Some Rights Reserved by extranoise at Flickr

In recalling how couples I’ve encountered have dealt with conflict in their relationships, two moments come to mind. These were just glimpses, but they stand out as the extremes.

Once during a visit to a Native American community in the Pacific Northwest, I went to see an elder couple at their home. What they said has faded from memory, but how they said it was completely enchanting. Their words flowed together as if the two of them were inside each other’s minds. Without a pause, they spoke in rhythmic alternation, picking up each other’s sentences, finishing thoughts in a way that seemed like sharing rather than interrupting.

Their voices perfectly complemented each other in tone and pitch – it was like listening to music, a beautiful duet. I could hardly imagine what they might have done to reach that harmony. No couple gets through decades together without their share of differences and conflict. I knew they were prominent in the ceremonial life of the community, and perhaps it was that spiritual dimension that had helped them achieve such harmony.

The other example was as different as night from day. I was driving a few blocks from our house on a beautiful New Mexico morning, with a clear view of the mountains on either side of the Rio Grande Valley. In stark contrast, I saw a young couple about a block away flailing in their own dark storm.

The man had just left their house, crossed the street to his car and looked back to see the woman following him out. She marched in one determined step after another right up to him and without a word punched him in the face. He immediately hit back just as hard, and the fight was on. They kept pounding at each other as I watched from a distance, horrified, immobilized. It seemed my car just kept going where it needed to go.

Most of us live somewhere between these extremes, hoping to work things out, but often not knowing what to do. My wife and I have found a couple of methods we keep coming back to. There’s one in particular we’ve learned to use effectively over and over again when I’m losing myself in depression.

One of the most common things I’ve done when depressed is to get intensely irritable and angry with everything and everyone. My wife takes the brunt of this. I’ll either snap in quick judgment about whatever she says or does. Or I won’t say a word and grunt and frown through the day, not even making eye contact. Of course, she’s hurt, angry, frustrated at this punishing behavior, often exploding in return, and then we’re into an increasingly bitter argument. After that, I’ll feel even more depressed about the relationship, and she’ll smolder in resentment while losing hope that I’ll ever change.

We’ve learned to short-circuit that vicious cycle – or at least try to – by naming as quickly as possible the trigger for the anger that I’m nurturing and refusing to talk about directly. There’s always something that sets it off. It could be an incident at work or something I feel I’ve failed at or a comment I’ve interpreted as a slight or attack. Whatever it might have been, I feel hurt or angry or afraid and shut the emotion down, refusing to talk about it. I can do that so well that I put the incident out of mind altogether. Then I get intensely irritable, often imagining that this is a legitimate response.

Whenever I manage to stop and try to think where the anger is coming from, I can usually trace it back to the triggering moment. Sometimes, I’ve been keenly aware of it all the time, but often I really have to think hard to bring it back, so effectively have I pushed it aside. If I can’t step back, my wife might be able to do it. Even if she’s yelling it out, she’ll hit the key point. What’s going on? What started you off? You have to tell me! I can’t take this!

If I can then not only remember but also say in so many words, here’s what happened, I feel an incredible relief. The free-roaming irritability and anger just vanish as I focus on what’s really bothering me, and my wife and I begin to talk about it. At once she becomes responsive and sympathetic. We may be exhausted from tension and fighting, but we’ve calmed down and begun to work on a specific problem.

It may seem like it’s only common sense to go after the cause in this way, but depressed behavior creates so much isolation for both partners over such a long time that every little breakthrough is all the more powerful. It’s the sum of small steps like this that make possible a much bigger change in a relationship damaged by years of emotional withdrawal and hostility.

Using even basic methods like this one takes a lot of practice. I find that many people underestimate this and quickly get frustrated when they try something a couple of times and can’t make it work. It’s almost impossible to interrupt intense emotions when you’re deep in battle with your partner unless you’ve internalized the steps you need to take.

Working with a therapist is one way. Trying out a method in the calmer setting of a session may seem like an artificial exercise, precisely because you and your partner are less driven by emotion. Although it’s nothing like the intensity of the real thing, every repetition helps build a new habit. And that’s what it must become, something you can recall, if only dimly, even when you’re hurt and angry and want to lash out.

This part of recovery is a long story, and there are many other self-interventions to describe. However, before any of them can work, something even more basic has to happen. You have to find enough emotional detachment in the heat of the moment to be able to take that critical step back from the brink. It’s been the hardest part for me, and the one I want to explore in the next post.

Have you been able to take that step back and use some method to keep an argument from escalating? How have you been able to do that – or what has kept it from happening?

