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I’ve written an overview post in this series on Depression Central, and I hope you’ll have a look at that. Thanks.

Talking to a depressed partner can be more than frustrating. It can feel hopeless when you’re faced with a slammed door shutting you out completely or a furious attack full of blame and rejection. If your partner says anything, the words are likely either accusing you as the cause for the onset of severe depression, or angrily denying there’s any problem at all. Or you may not get any response and have to deal with someone who is emotionally absent, empty of feeling, gone from the relationship. This is likely the worst crisis you’ve ever faced with your partner.

The First Step

I discussed in a previous post some approaches recommended by prominent authors to the partners of depressed people and mentioned Julie Fast’s “big picture” plan as the one that made the most sense to me.

The first step toward healing for your partner, as well as yourself and the relationship, is to recognize that it’s depression driving you apart. Both partners need to be able to sense the early signs of its onset. But only your partner can make a commitment to action and take charge of their own treatment. There are some ways you can help with this process, but you can’t do it for them or take on the leading role in recovery. That’s not your job. You didn’t cause the problem. You can’t cure it.

I’d like to describe here how difficult that first step of recognition was in my case and then look at a method for getting a clearer picture of what’s happening, one that proved effective for my wife and for me. With the understanding and insight gained from that work, it slowly became possible to communicate without getting caught up in confrontations driven by depression.

Recognizing the Shadow in the House

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, for years I had a very limited understanding of what depression could do. Apart from the feelings of bleakness and despair, I never grasped that so many other things I was experiencing were linked to this condition. That’s important to know because a partner may be in treatment for depression but not be dealing with all its effects and distortions of thought and feeling.

I assumed that other symptoms, now so familiar to those who have tried to educate themselves about this condition, were either a part of my nature or were caused by some external circumstance. The anxiety, the obsessive way of thinking, the inability to focus and mental blank-outs seemed to be limitations that I could not change, even though they were by no means permanent.

My constant negative thinking and the shame I felt seemed justified by my inner failings. Projecting negative judgments about myself into the minds and attitudes of others also felt like reality. That’s the way they must be judging me. Everyone should think badly of me because I was empty inside.

On the other hand, I blamed my wife for the problems I imagined were plaguing our relationship. I could certainly see that I was contributing to them, but that didn’t stop me from raging at her and our kids for everthing – and for nothing.

All of this made any real communication about what was happening completely impossible. I cast around me a net of control to capture and hold everything still. Most of my crazy behavior was based on fear of ripping that net. Everything I saw felt like part of me, an extension of my nervous system. On the surface, I was enraged at each unexpected tremor, sudden shift, raised voice, spontaneous action.

But anger can be a mask for fear, and inwardly I often burned in fear, even panic. Any effort by my wife to tell me what she was seeing in me and the effect it was having on her and our children only prompted more anger as I denied I had any problem and shut her out even more.

How did we begin to cut through the defenses and barriers to real communication? At calmer moments, we applied some tools we had learned from a therapist and gradually retrained our reactions to each other. That process made a breakthrough possible, but it was a long time coming.

Ideas on Coping with a Depressed Partner

As Julie Fast suggests in Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder, making lists of what works with your partner and yourself is a helpful starting point. That process begins by writing down changes in behavior and learning how those changes relate to the symptoms of depression.

Then, it’s important to list the specific actions, tones of voice, words and physical gestures – everything you perceive when the familiar partner is slipping away into depression. These steps make it clear that depressed partners are no longer the same people you’ve known but have been transformed by a condition they may not recognize at all or just can’t control. Next, think about your own responses to what the “new” and estranged partners are doing. By writing down those reactions – not just the feelings but also what you’ve said and done – it may be possible to separate the responses that seemed to get nowhere from those that helped move toward a truer dialogue.

Julie Fast gives many examples of how to focus on what works, but she also understands how hard it is. Faced with irrational and abusive attacks that threaten the core relationship and tear into one’s own self-esteem, no one can stand back and calmly set aside the raw emotions of the moment. For one thing, the “well” partners have plenty of issues of their own. They may have experience with depression, anxiety, fears of abandonment, damaged self-esteem, a history of abuse. Everyone has vulnerabilities, and it is often those dimensions that are the targets of of a depressed partner’s abuse.

To be most effective, though, learning from such methods has to be shared, if at all possible. The burden can’t fall on one person. In our case, I had enough periods when depression receded that I could work with my wife in therapy and begin practicing ways of catching myself early on. That didn’t stop repeated episodes of illness, but it did give my wife something to appeal to when I started going into a tailspin. She could tell me what she was observing before I got out of control – the initial irritability, obsessive thinking, secluding myself, constant frowning, never looking directly at her. Her ability to do this gave me pause because I could see where I was heading. If I could admit to her that she was right, I was getting depressed, we could both focus on the illness instead of getting into a blaming match.

