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, 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
Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:11:00 GMT
Reading the comments that appeared at Beyond Blue about The Longing to Leave-2 has been a continuing inspiration. I realize how different everyone’s experience is about the impact of depression on marriage, and how desperately hard everyone works to reach what is for them the right answer about staying married or not. For some, the “longing to leave” is a justified move to safety from a destructive relationship. For me, though, it was a fantasy borne of depression. I often wonder how it is, given where I began in my struggle to build a loving relationship with another human being, that my wife and I have stayed married for so long. “Marriage is survival,” I once heard a pastor say at a wedding, and the uncomfortable laughter in his large audience confirmed the truth of it. Despite all our struggles, we’ve managed to survive the worst of times.
For so many years, though, and long beyond adolescent dreams, I was searching obsessively not for the real work of two people always learning about each other but for a drug-like love that would give me a shortcut to salvation.
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Posted in Partners to Depression, Men and Depression | Tags depression, dream, fantasy, love, marriage, men, obsession | 10 comments
Posted by JohnD
Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:17:00 GMT
Photo Credit: Kenn Kiser – MorgueFile
Not sure where the following came from, but it turned up on my cyber doorstep recently. I guess some men have trouble living up to their fantasies.
Ok – everybody knows depressed people have these outbursts of grief and crying for no apparent reason. At least some people do. But certainly not me, a guy – I’m not going to start springing leaks in my well-caulked hull of a head. Real depressed men don’t do that. Certainly I never do that – not ever – well, hardly ever. And should an accident like that happen, a spill of mental incontinence when least expected, it’s not going to happen in public. No way.
So what happened the other day was totally out of line. I was driving to work, having picked just the right time to miss all the jams and fly down the freeway, when I’m listening to the radio. Not just any pop tune bouncing beat kind of thing but the stealth ego breakers of NPR. Serves me right. The story had something to do with concentration camp survivors. They had been contacted by this dying veteran with a shoebox full of snapshots taken of a liberated camp at the close of the war. The guy found out who was in the pictures and delivered them to the survivors. Then they all had a celebration to honor the guy after his death – all those happy tears – and somebody made a movie of the whole thing. OK, very moving, very ennobling, but I don’t know these people. What’s it to me? And there I am exiting the freeway onto the downtown street a few blocks from my office when these lurchy guttural swellings started rising up in my throat. What the hell is this? Am I about to throw up as I’m pulling into the parking lot? No, it was worse than that. I’m fighting down this sobmachinegun choking my breath and pushing wet stuff out of my eyes.
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Posted in Surviving at Work | Tags crying, dreams, fantasy, grief, men, motorcycle, work | 1 comment | 1 trackback
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 06 Oct 2007 21:21:00 GMT
The longing to leave one’s intimate partner brings out something that isn’t much discussed in descriptions of depression. It is the
active face of the illness. We often focus on the passive symptoms, the inactivity, the isolation, sense of worthlessness, disruption of focused thought, lack of will to do anything. But paradoxically the inner loss and need can drive depressed people to frenzied action to fill the great emptiness in the center of their lives. They may long to replace that inadequate self with an imagined new one that makes up for every loss.
My experience with this phase of illness occurred when I had only limited awareness of the hold depression had on me. That may be a key to understanding the dynamic and how to respond to someone in the grip of this drive to turn life upside down. Unhappy without knowing why, I had to find an explanation, and the easiest way to do that was to look outward. I could only see my present life, my wife, my work as holding me back, frustrating my deepest desires. In effect, I was blaming everyone but me for my misery. In that state, I could only focus on the promise of leaving, finding a new mate, new work, new everything.
Every suggestion my wife might make that there was something wrong with me only brought the angriest denial. Every time she said how much she loved me only felt like a demand that I stay stuck in this unfulfilling life and do what she wanted me to do. I knew so clearly that I was not the problem, certainly not sick but for the first time on the verge of escaping into the exciting life I should have been living all along.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Partners to Depression, Men and Depression | Tags anger, fantasy, intimacy, leaving, love, marriage, partner | 13 comments
