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Depression is a natural enemy of close relationships. It helps build tension and conflict as a once-loving partner either withdraws into emotional isolation or turns angry and blaming. I suppose that’s inevitable since the loving support of a long-term relationship doesn’t fit the depressed view of an undeserving and damaged self. Nor does it fit the phase of depression that blames the partner for causing the inner pain.

Either way, depressives push their partners off to a distance they can handle, and the partners search for explanations. A helpful one is to think of depression as a force that splits a person in two and starts an inner struggle between the healthy and depressed personalities. Then depression becomes the cause of conflict, the culprit that breaks apart the relationship.

My wife and I came to think in these terms and took comfort in imagining depression as the evil twin I needed to kick out of my life. That view gave us something to hope for. With each new treatment, there was another chance to get rid of the intruder and bring back the real me permanently. That’s how we’d end the tension and restore what we could of a damaged relationship.

But there were problems with that approach. It took a lot of our energy away from dealing with the tension and conflict we lived with every day. It was true that I had to focus on ending depression – my wife couldn’t do that for me. And while I was working hard on doing that, she had to take care of herself. But we also needed to try every day to repair the weakened bond between us.

Reconnecting with each other was just as crucial to recovery as the work I was doing on my own. Too often our effort to talk about it, though, came down to venting frustration, sometimes only confirming the worst. The one solution we kept coming back to began with progress in my treatment. And that was too long in coming.

In an earlier period, we had worked with therapists as a couple and had learned specific skills to get to the root of issues we fought over. We still tried to use them, but they no longer seemed adequate. I’ll detail some of these in another post and just say here that they were too rational and didn’t recognize the power of emotions to overwhelm them.

We needed ways to deal with the specific distortions that depression brought to the relationship. The first step was to recognize what they were.

Depressed Ways of Thinking & Feeling

Here are a few that have been the strongest and most damaging to our relationship.

• The Center of the World: First is the self-absorption that possessed me. Everything revolved around the pain I felt and the obsessive thinking that went with it. Whether I was in a phase of feeling worthless and causing all the unhappiness in my family – or blaming everything on them, the world revolved around me. My wife and every person I knew became players in my drama, projections of my depression, and I couldn’t see them for who they were.

• Proof of Worthlessness: Wherever I looked, I found evidence to prove my own worthlessness. Anything that on its face supported the belief I had about what was happening I embraced immediately. Anything that contradicted it – especially if my wife or a close friend tried to be supportive and offer hope for the future – I’d attack and reject.

• The Future is Fixed: All my thinking insisted that change was not possible. I would always be rotten – or I’d always be miserable. It will always be hopeless, and there will never be any remedy – except for an extreme one. That could mean suicide or complete escape into a new life where everything would be perfect.

• Self-Defeat: With that conviction, I found myself fulfilling the prophecy of endless failure, disappointment and depression. I couldn’t possibly succeed – it just wasn’t meant to be. If others told me I had been successful, I knew that they simply couldn’t see through my false facade. They were completely wrong and not to be listened to.

• Absolutes Rule: Everything I did was wrong. Everyone judged me. I could never be better. Hope was impossible. Treatments couldn’t work. I always failed. And on and on. My world of depression was full of absolutes. Everything was either good or bad. There were no complications.

A relationship of love, trust and sharing disappeared in this perpetual storm of negativity. I couldn’t see my wife for the person she was. I couldn’t even see myself.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy refers to these as “cognitive errors” and assumes that such habits of thinking produce the negative feelings of depression. By changing those habits, thinking, feeling and behavior can become more positive. You can start to see the world again in all its complexity and assess experience in a realistic manner.

That method has been of some help, but like so many others it assumes that rationality will prevail. The guiding assumption that thinking rules emotion doesn’t jibe with my experience. And I’m hardly the only one questioning this approach. Writers like Joseph LeDoux, in The Emotional Brain, and Antonio Damasio in The Feeling of What Happens, have written extensively about the intertwining of emotion and reason that gives rise to ideas and awareness.

In the next post, I’ll explain the approach that I’ve found most helpful. In the meantime, I’d like to hear about your experience.

Have you found ways to work with your partner to keep your relationship going while you’re also trying to deal with depression? What has worked for you?

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Here’s something that caught my eye – a highly original classification of the emotions. This image is the work of Robert Plutchik, a psychologist who saw emotions, apparently as Darwin did, as playing a role in the evolution of animal life. He posited that all animals, including humans, share the “primary” emotions.

Those primary are the eight shown in the middle of the three circles of this figure, and he groups them as four pairs of opposites: fear vs. anger, surprise vs. acceptance, joy vs. sadness and acceptance vs. disgust. These occur at different levels of intensity – he shows the less intense in the outer circle and the most intense in the center. For example, the progression goes from annoyance to anger to rage, serenity to joy to ecstasy, acceptance to trust to admiration, etc. (I can’t see, though, how boredom is the less intense form of loathing – but there’s lots to quibble about here.)

