Some Rights Reserved by ComputerHotline at Flickr

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?

Some Rights Reserved by nyki_m at Flickr

Some of the comments on the last post in this series hit hard on two issues. First is the question of personal choice: is a man supposed to escape responsibility for destructive behavior by attributing everything to depression? The answer is no! Depression is never an excuse for inflicting pain and loss, breaking up families, violent rages or destructive behavior of any kind. The other compelling question that is asked over and over again, often in desperation, is: What can I do?

I’ll try here to deal with both of these issues here rather than put them off to the end of the series, as I had originally planned.

1. Responsibility

Whatever might roil me internally in the midst of this condition doesn’t change or lessen my responsibility for the harm my behavior is causing. My wife hasn’t kept silent but has confronted me whenever she needed to about what I was doing to our relationship and everything I was putting at risk. Hearing that from her was not enough by itself to shatter the power of denial, but it was essential to be confronted with the facts of her feelings. That truth needs to get through the layers of depressive self-absorption and isolation in order for recovery to begin, but it is knowledge that has to be put to use by me. I had to decide to take responsibility for my own recovery.

I could not make that inner choice, however, so long as I was looking for an external cure. The last post tried to bring out the twisted thinking, rooted in denial, that led me for a time to look to something or someone other than me as the cause of an inner despair and emptiness. Convinced that the cause was external, it made sense in this phony logic to look for a cure by changing location, jobs, family. That would be the path to fulfillment. Fortunately, I could never fully believe that was true.

I thought I was doing everything I could to get better by using a series of treatments. I took medication, spent countless hours with therapists of many persuasions to undo patterns from the past, got counseling with my wife, changed diet, ran a lot, meditated, tried to change destructive ways of thinking, and more than that. The problem was that I kept waiting for one of these or all in combination to do the trick and rid me of this destructive condition.

None of them ever seemed to work for long because in a sense I was still looking for an external cure. Only when I had to deal with cancer did it dawn on me that I had to take charge of my treatment in a way I hadn’t done before. To doctors I was a statistic with a certain probability of survival after five years, ten years. I had to make an inner determination not only to use the available tools but to strengthen my will to change and approach that illness with the spirit of an activist. I wasn’t going to let it kill me. It might come to that but not without a hell of a fight from me.

That’s what has to happen in depression. As with substance abuse and addiction, no one and no thing could do it for me. Recovery had to begin with my inner belief that I could make it happen.

2. What Can a Woman Do?

I can speak only from my experience so there’s an obvious limit to how much I can say about what a woman can do. But I’ve talk to my wife – her medium is visual not verbal – and can summarize what she has done.

First, here’s part of what I said in the Longing to Leave series over a year ago.

I’m not big on offering advice, but the potentially devastating impacts of depressed people on those closest to them leads me to go a bit beyond just reflecting on what I’ve been through.

If you’re trying to deal with the sudden transformation of an intimate partner, get help, starting with friends and family. You’ve likely felt such a deep assault and wound that it would be easy to get lost in the sheer humiliation, hurt and anger of the experience, searching for what you’ve done wrong, what you could do or say to set things right. That’s a trap … Those closest to you and your partner have doubtless noticed something strange and may have been hurt as well by new behavior. That will remind you that you’re not alone in this.

And remember that you can’t cure someone else with your words and love. They only backfire. At most, you can help your partner gradually gain awareness. …

What my wife did was to confront me with I was doing to her and demand I get treatment before I destroyed our marriage. Having dealt with the danger of alcoholism in her own experience, she knew about codependence. She knew she couldn’t take care of me by blaming herself and putting my feelings ahead of her own. I got that message loud and clear.

She has told me that at first she experienced only the anger and the hurt it caused. We did couples therapy in two separate periods. Both helped. The second led to a breakthrough that re-established the basic bond between us. Slowly but surely, though, I took many steps backward.

As time went on, she felt the impact of other types of behavior besides anger and aggressive emotional abuse, but they all had the same effect – she was cut off from the love and support she needed from the relationship. That was devastating, and she had to deal with it over and over again. As she tells it. the most important realization for her was that all this grew out of severe and chronic depression and that it was unrelated to anything she had done. She knew I was the one who had to turn it around.

She was sympathetic and loving but repeatedly forced me to see the horrible impact of my behavior on her. No matter the cause, that was real, and it had to stop. And I had better do something about it if anything was to be salvaged.

That was what she could do at the time – be honest with me and try to take care of herself.

Our experience doesn’t cover everything, of course, but this is what we can offer. I hope you can feel free to talk here about what you feel you can do – or have already done – to deal with a depressed partner.