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Talking to the depression of a spouse or partner is usually a no-win trap. I speak from the experience of having angrily fought off so many attempts my wife made over the years simply to let me know that something was deeply wrong. Depression is the intruder in any intimate relationship. It creates a replica of the person you know and love, like the pod people of the Body Snatchers films – identical bodies taking the life away from the man or woman living with you and substituting a terrifying, unknown being.

People enduring the pain of relationships distorted by depression tell their stories over and over again in the user groups, blogs, forums and message boards of the internet. These partners to depression, often bewildered and desperate, need the outpouring of support they get on these sites, but they want more than that. They want to know what to do.

Advice is easy to come by on the forums, and we’ve all had mixed experiences with it. Sometimes, it’s enormously helpful, but it can be preachy, dogmatic, irrelevant and even offensive or wounding. But whatever the shortcomings of the help offered, I find it always to be passionate. Most of the participants online have learned what they know from hard experience, and sharing it is usually part of their own healing. Despite having to sort through much that is not relevant to my situation, I keep returning to these forums to understand more about the struggle of living with depression.

But I have a very different experience when I turn to some of the best known books offering analysis and advice on how to respond to a depressed partner. I’m going to avoid names here because there seems to be a more generic problem than one I find in a single writer. It’s a very tricky thing to offer step by step advice to people dealing with depression because the term covers a multitude of conditions along a spectrum from mild to suicidal.

The best writers, from my perspective, ground advice in their own experience with the illness and are helpful in guiding readers to adapt the suggestions to their own unique circumstances. I find Julie Fast’s work – though dealing with bipolar rather than depression, (Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder) to be very helpful for just these reasons.

Many other writers have their own websites and forums, and I often find a strange break between the down-to-earth advice found in their online sites and the overly neat prescriptions in their books. Now, please understand that I have enormous respect for each of these authors. Their books are best sellers, and they have helped thousands of people better understand how to deal with depression. But I’d like to review a few of the problems that most trouble me as I search for advice that would be helpful in my own marriage.

Here’s an exchange from a popular forum that captures what bothers me about the advice in one such book. A woman had posted a few times and expressed enormous relief and gratitude at finding this source of help and support. Following is a response to one of her statements – quoted first below.

“…. I am still trying to persuade him to get help, but so far with no luck.”

Response:“Stop doing that. All he will do is actively resist it. If you make him an appointment [with a therapist], he thinks you are (s)mothering him, and he resents it. Not will. He does.”

“Really, I should stop trying to persuade him? I just read the chapter in [author's book] about using persuasive techniques — so that’s what I tried. I guess I’ll stop.”

The woman seeking help is so hurt and confused that she is grabbing whatever advice comes her way. The book’s prescriptions about how to persuade her husband to get help sounded so clear and doable that she went for it. Finding that contradicted by an experienced contributor to the forum, she goes for the new suggestion – advice which makes more sense in the context of my own experience. The problem with the book’s advice was that it ignored the storm of intense emotion and conflicting feelings in relationships damaged by depression.

In re-reading several books of this type, I’ve listed out a few of the things I find most troubling.

1. They often present a stereotype of the depressed partner as incapable of thinking rationally, helpless, needing to be guided like a child, needing to be treated and talked to carefully lest the wrong words trigger an angry or violent reaction. Of course, there’s an element of truth in this, but there’s a lot more going on. Denial is not the same as irrationality. To use myself as an example – though I know I’m not unique in this – my rational mind is often functioning perfectly well, but in the midst of depression it is disconnected from what I’m feeling and capable of doing. The best support comes from understanding that I’m in the grip of something I haven’t been able to control, not from assuming I can’t think straight.

2. Despite the characterization of irrationality, the advice is completely rational. Here are the stages you as the non-depressed partner go through, here are the steps to take in dealing with the depressed partner. Here is what you should say, here is what you shouldn’t say. I don’t believe it’s possible to use rational techniques of persuasion with a person in the midst of depression. More fundamentally, it’s not the words themselves that cause a negative reaction. It’s the attitude and feeling behind them. If I hear scripted words coated in reassuring tones that conceal hurt or anger – I’m not going to be fooled or pay much attention.

3. The advice also tends to assume that the undepressed partner has a big responsibility to help change the troubled one. First, this is unfair. Only the depressed person can initiate change. Second, I worry that a person trying these techniques, which in many cases will fail, will believe they’re not up to the job of overcoming the partner’s resistance. That not only damages self-esteem, it reinforces the idea that they may have contributed to the onset of depression. Or worse – they might come to feel that success in changing the partner will make them happy That’s almost a formula for codependence – putting the depressed person’s state of feeling above your own and making it a condition of your wellbeing.

