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Simple things can overwhelm, turn me upside down, submerge who I am in a great wave. I was turned over once as a kid, swimming at a beach near LA, the ocean churning and huge. I tried to jump into a breaker and ride it in, but the surge tossed me up in its gritty gnash of turgid green, where I whirled about, then smashed head first into the sand. Lying there on the beach, I turned to see if I was safe and saw what was left of the wave easing away in a mass of bubbles, like so much harmless fizz in a glass. I had been completely lost inside that thing, powerless to move, jetsam to be thrown aside. And now it was nothing.

It’s one thing to be taken over by a force outside you, another to be overwhelmed from within – tossed into emptiness only by your mind. Little things – nothing at all really – can tear you loose from the ground you stand on.

I was driving home one evening on autopilot – it was late, I was tired, preoccupied. My mind was obsessing, vice-tightened on every mistake I had made in my work that night. I had done everything wrong, was sure my colleagues now thought me a fool, a liability. How could I have done this, said that? Every detail cut into my skull, and I thought my head would just crack with the tension.

How could I go back to the office the next day, continue working as if nothing had happened. How could I live with myself? I could never do anything right – I was a fraud, and everyone would know. I was the star in this masterpiece of depressive thinking.

Then I came to a stop sign, a routine stop sign. There wasn’t any light, not even moonlight, but what I could see was suddenly all wrong.

I knew I must be near my home, but I couldn’t recognize a thing. I had come through here hundreds of times, yet now everything was strange. Those tall dark masses must be a row of trees – but there is no row of trees on that corner. How could the road angle off to the left? I knew it went straight ahead, it had to go straight ahead!

I was completely lost. I panicked – I couldn’t make any sense of this space. It was like driving off the freeway into an emptiness without direction or even the pull of gravity. Whatever internal compass it is that keeps me oriented on the face of the earth was broken – a suspended needle spinning round its wobbly circle over and over again, and my mind was spinning with it.

I tried to search my memory for the corners and streets I knew to get my bearings – but there were too many – I could hardly think straight. I was flailing inside, and I couldn’t choose among those rapid flashes. This is crazy, I told myself, just calm down for a minute – it’s no big deal. Why is this happening?

But I had to do something in that dark, empty place without a sign I could see. I was all panic, but I knew one thing. I was in my car, the wheel in my left hand, the shift knob in my right, the accelerator next to the foot pushing way too hard on the brake.

I forced myself to stop thinking and drove straight through what felt like a wall of flashing red lights warning me not to move. But that was all I could do, and somehow I just did it. If I kept on, I would have to find something familiar, something that would place me back where the world was instead of in this nothingness. Movement felt good. Panicked confusion was so many bits of broken glass cutting my hands, but here was a smooth and useful fragment.

It took another couple of miles heading straight down the silent street until I found it. A light, a sign with a name I knew, a corner with a small store and post office, just where they were supposed to be. I knew where I was. A few miles too far, but I knew exactly how to get back. I knew where my house was and would soon be there.

Everything looked right, I could sink into the comfort of the familiar, an order around me that contained my feelings, my awareness. The world was still there, and I was back in place. I wasn’t lost, and the panic ebbed away. No crisis, just a dark night. I knew where I was.

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Some of the comments on the last post in this series hit hard on two issues. First is the question of personal choice: is a man supposed to escape responsibility for destructive behavior by attributing everything to depression? The answer is no! Depression is never an excuse for inflicting pain and loss, breaking up families, violent rages or destructive behavior of any kind. The other compelling question that is asked over and over again, often in desperation, is: What can I do?

I’ll try here to deal with both of these issues here rather than put them off to the end of the series, as I had originally planned.

1. Responsibility

Whatever might roil me internally in the midst of this condition doesn’t change or lessen my responsibility for the harm my behavior is causing. My wife hasn’t kept silent but has confronted me whenever she needed to about what I was doing to our relationship and everything I was putting at risk. Hearing that from her was not enough by itself to shatter the power of denial, but it was essential to be confronted with the facts of her feelings. That truth needs to get through the layers of depressive self-absorption and isolation in order for recovery to begin, but it is knowledge that has to be put to use by me. I had to decide to take responsibility for my own recovery.

I could not make that inner choice, however, so long as I was looking for an external cure. The last post tried to bring out the twisted thinking, rooted in denial, that led me for a time to look to something or someone other than me as the cause of an inner despair and emptiness. Convinced that the cause was external, it made sense in this phony logic to look for a cure by changing location, jobs, family. That would be the path to fulfillment. Fortunately, I could never fully believe that was true.

I thought I was doing everything I could to get better by using a series of treatments. I took medication, spent countless hours with therapists of many persuasions to undo patterns from the past, got counseling with my wife, changed diet, ran a lot, meditated, tried to change destructive ways of thinking, and more than that. The problem was that I kept waiting for one of these or all in combination to do the trick and rid me of this destructive condition.

None of them ever seemed to work for long because in a sense I was still looking for an external cure. Only when I had to deal with cancer did it dawn on me that I had to take charge of my treatment in a way I hadn’t done before. To doctors I was a statistic with a certain probability of survival after five years, ten years. I had to make an inner determination not only to use the available tools but to strengthen my will to change and approach that illness with the spirit of an activist. I wasn’t going to let it kill me. It might come to that but not without a hell of a fight from me.

That’s what has to happen in depression. As with substance abuse and addiction, no one and no thing could do it for me. Recovery had to begin with my inner belief that I could make it happen.

2. What Can a Woman Do?

I can speak only from my experience so there’s an obvious limit to how much I can say about what a woman can do. But I’ve talk to my wife – her medium is visual not verbal – and can summarize what she has done.

First, here’s part of what I said in the Longing to Leave series over a year ago.

I’m not big on offering advice, but the potentially devastating impacts of depressed people on those closest to them leads me to go a bit beyond just reflecting on what I’ve been through.

If you’re trying to deal with the sudden transformation of an intimate partner, get help, starting with friends and family. You’ve likely felt such a deep assault and wound that it would be easy to get lost in the sheer humiliation, hurt and anger of the experience, searching for what you’ve done wrong, what you could do or say to set things right. That’s a trap … Those closest to you and your partner have doubtless noticed something strange and may have been hurt as well by new behavior. That will remind you that you’re not alone in this.

And remember that you can’t cure someone else with your words and love. They only backfire. At most, you can help your partner gradually gain awareness. …

What my wife did was to confront me with I was doing to her and demand I get treatment before I destroyed our marriage. Having dealt with the danger of alcoholism in her own experience, she knew about codependence. She knew she couldn’t take care of me by blaming herself and putting my feelings ahead of her own. I got that message loud and clear.

She has told me that at first she experienced only the anger and the hurt it caused. We did couples therapy in two separate periods. Both helped. The second led to a breakthrough that re-established the basic bond between us. Slowly but surely, though, I took many steps backward.

As time went on, she felt the impact of other types of behavior besides anger and aggressive emotional abuse, but they all had the same effect – she was cut off from the love and support she needed from the relationship. That was devastating, and she had to deal with it over and over again. As she tells it. the most important realization for her was that all this grew out of severe and chronic depression and that it was unrelated to anything she had done. She knew I was the one who had to turn it around.

She was sympathetic and loving but repeatedly forced me to see the horrible impact of my behavior on her. No matter the cause, that was real, and it had to stop. And I had better do something about it if anything was to be salvaged.

That was what she could do at the time – be honest with me and try to take care of herself.

Our experience doesn’t cover everything, of course, but this is what we can offer. I hope you can feel free to talk here about what you feel you can do – or have already done – to deal with a depressed partner.