Posted by JohnD
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:32:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Aron Escobar at Flicker
I had lunch with M one day to talk business, and I got on with him well. We were both excited about the projects we were working on, but soon got to more personal things. I told him about the depression I kept fighting and about treatment to keep it in check. He went into a lot of things about his life I didn’t know, then paused before opening a big door into a troubled past.
He talked about his separation from his wife – how they had put everything on the table – and now were doing great again. His big problem was that he was an addict – to fantasy and sexuality. I listened hard to what he was saying, staring intently into a part of my own life I didn’t want to see.
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Posted in Partners to Depression, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags compulsive, family, fantasy, men, obsession, power, recovery, sexual addiction, shame, wife | 20 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:28:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by denis collette at Flickr
There is a powerful moment in the film, Tender Mercies
, when the lead character, hearing of the death of someone close to him, says he hates happiness. “You can’t trust it.” I think I took in lessons like that when young and for a long time was fearful of a happiness that seemed to depend on being with someone. And that was the only happiness or fulfillment I could imagine since I felt then so empty on my own, so unworthy of any place in the world at all. But then it happened that I met that one who became my life partner. She kicked and poked at depressed thinking long and hard enough to help me start seeing around it, seeing myself in that state as someone I didn’t want to be.
I could begin to understand my down-staring face wasn’t all that I amounted to. And she could scream enough into my soul to get the message through that love was an offering that had to be taken in and returned, that it demanded to meet a responding energy and affection coming from that deep place. She helped wake me up to my own humanness and hence to the possibility of healing, of being filled with an awareness of a life so different from what I was used to, a life where inner peace could be found.
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Posted in Partners to Depression, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags beauty, depression, healing, hope, life, love, Tender Mercies | 7 comments
Posted by JohnD
Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:34:00 GMT
Photo Credit: rustyphil – Stockxpert
It was more than a decade ago when I stopped believing my own fantasies of finding happiness by leaving my marriage. I could see that those dreams were only substitutes for taking a hard look at who I was. Depression, though, made that difficult task even harder by convincing me there was no one worth knowing in this mind and soul of mine. I had a dream at that time full of images of shame that took the form of people speaking in my own depressed voice all the messages I kept sending to myself. I sat shrinking in the corner of a big room, and each of them came in turn, looking twice their normal size, to tell me what a mess I was. The gloom of that dream woke me up. I could see so clearly how my psyche was devilishly busy turning my own thoughts into hammer blows to drive me deeper underground. Something snapped, and I was suddenly alert with purpose to fight back against that force trying to kill me. It was the same powerful feeling that woke me up from depression during an earlier bout with cancer. I wasn’t going to let that darkness prevent me from rediscovering who I really was and rebuilding a close relationship with my wife.
But exactly what do you do to regain this closeness with your partner?
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Posted in Partners to Depression, Connecting | Tags close, depression, intimacy, longing, love, marriage, partner, personality, therapy, Undefended Love | 2 comments
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.
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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
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.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Partners to Depression, Connecting, Fighting Depression | Tags depression, home, hope, love, marriage, partner, relationship, trust | 1 comment