4. There is a lot that the better books get right, but the priorities are often backwards. They emphasize that depression is the problem, not the relationship or the partner. Even though the impact of the practical advice might contradict this, it’s the single most reassuring thing a reader needs to understand. There’s an illness here; it’s not your fault. They also get to another key point, that the undepressed partners need to take care of themselves by drawing behavioral boundaries, setting conditions for what they can’t tolerate and backing those conditions with action, even if it means leaving the relationship. The problem is that these books often get to these points last, when they should be first and give shape to everything else.

5. Lastly, the books seem to assume that this drama is a one-time thing. If the techniques are applied and work, the relationship is saved and happiness results. If they fail, the relationship may well end. But, while many people may endure only one major episode of depression, it’s more likely that there will be many more. Having dealt successfully with one doesn’t necessarily mean that the next will yield in the same way. Both members of a relationship need to understand this possibility. They may well be in training for a long struggle.

Another anecdote posted by the same woman quoted above is worth repeating here. She and her husband went to a family gathering where he was completely sociable, happy and at ease. Overcome by the terrible difference between his behavior in that setting and his silence and abuse at home, she burst into tears. The husband saw this, as did other members of the family. They told him – You’re wife is crying, you have to do something. This finally got through to him. On the way home, he told her that he probably needed to get help. A small step, but a huge change for him.

That’s the way change can begin to happen. No learned strategies, no persuasive words spoken by the wife, simply the genuine emotion of a life falling apart. Added to that was the witness of concerned relatives outside the marriage. What could be more powerful than that?

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The risk of being changed is one of the most frightening experiences we can face. — Carl Rogers: Breakdowns in Communication in On Becoming a Person

Accepting the risk of change has been a big step in recovery: risks are hard to take because of the fear they trigger. I’m still stumbling around with the acceptance of risk – one minute eager for anything new, the next minute fearful of every change.

I mentioned the analogy of prison when describing my rejection of the idea that depression was permanent and that I would always be in recovery. But ending the isolation of that prison brings up exactly that fear of change.

The prison constructed in my mind for self-confinement was a special place. It took care of many problems, especially involvement in the unpredictability of life:

• No way out, no struggle to escape because that choice didn’t exist.
• The cell might be scrappy in appearance but there was plenty of room for the limited movement I made from time to time.
• No colors visible in the dim light, no distracting associations to interrupt this solitude.
• All my simple needs were met. Mysteriously, I needed little food or exercise and could sleep as much or as little as I wished.
• No place to go, no person to meet, no anxiety or fear about new encounters.
• My feelings were so muted, I had no need to stir them up.
• Nothing to do, no need to self-evaluate or to dwell on my inadequacy to get that nothing done.
• No time, only a futureless, pastless present, hence nothing to regret about the past, nothing in the future to plan or feel anxious about. The future would never come.

Life was simpler, safe, predictable – even in the misery of depression. I knew what that was, and, at the time, that’s all I wanted to know. In my case, I never opened any door to get out of that isolation. The perverse comfort of confinement seemed impossible to leave when I was there. But one morning I would wake and find it was gone and knew I never wanted to go back. I kept working against a return, but then on another morning I would wake, or try to wake, and realize I was locked up again. There was no why for falling back into it and no why for getting out.

As I’ve described elsewhere, after the last five years of sustained, intense effort to get out of severe depression without going back, another sudden change has occurred. I feel again like a whole person, not the half-person who gets better for a time alongside the other half-person who is ready to take over my life without notice. This time I feel different, more fully alive. But I still have a long way to go.

There are many risks in going more deeply into the full reality of who I am. Primary among them is the risk of letting my feelings express themselves as they occur without the filtering and restraining that has kept them from others and even from myself.

Equally difficult, though, is the fear of experiencing other people for who they are, instead of the projections I read into their voices, words, eyes. Strangely, those projections always made the other person mine in a way. Disguising them in judgments of myself pulled them into depression. That helped to confirm what depression told me was true, at the cost of never seeing who was really talking to me. There was no other person, only me with a different face.

Breaking out of that wrapped up self, not only to let my own feelings flow spontaneously but also to experience fully the other person before me, continues to stir up the fears that were part of a life with depression.

There is the emotional vulnerability of being present, taking the good and bad as they come. That is no problem at all in a weirdly comfortable prison cell. Complete isolation, seeing the world only as it can be seen in the dark, removes the possibility of real interaction – and risk.

I’m reminded of a scene in a film version of Dickens’ Little Dorrit. The elderly Mr. Dorrit, having spent most of his life in debtor’s prison, is offered a chance to step through the prison door for a brief walk in the noisy, bustling London street. He looks out fearfully and then pulls back, politely declining the offer, and quickly flees back to his room.

