then you saw her face, and realized that she didn’t seem so happy to see you.
That was the moment. You walked away, embarrassment and disappointment rushing over you.
Perhaps you wondered, “Did I do something to her, something I can’t remember?” Ready to blame yourself, after walking away your emotions dysregulated.
The scene was humiliating. It may seem easier to forget it than to dwell on the miserable memory.
So as it slips away from your memory, you’re left with a terrible mood and the thought “this is how I am, I’m a depressive, I always end up this way.”
But then you remember: “Think about your explanation.” You didn’t feel bad the day before. Remember the situation. It’s better to remember a humiliating situation than to turn the explanation inward and attribute your depressed mood to your personality, your disposition.
Step Four: You can learn to stop yourself when you’re whispering those dispositional explanations. Challenge your habitual explanations and ask yourself: “When did my mood change?” It doesn’t take that long to learn to stop, quiet your jumbled thoughts with a mini-meditation, and ask yourself about the situation.
Learning to identify the situational explanation for those times you find yourself depressed changes how you respond to those darker moods. Instead of crawling away, adding insult to injury, you’ll be able to learn to protect yourself from the impact of painful or humiliating situations. You’ll be open to taking actions to counter your mood, and create a new situation.