Some Rights Reserved by Felinest at Flickr

I’m a paws-on kind of guy so I get really upset when they’re tied behind my back. Truly, deeply, combustibly upset, especially with the self-imposed deadline for my new website fast approaching.

For two weeks, I’ve been sitting at this keyboard staring at spinning beach balls of computer death against the bright and cheery background of my frozen website. Gray screens, grinding gears and broken hard drives. Vanishing posts, failed backups and wheezy memory of the random access type. Very, very random.

Primary system blown, older system now in place. More spinning beach balls, grinding gears and gray screens. I work at the machine’s convenience.

Is there a lesson in this? Is it hubris to set a deadline for launching a new website?

I guess I’ve set my own stress trap and should have read this post of mine again before making firm commitments. After all, no one but me cares about or remembers or ever knew about this deadline, so I’ll try to relax about missing it. Good practice in breaking an old depression-era habit.

So, RecoveryFromDepression.com will remain shut behind password-only access well beyond my hoped for launch date of August 1st. I’ll let you know when it’s up and running.

In the meantime, I get a cool new computer to satisfy my gadget-lust. So all is not lost.

Here’s wishing you the best in hardware reliability.

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 Mike Baird at Flickr

In response to a recent post, Clinically Clueless commented that, for her, recovery was a process, not a destination. She needed to keep aware of it, like those recovering from addiction, in order to catch the signs of relapse. I’ve thought of recovery in a similar way, certainly not a state you arrive at and then take for granted. These days I consider it more like a set of skills that I have to keep practicing. I need them almost every day.

But I’ve also been unwilling to think of myself as always in recovery, as I wrote in this post last year. I want the different way of living that should come next, one with the vital energy that depression drains away so completely. Sure, symptoms linger on, and that’s why the skills to deal with them are so important.

In the past year, I came to believe that I had recovered, that I was “there.” It took quite a while before I felt OK with saying this out loud or writing it down in this blog. There had been so many false “recoveries” that I couldn’t quite believe I had changed so deeply. But it gradually dawned on me that my way of living each day had a new energy about it. I knew what I wanted to do and could get it done. I laughed about mistakes that I used to take as disasters. I started reconnecting with my family and friends, instead of lurking about in shadowy absence all the time. (However – tons of work to do in restoring relationships – much more about that coming up in another post.)

Most of all, as I wrote here at a critical moment, my belief about myself had changed. I no longer assumed I was all wrong as a person, a fraud, worthless – that endlessly replayed recording. There wasn’t any recording. I didn’t start thinking how fine and OK I was. I was simply feeling, thinking, behaving differently, without that constant bleak drag of heavy chains.

It’s true I’m not done with the symptoms, but I do feel done with the beliefs of depression. Without the power of those negative beliefs behind them, the symptoms are more like old habits. After decades of doing things their way, I have to remain aware when I find myself repeating one of those patterns.

For example, I still have a habit of reminding myself of every mistake and failure I’ve ever made. I can’t pretend I won’t keep thinking that way for a while longer – it’s a hard habit to break. However, running myself down for thinking negatively and trying to avoid those thoughts doesn’t work. Instead, I observe them and remind myself, that whatever actually happened back then, it’s over and done with. I can’t undo it now. The obsessive quality of those memories is gone because I don’t take them as confirmation of what a fool or idiot I am – as I used to do. I don’t believe that anymore.

In this sense of the need to change old habits, recovery is a process that keeps on – and on. I’m very much in the midst of it. But it’s also true that I’m living in a different place from the depressive home I used to live in. I guess I could say that recovery is both a process and a destination – but not the final one. It’s another step toward getting reconnected with people, restoring a sense of purpose, letting myself be surprised.

At that point, the mindset switches from getting over depression to sustaining wellness in all its richness. That’s where insightful guides like Evan become especially helpful. After perfecting the art of ill-being for so many years, I’m working on the skills of well-being for a change. And I have a long way to go. Feeling better is great

It’s a lot more challenging than depression because depression gives you all the answers to every experience in life. Of course, all the answers are pretty much the same – whatever it is, I’m no good at it and never will be. That explains everything – so, if you accept that answer, you can just sit back and watch the life seep away. Being present for my life definitely beats being absent, but after decades of doing things the depressed way, this doesn’t happen all at once.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was working on a series of ebooks about recovery. My hope is to outline what I’ve learned – and am still learning by trial and error – by drawing out those practical skills that have helped me get through this long effort to get back into life. This step-by-step experience is the theme of the new site I’m developing: Recovery from Depression.

Perhaps that’s not quite the right name, though. It might be better to call it something that gets at reconnecting with life – the third phase that takes you beyond recovery. Any ideas? How do you think about recovery?