I have yet to feel completely comfortable in a world with people and feelings I must accept just as they are. Now I’m doing that far more often than before, but old habits die hard.

Some words of Carl Rogers in A Way of Being
keep me thinking about what I’m trying to achieve and how difficult it is to sustain.

To really know what I am experiencing in the moment is by no means an easy thing, but I feel somewhat encouraged because I think that over the years I have been improving at it. I am convinced, however, that it is a lifelong task and that none of us ever is totally able to be comfortably close to all that is going on within our own experience.

Do these words resonate with you? Is this kind of struggle a part of what you’re going through now?

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Carl Rogers summarized what he had learned about his own process of becoming a person in an essay entitled “This is Me,” found in On Becoming a Person. This discussion helps illuminate the beliefs he gained from experience about effective change and acceptance of one’s self.

He concluded that paper with a brief statement on his view of what life at its richest can become: “a flowing, changing process.” This essay, among many others he wrote, has resonated so deeply with me that I wanted to devote this post to a few key passages providing a glimpse of his ideas.

As he said of what he had come to understand and believe, these learnings were not fixed but changing.

…I believe they became a part of my actions and inner convictions long before I realized them consciously. They are certainly scattered learnings, and incomplete. … I continually learn and relearn them.

• In my relationships with persons … it does not help … to act as though I were something that I am not.

  It does not help to act calm and pleasant when actually I am angry and critical. … It does not help to act as though I were a loving person if actually, at the moment, I am hostile. It does not help for me to act as though I were full of assurance, if actually I am frightened and unsure.

  …[P]ut in another way … I have not found it to be helpful or effective in my relationships with other people to try to maintain a facade; to act in one way on the surface when I am experiencing something quite different underneath. … [M]ost of the mistakes I make in personal relationships, most of the times in which I fail to be of help to other individuals, can be accounted for in terms of the fact that I have, for some defensive reason, behaved in one way at the surface level, while in reality my feelings run in a contrary direction.

• I find I am more effective when I can listen acceptantly to myself, and can be myself.

  … I have learned to become more adequate in listening to myself; so that I know…what I am feeling at any given moment – to be able to realize I am angry, or that I do feel rejecting toward this person; or that I feel very full of warmth and affection for this individual; … or that I am anxious and fearful in my relationship to this person. … One way of putting this is that I feel I have become more adequate in letting myself be what I am. I believe that I have learned this from my clients as well as within my own experience – that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.

• I have found it of enormous value when I can permit myself to understand another person.

  Our first reaction to most of the statements which we hear from other people is an immediate evaluation, or judgment, rather than an understanding of it. … Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of the statement is to him. I believe this is because understanding is risky.

  If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual, to enter thoroughly and completely and empathically into his frame of reference. It is also a rare thing.

• What is most personal is most general.

  … I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.

• Life, at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed.

  To experience this is both fascinating and a little frightening. I find I am at my best when I can let the flow of my experience carry me in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals of which I am but dimly aware.

  In thus floating with the complex stream of my experiencing, and in trying to understand its ever-changing complexity, it should be evident that there are no fixed points. When I am thus able to be in process, it is clear that there can be no closed system of beliefs, no unchanging set of principles which I hold. Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming.

… I trust it is clear now why there is no philosophy or belief or set of principles which I could encourage or persuade others to have or hold. I can only try to live by my interpretation of the current meaning of my experience, and try to give others the permission … to develop their own inward freedom and thus their own meaningful interpretation of their own experience.

These few clips give a hint of Rogers’ trust in experience, rather than theory, as a guide to both the therapeutic relationship and the characteristics of well-being. In other papers, most of them written in the 1950s, he elaborated on his view of the good life. In the next post in this series, I’ll try to summarize his view of wellness and compare it to those of other writers whose work has helped me make progress in getting my life back from depression.

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Anxiety is one of the fringe benefits of depression. The form of it that I find most acute is now called social anxiety, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I used to call it torture. When it’s upon me in full force, every encounter with people is a searing experience. I can hardly make out who they are because of the blinding panic that sets in. Driven to say or do something, words tumble out, expressions cross my face that are usually totally off the mark. Completely embarrassed and burning inside, I leave as fast as I can.

There was a time when I tried to capture moments like that in poems, and this is one from a long time ago.

The two beside me on the bench

speak in one touch of their intimacy,

and I am the cheap voyeur.

I touch up face after face,

I bluff, I burn in unlikely mime,

I dangle near their design

of entwining arms.

Like an antique entertainer

tapping song to his ragged time

while the showgirls upstage him,

I want the sudden comeback,

want the place dead with applause:

I don’t know what I want.

Then quiet like a curtain falls,

and I make off.

Is social anxiety a partner to the depression you experience? Does it happen mostly with strangers, or can it be triggered in any situation?