Many depressed partners are beyond reach and refuse to talk at all. Even in those cases, though, working through this method alone at least helps partners of the depressed avoid self-blame or the trap of believing they can fix the problem on their own.

But no matter how severe the depression, the effects of abuse and irrationality are real and can’t be allowed to continue. It’s especially important for the unreachable partners to face the consequences of the pain and damage they inflict on their familes. If nothing else works, a boundary has to be sharply drawn. More than once, I faced an ultimatum from my wife, and that forced me to acknowledge the havoc I was causing and to get serious about treatment. As addicts often say, it wasn’t until they lost everything that they finally admitted they were out of control and could begin recovery. Unchecked depression can be that bad. The illness pushes everyone affected by it toward destruction, and it can take extreme measures to stop it.

These methods helped us avoid the extreme, but every relationship has different needs. Does this one sound feasible in your case? Have you found any method that works for you?

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1.

I walk around with a crowd inside – so many selves wanting to go in different directions. Too many voices are talking all at once, and it’s hard to pick out the one I need to listen to right now. Here’s the intuitive talker, waking up with the big picture and the ideas for what I’ll get done on my blogs today – he’s the one I want. Then that anxious kid, unready for the day, prickly at every detail, tries to noise the others out with TV static.

But here’s my writing, creative buddy, who pours peacefulness into a cleared space he holds open for me. But that physical guy is pushing me out the door to stretch all those muscles and finish the undone, hard work in gardens and fields. Always, of course, the damn depressive self, is trying to get back on top and sit with invisible weight on all the others, telling me I’ll never get anything done – so why try?

I am struggling to push aside the intruders shouldering into this moment and sit with the intuitive, creative me in my study. Right now they’re pushing me to get this blog post into shape, and it’s getting easier to hear what they’re saying. Of course, a worrying, list-maker keeps dragging my thoughts to the other 25 things I need to start doing. I tear up the latest scrap of paper he’s pushing in front of the computer screen.

However unruly and full of fight these competing selves may be, they have to stay together, and a gathering mind, always insisting that I’m just one man after all, manages to keep them in the right formation. They’re like flights of birds in migration – either they fly together behind this binding me, or, one by one, they fall by the wayside and are lost.

2.

Paul Bloom, a psychologist, wrote in a recent Atlantic article about research that reinforces the idea that we consist of different selves. This could be much more than a metaphor for inner conflict. Instead of a single self that tries to fight desires pulling in different directions, he sees something closer to what I feel goes on within me: multiple selves in tension with each other:

The view I’m interested in … is conservative in that it accepts that brains give rise to selves that last over time, plan for the future, and so on. But it is radical in that it gives up the idea that there is just one self per head. The idea is that instead, within each brain, different selves are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control—bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.

These selves aren’t really popping in and out of existence. They’re all familiar companions who compete for my attention, but I’ve known them well for a long time. I’m always working to keep the positive ones foremost and push the negative ones aside. That’s one way I’ve come to think of recovery – I’ve learned how to deny power to a depressive or anxious or addictive me and fill with energy the creative, spiritual and loving beings.

This may sound like a dissociative personality disorder, but it’s not. These different selves are not compartmentalized and out of touch with each other. They’re interacting all the time. They tell stories, some grim, some hopeful and become parts of the living narrative I put together to form the single sense of who I am. It may not be the most consistent narrative, since, as the lead character, I’ve often changed direction and spoken with many voices. But I learn how to live – and find meaning in what I go through – by working hard to put each self into the order that will keep me sane and functioning.

When I’m well, this happens without much thinking, almost effortlessly. Even when I’m well, though, the dialogue, the arguments, the pushing and shoving for control among them still go on, however muted they might become. I have to remain mindful at all times, especially about the quiet moves that depression is making. He’s the most artful one of all, as well as the most dangerous.

Mindfulness for this purpose has a special meaning. It is not so much the detached observation of thoughts racing through my awareness until they are all still and a different consciousness is achieved.

More commonly, the flow I’m listening to consists of coherent voices pushing me in one direction or another. The peace and harmony I achieve comes when I can listen calmly to them all and detach myself from their tension. Then suddenly they are in the places where they need to be, their struggle is a sideshow, and I am filled with a sense of life and openness that is more than the sum of all those parts.

You could say I’m in the lead again, working hard in this endless flight, heading toward a home that’s still out of view.

Have you thought of an inner battle in this way? How does the struggle feel to you?

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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.