He also proposed that all other emotions – like colors – are combinations of the eight primaries. Those “secondary” emotions appear in the white spaces between the colored spokes. So love is derived from a mixture of optimism and amazement, contempt from anger and disgust, awe from fear and surprise, and so on.

There’s a lot I don’t agree with in this classification. Partly, that may result from some of the name choices he makes, such as submission. That seems more appropriate word for the action that follows an emotion rather than the emotion itself. Some of the associations are questionable – why does boredom lead to disgust? It’s interesting, though, to think about this classification and how emotions are linked and blended.

I spent a while learning something by alternately agreeing and arguing with the whole thing. That was fun as well as instructive. I hope it works the same way for you.

What do you think of this?

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Patrick has written a comment packed with ideas about his responses to depression. I’m especially interested in three points he makes about creativity and imagination. First, he notes that his years of experience of therapy led him to see it as a “misguided enterprise, that of creating and recreating ‘narratives’ to explain events of Mind.” His creative imagination “can spin yarns and unspin them and spin them again” without getting him anywhere. He has come to see depression as a physical problem since it has responded to intense exercise and intense Zen meditation much more than to therapy or medication. Because he now sees the condition as a distortion of thinking, rooted in physical causes, he rejects the idea that “the suffering caused by depression is somehow noble of that it provides special insight.” He has also found that he tends to “become what I consistently think about,” and this insight helps with “understanding the cascading of depression and negative thoughts.” This is not, he says, “a skillful use of creative imagination.”

My experience is close to what he’s saying about creativity and imagination, and I want to bring this out because I’ve encountered many online who see depression in just the opposite way, as a source of inspiration and creativity. Though such different interpretations often lead to bitter debates in this medium, I don’t see this variety of perspectives as a cause of dispute. I’m fascinated by the multiple ways that extremely thoughtful people experience and interpret the multi-faceted condition we call depression.

Jane Chin, for example, has written an extended and inspired defense of her creativity as intrinsic to her, not a product of her depression. Peter Kramer devoted a third of his book, Against Depression, to reviewing the history of the close association between the emotions of depression and artistic imagination. He suggests that changing our view of depression by seeing it as an illness with physical causes could also change the experience of emotions in our culture, pushing us away from glorifying melancholy, despair and alienation and toward focusing more on the strong, worldly directed passions of anger, excitement, joy or grief.

On the other hand, Philip Dawdy has written in the post, Is Depression a Mental Illness? (November 6, 2007), “Besides, there are some positive aspects to depression. It’s a great source of artistic inspiration – trust me on this one.” Dawdy also discussed an essay by Tim Bugansky (author of Anywhere but Here) called I Miss Depression, a recollection of his experiences before having depression symptoms relieved by medication. Bugansky writes that when depressed, though isolated within himself, he felt more intensely alive, completely connected to the world and more creative. He says he doesn’t want to glorify depression, realizes that without his meds he could have become much worse, but nevertheless misses “the brilliant sadness” of his former depressed state.

Siroj Sorajjakool writes in a typically sensitive post about the challenge of living with depression. This is a remarkable reflection on connection and disconnection. He finds that depression, the sense of being wrong in who you are, pushes you to the edge in negative thinking about yourself. This results for him in a very high level of consciousness. In a comment on a post of mine, he writes: “I have been amazed at what depression has done for me and, in a way, I would not have been where I am now if not because of my struggle with depression. Pain is always there but like you said, there is something more, a deeper sense of meaning and satisfaction.” The post he was responding to discusses what getting well is all about. I write there that depression has always been part of my life and linked with the self-discovery that some call individuation or salvation. In that sense, I agree with Siroj. The illness tests me almost every day and pushes me to invent some new way to fight its effects and regain a sense of comfort with who I am, balance in my thinking and renewed energy.

In my experience, depression destroys creativity because it destroys my ability to think, imagine, will. I see these two as opposite psychic forces. It is the creative core of a so far resilient self, holding an outpost never quite overrun by depression, that enables me to fight back. It is imagination working with a remaining spark of life that helps me avoid self-destruction and lets my mind and feelings come alive again. After pushing off the depression, I can be myself instead of that deadly negative monster the illness wants me to accept as who I am.

This brings me back to Patrick and the idea that his creative imagination is not helpful when it generates the “cascading of depression and negative thoughts.” The better side of his creativity reveals positive states that he can imagine and move toward. He says these imaginings come not from abstract theories but from physical experiences that are free, if I’m reading him accurately, of the engineered constraints that try to contain the spontaneity of life. I’m with him there – depression tends to submerge the vital form of creativity. If I’m lucky, enough of the good stuff remains to help me imagine a way out.