The Longing to be Close - 1

Posted by JohnD Sat, 29 Dec 2007 23:38:00 GMT

Photo – Rights Reserved

In reading over the many responses to The Longing to Leave series, I realize those stories only get at part of the picture. Like many in the midst of depression, I wanted to blame my marriage for what I was going through and fantasized about leaving. But at the core of that fantasy was an almost miraculous closeness and intimacy. What is deeper than that longing to be close, to be perfectly understood, accepted, loved? The fantasy of leaving to attain it is like a drug that gets you high, but the charged dream always leaves out, as dreams usually do, the daily reality of building a relationship through hard honesty. When possessed by that dream, all I could think about was what I did not have in my life, yet I couldn’t do what needed to be done to turn that around, to restore the closeness I so deeply wanted.

I think of Sylvia Plath’s powerful image of her own depression in The Bell Jar. She felt enclosed in a clear glass structure that cut her off completely from everyone and everything but still left all of life fully visible. She could not connect with anyone or feel anything through that barrier. The image fit what I was going through in many ways. The separation was always there, and often I couldn’t feel anything at all. But there were other times when I was raging with fury inside that glass bell, full of blame and frustration and yelling to be heard. The words, though, and the rage were exactly what was driving my wife away rather than drawing her closer. I think the truth was that real closeness was the most terrifying thing I could encounter, and the fear of it was a powerful force driving me into fantasy fulfillment where intimacy was seemingly so available and had no cost.

Posted in Partners to Depression, Connecting | Tags depression, dream, fantasy, intimacy, isolation, marriage, partner, presence, relationship, shame, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar | 2 comments | no trackbacks

Depression and Stress

Posted by JohnD Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:28:00 GMT

Photo Credit: Eraxion – Stockxpert

Part of my recovery consists of putting two and two together. I’ve learned to see links between things I’ve done and felt that I never knew were connected to depression. Blowing up in rage, feeling extreme anxiety, even panic at meeting a group of new people, deep fears and fantasies, memory loss – understanding that all of those problems fitted in with depression was surprising but also comforting. That painful barrage of living began to take shape as a single condition, and the new knowledge gave me a sense of empowerment. All that mess wasn’t just me, fixed in fate forever. It was part of an illness that I could work on and start to recover from. And now, thanks to research about the multiple impacts of stress on body systems, I can add another link. My well-hidden inner boiling in response to the pressure of every obligation, every unmet goal, every imagined requirement I impose on myself – all that too has a connection to depression but perhaps a different one than the others. The response to the extreme stress I so often feel may be a major cause of depression rather than one of its many effects. To find out more about this, there is one book everyone has to read: Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Third Edition.

Posted in Explanations, Fighting Depression | Tags depression, emotion, glucocorticoids, major depression, mental illness, neurochemistry, psychology, recovery, Robert Sapolsky, stress, stressors | 2 comments | no trackbacks

Hope, Love, Depression and House Repair

Posted by JohnD Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:51:00 GMT

Photo: Galina Barskaya – Fotolia.com

A four-word comment from Stephany has set my mind going. “Hope is not love.” she writes in reference to my last post on the difficulty of sustaining a marriage in the midst of major depression. At the end of that brief story I used a house-building image in talking about hope, and I think that’s what she’s responding to. “Hope” and “love” are such big words, I’d better get clear what they have come to mean to me in the very specific context of fighting depression.

I spoke of hope as a house my wife and I were building, and that sounds a bit strange. Isn’t hope something you feel about the future rather than a conscious construction? I can feel it as a response to something that creates an expectation about good things to come. Or it’s a coloring over all my thinking and actions, an energizing force, a constant Yes! Yes! at some preconscious level that is a motive to keep on building things. In depression, of course, I feel hopeless, but beyond the simple absence of hope I get to despair, a force that moves me in the opposite direction – doom, gloom, futility – the deep belief that I’m worthless and so is everything I do. At its mildest that means stillness and paralysis, at its worst, the urge to undermine what I’ve been building, to destroy – ultimately – me.

Posted in What Depression Can Do, Partners to Depression, Connecting, Fighting Depression | Tags depression, home, hope, love, marriage, partner, relationship, trust | 1 comment

Depressed Partner - Disappearing

Posted by JohnD Thu, 20 Dec 2007 21:29:00 GMT

Photo: © Platenik Dalibor – Fotolia.com

I went to a wedding once, and the pastor had a simple message for the young couple before him as well as the rest of us packed into a beautiful church. “Marriage is survival,” he began, and the crowd of two hundred answered back in laughing groans of recognition.

That statement is true of any marriage that lasts, and how much harder it is when one of the partners is dealing with major depression. I woke this morning recalling that advice and saddened at the thought of how destructive depression has been to my marriage, as it must be to any sustained intimate relationship. What happens to my wife when I’m lost in an internal struggle? What does she go through? I’ve had all too many chances to find out.

Posted in Partners to Depression, Connecting | Tags abuse, disappearing, family, gardening, healing, hope, love, marriage, partner, recovery | 2 comments | no trackbacks

Caution: Raging Man in Residence

Posted by JohnD Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:50:00 GMT

Photo Credit: winterling – Stockxpert

An active and aggressive side of depression, especially painful to recall, is the rage that used to blast through me at my wife and three boys. There are few things to equal the power for healing of the connection and love of your own family, and it’s a sign of the depth of isolation and emotional distortion that accompanies depression when that very connection is abused and threatened. But so it is, and, as Beyond Blue summarized a couple of months ago, research is identifying hostility, aggressive blaming and need for control as more typically male responses to the underlying changes going on in the mind and body as the illness deepens its impact over time.

The rage, the urge to break away, the impossibility of talking freely to my wife (or myself) were at their height when I had little or no awareness that these were all linked to the same illness. I knew I was subject to depression, but I thought of that problem as a name for the episodes of despair and paralysis that had been part of my life since childhood. Maybe migraines were related, I wasn’t sure of that – doctors had always treated those separately. But I was active at this time, building a new business, traveling a lot, feeling like I was getting somewhere. And yet there were these times, more and more frequent, when I knew damn well I was really out of control. Something just took over, and I struggled to stop it.

Posted in What Depression Can Do, Partners to Depression, Growing Up with Depression, Men and Depression | Tags children, control, depression, family, love, marriage, men, parent, partner, rage, shame, trust | 2 comments