Depressed Partner - Disappearing
Posted by JohnD
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.
Her feelings and needs disappear from my awareness as I plunge into a maelstrom of self-contempt, obsessive thinking about everything wrong with me, extreme anxiety about each human encounter, hopelessness – and then my own struggle to fight against all that, to regain a firm enough footing in my sense of self-worth that I can face the day and get active. All that consumes energy, attention – it’s preoccupation with self, to be sure, and it’s the almost daily fight just to stay alive. In that state, I can no longer see or hear my wife.
She becomes a player in that internal drama, invested with my projections and fears, when, that is, I can focus on her at all. She doesn’t have a chance to stand in front of me in her own right, pushing herself, her needs into my awareness. And what does she see?
She knows that I’m missing in action, purely inner action, cut off from any connection with who she is. That by itself would be hurtful enough. But it’s not just that I’m cut off – she sees me silent, sullen, irritable at best – and at worst verbally and emotionally abusive. She tries to disturb the inner fight I’m going through to remind me, hey! I’m here too! But she usually doesn’t get very far. Dealing with me in that state imposes on L an exhausting struggle to make sense of what’s happening, to find ways to keep hoping that this nightmare will end.
Then if I can succeed in getting back into my feelings and become alive and responsive again – my old loving self in this relationship – she can’t simply be relieved at the change and welcome me back. Instead she’s angry and confused at my inconsistency. One day I’m gone in spirit but still hulking around and impossible to deal with, the next I’m open and loving. She never knows how long my good moods will last and cannot relax under the threat of this recurring storm. It wears her down.
One day, as my mood was lifting out of a bad spell that had lasted for weeks, I found her lying in bed, looking as weary and pale as I had ever seen her. She said she had no reserves left for dealing with me. She was exhausted, and looked it. She told me how she had been so devastated when I had closed myself to her right after an especially stressful time during my bout with cancer. By some miracle I had stayed upbeat, positive and open to her and everyone trying to help me, and she had been so loving and powerfully focused on helping me come out of that crisis alive. Yet after recovery from the operation, I fell into a dark mess and turned that angry face on her once again. She couldn’t believe it, and now there was nothing left to respond with.
Later that day, we started a slow recovery by working together in the gardens she had nurtured. Good old physical exhaustion from hours of pulling out weeds, hacking through overgrown lilac bushes, carting it all away – and doing it together – helped begin restoring us to each other. Just being with her in those gardens helped with healing. L had created so much beauty in that intricate ordering of new life – as she always does, wherever we live. The gardens grew from the depth of her feeling, and we could share that fullness in reaching into the ground to work with the rich soil – itself an artifact she had built up slowly over time. The inner poison was draining away.
But that was just a first step – hard talking followed, painful for us both. She told me how she felt constantly judged by me and was on pins and needles all the time. I couldn’t appreciate all the love she had for me, or all the nurturing that she gave me and our kids – the thought and care and love that went into getting food, creating a garden, working as an artist to refashion each room of the house we lived in. My promises to work on changing sounded hollow to me, like those of a drunk or a wife-beater. This time she made me promise only one thing – to get back in therapy immediately, to keep getting help and never stop, as I had in the past, repeatedly. Nothing was going to be easy, but it felt better that we were talking again.
That was 12 years ago, and there have been many ups and downs since then. I wish I could say there was some simple happy answer, but there isn’t. We go through my spells together, each suffering in a different way. What we’ve learned a little more about, though, is hope. Hope is a complicated house to build, and living in the midst of construction can really drive you crazy. But we’ve managed to finish a new room just this week.
If you can write about your own experience with your partner, that would be a great help to us all.
hope is not love.
I think that your wife is fortunate that you felt all of that, and wanted to work to have a relationship. I suppose I could tell a story of a person that treated me the same way,maybe it was depression, maybe not, but how you describe yourself matches up. I raised my kids, did all of the “work” that takes, including a special need child, and her need grew to a higher level recently, as my blog states. I had a different defining moment. Several in fact, but the one that clarified things was when I asked the person if they ever liked let alone love me. I got the answer I was living with while raising my kids, which caused me to feel foolish, the answer was “No.” Among other things, when the silence was finally broken, and words finally were spoken, it appears now he made a complete mistake. I raised my children, and did my best for them. I knew I didn’t have a relationship, I wasn’t expecting a good answer, it was over anyway. But the pain still was there, actually I was shocked that it was all erased. It was as if I was erased. I would rather have had him admit to himself he was emotionally not attached to me,years ago, 20 years ago, hell 25 years ago, or maybe he should have not married me at all, it would have been better that way—but I was too busy working and taking care of my kids to care about myself. When the last 2 years of mental health crises happened with my youngest, it really opened my eyes that I’ve actually been a single parent all of these years.
Slam dunk, the guy finally talks, and this causes my first comment. Hope is not love.
I have hope for, but now I realize I never had it, and wouldn’t know what to do if I ever got it. That, is where I wrote before, that it is practically scary, imagining myself happy, because I’ve not had a relationship that brought me happiness,or love. How can that be, explained, except for having a high need child keeps me quite busy, and it’s when she needed support the most, he bailed even more.
What a depressing story, as usual, my life depicts despair. But, maybe this will help someone else. Who knows.
It’s worse, knowing you felt alone in a marriage, then the ultimate smack down, the last yelling in my face, that I in fact was bizzare, and well, what else needs to be said.
I’m glad you connected via the gardening. Your relationship is obviously one you both want, which is what matters I guess.
Once, at the state hospital, a social worker saw my distraught, weary soul. Advocating for my daughter 2 years ago, she looked at my daughter’s father and told him to take my hand and get me out of there, to go “take care of your wife”. He refused. That was just one humilation that frankly, showed me much.
Maybe mine is a story of being played a fool, taking care of my kids, is my reward though. One of my kids last night told me, a lot. When I called her crying and said, “I’ve failed all of you.” My psychiatrist had encouraged me to consider how my daughters are adults, and they can be supportive of me. That was the most difficult conversation with my daughter.They are adults, and lived in the same house, with an emotionally detached/and most likely depressed father, so I guess we all get it now.
This is probably too long of a post, but if it helps someone else by reading it, I hope it does, otherwise I’ve told this and regret it.