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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?

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In Silence

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your

Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them
When all their silence
Is on fire?”

~ Thomas Merton ~

(The Strange Islands: Poems by Thomas Merton)

Thanks to Panhala for highlighting this poem.

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My partner in life is an artist who works in many media. She fills the space around us, inside and outside our home, with beautiful things. Her gardens crowd with daily works-in-progress as she adds one more spot of life to a year-round creation. It unfolds in time as the season and color for one group of living things peaks and then fades, in a cycle that never ends and that never repeats in quite the same way.

Cabbage and Calendula

Her natural works of art speak for themselves. I’ve put a few images here, and many more are going up on Flickr. Each is a glimpse of one moment and breaks up the flow of this complicated garden life. If you can see enough of them, though, you begin to get a sense of what she is making, day by day. It’s a big part of the healing in my life.

Rose Garden

Winter Gem with Erysimum

Display with Sylvie

Angel's Trumpet with Potato Bush

Sunset

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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?