Some Rights Reserved by nonofarahshila at Flickr

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?

Some Rights Reserved by Alyssa L. Miller at Flickr

It may seem strange to pose this question: is it loneliness or is it depression? After all, many people feel loneliness at the loss or weakening of close relationships because of depression, and most of us who’ve lived with the condition over a lifetime experience those broken connections as some of its worst effects.

On the other hand, lots of lonely people are not depressed – sad, most likely, but not necessarily experiencing the classic symptoms. The two are different but often occur together. Getting straight about the difference isn’t a matter of hair-splitting for me. It’s been an important part of learning how to take my life back from depression.

The recent book, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection reminds me of the way I got started in recovery and also offers new and helpful insights about the differences between loneliness and depression.

The authors explore why social connection is an essential part of human nature and what the effects of loneliness are, including long-term physical deterioration. They cite many cultures in which the worst punishment is not death but banishment, because it cuts a person off from every connection that gives them a meaningful place in the world. Deprived of that, they begin a collapse on many levels – from neurological to spiritual.

But this study also describes the importance of the pain of loneliness in the broad trend of human evolution as a possible warning sign. It can help sustain the bonds that hold a community together by reminding an individual of the central importance of human connection to survival. That impels a lonely person to restore the lost relationships. There is a pull to return.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. – Dorothy Day

Depression, on the other hand, serves as a different kind of warning. Stress and other causes have created such harm that an individual can no longer be a helpful part of the community and must retreat from contact in order to heal. Depression impels a person away from social bonds, at least for a time.

The concept of this contrasting pull-push is a good description of what I’ve gone through.

Isolation and Loneliness

When I’m in the depths of depression I’m completely isolated from people. I can hardly focus on what they might be telling me or bear to make a gesture in their direction. My feelings aren’t there – I can’t respond. People sense I’m not really in their presence at all. Trying to be with others is painful, and I need to retreat to deal with my own sense of despair, worthlessness and the rest of the charming attributes of depression. I need to start healing and to do that I have to be alone and get into whatever treatment might help.

It isn’t until I’m coming out of depression and can see the damage I’ve done to my relationships – even if unintentionally – that I can begin to feel that loss. Then I’m deeply lonely and hope I can rebuild and restore the closeness and trust I’ve undermined. In our culture, though, that’s hard. There are no ceremonies to celebrate a return. I may more likely be greeted with mistrust, anger and distance.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence. What loneliness is more lonely than distrust? – George Eliot

Connection

When I was putting this blog together, the first topic that came to mind as essential to recovery was connecting. It was a main theme that ran through the journals that were my first source for these posts. Connecting meant that, first, I had to reconnect with my own feelings, always so remote and unreachable during the worst periods of depression. I had to be able to feel again, and to do that I had to open doors shut firmly against even sense impressions of the world around me. Most fundamentally I had to accept myself again as a whole person.

I had to feel the strength come back to my own body, see the colors in things, hear the words people spoke, and laugh, grieve, feel lonely, want to be part of my family again, want to go to work. Reconnecting with my own feelings, responding to daily life, I could begin to restore deeper connections with my wife and children. I often went through all this quite quickly, sometimes waking up one morning and feeling human again. At other times, I had to use all the tricks I’d learned just to get started.

Hard as most of those periods of recovery were, they were lost in depression before long, and the whole process had to start over again. What has encouraged me more recently is that the pull from loneliness back into connection has been so much fuller and more complete than ever before.

This push-pull idea is a useful reframing of experience, partly because it suggests that there are forces moving in depression and loneliness that go far beyond my own boundaries. That is another reminder that I’m not so alone as I imagine when isolation seems most complete.

………..

I know the experience of loneliness in relation to depression can differ widely in meaning for each person. What is it like for you?

Some Rights Reserved by Delphine Devos at Flickr

What do I really deserve from life? That’s a question that comes up online a lot, even if it’s only implied. And the dismaying but common answer is often: not much. It always saddens me to read that, but it’s never surprising. Those of us who’ve lived with depression for a while know that the first thing to go is self-esteem. I lost it early on and formed the habit of tearing myself down, focusing only on what I’d done wrong.

For me, it was a short step from losing self-respect to believing that I didn’t deserve success or happiness and that I would turn every good experience into something bad. In the midst of depression, behaving in self-defeating ways wasn’t so hard to do.

That was partly because I could never pass the inner rating system I used – the one that began with the question: What do I deserve?

Even thinking, “I don’t deserve…” (fill in the blank) … turns the experience of life on its head.

• A depressive friend told me some time ago in the midst of a market boom that she’d sold her stocks because she had made far too much money. She felt shame and said, only half jokingly: “God doesn’t want me to get any more money.”
• Driving one day with another friend, a man of considerable accomplishments, I asked him if shame and depression had been problems for him as they had been for me. (I only asked because I believed they were.) He laughingly dismissed the idea of depression, but shame about who he was? That was different. “Of course – what else? If I don’t amount to much, shame is right. What could I possibly deserve?”
• In my own case, I’ve had shame attacks in response to praise. I’ve also felt  scorn for an honor that I knew damn well should not have been given me. I’d be thinking: Those people can’t see the real me or they would know that I don’t deserve this.
• One woman I knew years ago had an off-again on-again affair with a married man who came and went as he pleased. That was her main relationship. She assumed that was the best she deserved.
• I’ve read many comments in forums that tell of confusion about what to do when faced with a partner who turns abusive. They ask the question of strangers – What should I do? There is doubt about who is causing the problem: Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s my fault, maybe I deserve this.

To deserve: to be worthy of, qualified for, or have a claim to reward, punishment, recompense, etc. …

Why do we even use words like deserve and worthy in talking or thinking about our deepest nature? Those words carry an assumption from the outset that we’re being evaluated for what we have done or for the talents we have demonstrated. In my case, there was always a mysterious standard I couldn’t meet and a  judge who determined how far I fell short. He always handed down the same verdict no matter what the evidence – undeserving.

The idea that I wasn’t worthy or deserving of love was the worst of all, but at times I believed it. Like so many, I often blocked out chances of intimacy through actions that repeated harmful patterns from the past – but to me they seemed only to confirm the belief that happiness in love was something I would never reach. I could yearn for intimacy, a trusting embrace, a deep bond of love, but I usually tensed up at opening fully to another. I was too afraid of what I was to do that, too convinced that the real me wasn’t fit to be that close to anyone.

It was a sure sign of recovery when I could finally stop listening to everything the inner voice was telling me about what I deserved. When that happened it was like seeing the emperor’s clothes for what they were – nothing at all. And into that nothingness also went the empty certainties of a rating system that was stacked against me from the start.

But for so long until then I listened to the voice, sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted from within, that I didn’t deserve whatever good might come my way. On the other hand, I took the bad, the disappointing as revealing the true me. Even if good things happened – and many did – I would likely feel undeserving and convince myself it was either a mistake or a strange bit of luck that couldn’t last long.

What occurs to me now is how the familiar, almost comfortable, the bad news felt. That was my element. My own success seemed intolerable, and I instinctively set about undoing it.

How do you feel when good things happen? Do you celebrate what’s happened, feel pride in what you’ve accomplished? Or does it feel undeserved, as if it resulted from a bureaucratic mistake, like a payment in the wrong amount that you’ll have to return?

Some Right Reserved by Ctd_2005 at Flickr

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?