I remember driving back home one day from the airport after a week’s absence. Good things had been happening on this trip, and I was eager to talk to L. about them. I had missed her and the boys, who were about 2, 5 and 6 at the time, and couldn’t wait to hug them. But I was nervous too because these moments of return were often the hardest of all. That’s when I would fall into a rage, sometimes forcing it to smolder inside, sometimes watching it boil over in furious words and slamming anger. This one time, though, an insight came to me as I drove down the last hillside to our driveway. As I struggled to understand the rage in human terms, I suddenly realized that underlying that aggressiveness was a deep fear, the fear of losing my family. I saw so clearly in that moment that the raging abuse was more of a protective reaction – push them away before they give up on you – a crazy response, to be sure, but one based in love and need that I couldn’t admit to. I was so relieved and excited to see it that way. I felt so deeply how much I loved them and couldn’t wait to tell this to L.

But that’s not what happened. No sooner had I grabbed my bags out of the car and started across the garden walkway that led to the front door, than I could feel a tightening in my chest. I was already nervous about losing it. There across that open grassy space, the kids’ toys were strewn about, and from inside I could hear two of them screaming at each other and thundering about as a tumbling fight ran from room to room. The noise cut deeply into me, as if their clatter and yells were knife-blows at my body. L. was trying to yell over them to cut it out! The tension became unbearable. Each tossed toy or sweat shirt on the lawn glowed in my eyes as a piece of me I had to put back into place. The rage was building and drove out any thought of a cheerful entrance.

As I walked through the door, instead of seeing each boy and L. as who they were, I could only feel my own shame spilling out in every direction – the mess inside me took the shape of that house and everything in it. I had to grab it all and restore the scene of order I was suddenly composing in my mind. I was driven to make it, and me, whole again and furious that no one else seemed to care! I wouldn’t stop until I had put everything back where I desperately needed it to be. There was no room then for surprising, unruly people, no room for anything unexpected. I obsessed on everything that struck me as out of place or broken or ugly, and nothing looked right! I was seized with a rage at once that sped me about picking up, straightening, pushing, shoving, slamming.

“What the hell’s going on!” I roared at L. “Can’t you HANDLE this!” She turned in shock from the cooking she was doing at the stove and just stared at me. “What are you talking about?”

But I didn’t stop to explain. I marched in fury on B and S who were locked in their wrestling and even laughing as they knocked over chairs and banged against a wall, tilting a framed picture on impact. I yanked them roughly apart, almost hurling them to opposite sides of the room. Between them on the floor I found a long rubber strip they had been playing with.

I knew exactly where that had come from because I had so painstakingly fitted it back into a metal runner that held it on the floor of the station wagon, not once but many, many times. It was a part of the car that just wouldn’t stay put and it symbolized all the mess and irresponsible destruction of this house – the mess I had become. “Who took this out of the car?” I raged. B look at S who was about to say something in his defense when I swung it hard against the side of his leg. He immediately burst into tears, and L. was at his side to help and hold him. She looked at me in speechless anger, the words trying to form in her mouth for a minute before she could finally hiss them out. “You can’t do that! You are OUT OF CONTROL!”

I stood there for a second still possessed of that rage but increasingly uncomfortable, knowing damn well this was crazy, this was not what I wanted, but I couldn’t stop. “They’re breaking everything! Why does everything have to get broken!” I practically ran out the door, that strip of rubber in my hand, and went right to the station wagon, pulled open the back, crawled in and set about trying to jam it back into that damned metal strip. IT JUST WOULDN’T FIT RIGHT! I willed all the rage still flowing through me into my finger tips to squeeze the endless three feet of that hard, resisting rubber strip back into its enclosing metal slot so the stupid thing could do what it was supposed to do and protect the finish of the cargo area floor. How many times had it popped out, and each time it tore at me that something I owned, that was a part of me, was wrong, completely wrong! I wound up pounding that strip with all my might and gave up when I could see it would stay put, but only for a time, of course, until a box was shoved over it, forcing it loose again. The whole thing was futile!

I sat in the back of that car feeling like a complete fool, my life a mess, everything wrong, ashamed that I had hurt my dear son and practically in tears at the thought of how happily I had hoped this homecoming would be. I was calmer then. I walked back to the house to see if I could repair the damage I had caused. Perhaps I could replay the scene, I thought, and get it right this time! Perhaps I could be the loving father and husband, glad to be home again, laughing at the playful tumbling of the kids, the special projects they had made out of the living room furniture, curious to see what they were up to, open and at ease with whatever might happen next. Maybe, someday.

I went through years doing this sort of thing and can hardly understand how we stayed together as a family. Fortunately, there were more good, or at least OK, times than miserable ones like this. Having a partner or parent lost in fits of depression-fed rage has got to be a terrifying thing. It was terrifying enough to be that partner, that parent, never sure when I’d lose it next. When the person you originally fell in love with gets back in balance, how can you be sure that the improvement will last?

How have you managed to cope with a partner in this state, or something like it? How do you go about rebuilding the basic trust of the relationship?

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