Storied Mind

Are You Still You When Your Partner Is Depressed?

john — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:49:24 +0000

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Over and over, I find online stories about the transformation of a loving partner, most often a man, into a depressed stranger. As I’ve often written here, I have been that stranger.

I’ve told several stories about what happened during that time in my life and what I’ve tried to learn from my own depressed behavior. I’ve described fantasies about becoming a new me, blaming my wife and my work for the unhappiness, losing control of myself in rage – and then pulling out of it before losing everything.

The story was all about me, and that’s always the way it is when depression is ghost writing at my side. My wife had a different story. Of course, it started with the crisis I had set in motion but then shifted to everything she did to sustain herself. When I “came back,” the old relationship didn’t come back with me. Instead, we had to create something different because we were both different. It wasn’t about me or her then but both of us.

Because of what I’ve been through and knowing how my wife took care of herself, I worry about many of the stories I read online. They tend to be all about him. I hear a great deal about what the depressed partner is doing, what may be wrong, his refusal to get help, his on-again off-again emotions, his confusion and pain. The hopef-for turning point of this story centers on whether or not he’ll get over it and return as the loving partner he used to be.

What I hear so much less about is the person who has to live with Depression Fallout as Anne Sheffield calls it – the emotional damage caused by living with a depressed partner.

I always want to ask, What about you? Where are you in all this? Except for a brief mention here and there about pain and perhaps efforts to get help, I have a hard time getting as sharp a picture of who you are and what this relationship means for your own sense of self.

Are you worried you won’t be you anymore once he’s gone? Why do you think you can change him? Why do you ask only about what will happen to him? Where are you?

There is so much invested in a close relationship that it inevitably affects the sense of who we are. Each partner, hopefully, feels enough trust to open and share a usually closed emotional core. Once it’s clear the relationship is a lasting one, there’s a sense of fulfillment and sureness of commitment on both sides. I’m still me, but I’m also more.

Even when troubled, angry or hurt by each other, the emotional resonance and mingling can move two people to some sort of healing. It’s all the more shocking, then, when depression takes control of one partner and rips the relationship. It’s not only a betrayal; it takes away the part of me that emerged through closeness to my partner. That cuts too deeply. I won’t feel complete anymore. How can I survive this?

I think the depth of loss of that joint identity varies a lot. At one extreme, there’s a complete dependence on another person to feel like a “real” person. That’s what I went through In my early twenties when I had the experience of being left abruptly. The crisis for me was extreme because I couldn’t imagine myself without this partner. I had no sense of my own value as a person and looked to her to make up for everything I wasn’t. In my state at the time, I could only feel OK because she was with me.

As I told myself, there was nothing left to fill the inner emptiness, so I fell apart. For a long time, I couldn’t accept what had happened and obsessed over the relationship, convinced I could do this or that to turn back the clock. Every attempt failed miserably, and my condition got worse and worse. It took a few years to get past that, but the long-term result was a much healthier sense of who I was.

That’s one extreme. Another is a level of independence of two people that they limit carefully the amount of time they spend together. There’s a fear of losing personal identity by getting too enmeshed in each other. One couple I knew (obviously wealthy) built side-by-side houses connected by a common space so that they could choose when to be together. If one had a serious problem like depression, there was certainly a loving concern but also a safe distance preserved to keep one from damaging the other – or so they thought.

There’s a balance that has to be found between needing a partner to feel good about yourself, as I did, and feeling so autonomous as to see a depressed partner’s problems as his own and having nothing to do with you.

As Peter Kramer puts it in his thoughtful book, Should You Leave?, society as a whole values independence and self-fulfillment far more than fulfillment through the interdependence of a relationship. But the goal for so many is to combine both.

Kramer offers a beautiful image of the way two people can be closely entwined without losing their own identities. He tells about his great aunt, who offered this comparison when she learned of his wedding engagement.

[She] pointed to a pair of white pines planted close together. They had developed a cone of branches and needles around the two trunks, responding to the sun as a single tree; if you were to cut one down, the other would look unbalanced, bare on one side and rounded on the other. A couple, she said, should be like those trees.

I suppose the continuing challenge is to find the balance between a healthy sense of one’s separate self and the shared identity of a close relationship. Neither can exclude the other, and even if relationships fail, they’ve given as much as they’ve taken away.

Sometimes I find out how the online stories have ended – though not so often as how they began. Usually, it’s encouraging, not because the relationship has been restored (that’s rare), but because an inner resilience has led to acceptance of what’s happened. The new story begins, and it’s all about you, no longer about him.

So that’s why I ask: where are you in the story you tell? Are you worried you won’t be you anymore once he’s gone?

Looking Out for Life

john — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:23:31 +0000

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When I was growing up, no one ever talked about depression. I didn’t know what it was, and the moods I went through didn’t get much reaction from my parents. Yet I spent a lot of time isolating myself, not feeling like playing with my friends or going anywhere, not interested in much of anything. I went through many spells of anxiety as well.

That was something I did recognize because it was like fear, and there wasn’t a boy who wanted to let fear stop him from doing anything. Yet I had to walk a fine line between the fear of what might happen outside my home and what might happen within it. There was a lot of depression in that small space.

One summer when I was about 9, I became convinced that it was too dangerous to go outside. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things, great and small, that could hurt me. For one thing, I could be stung by a bee. Or I might get beaten up, especially by that terror, Del Halstrom, who lived diagonally across the street from us. Or I could run into a car while riding my bike. These and many other possibilities obsessed me.

Staying inside was the thing to do. There I could keep an eye on the neighborhood while leaning on the wooden cover of the big living room radiator and staring out the wide casement windows. That was my lookout post.

I could spend hours at a time mesmerized by the late-day summer light on abundant red rose bushes right under my window. The roses themselves had gone limp in the July sun and had lost their wild density of color and fragrance. The humid heat smothered them to the ground, and the loose petals carpeted the lawn with deep but wilted red.

Our house was set back about fifty feet from the road and built on a slight rise. That gave me a sweeping view of everything that happened in this part of the neighborhood. Sometimes, I felt I was in an audience. The street was like a stage, and I watched the action carefully, ducking down if glances turned my way. I wanted to be invisible.

One evening I was at my post waiting for Del Halstrom to appear. He and my brother had made a fearful date to fight it out, and I wanted to keep track of his movements. There wasn’t anything I could do, of course, and I was nervous that Del might spot me at the window and come after me too.

He was a force that had pushed into our neighborhood when people started moving up from the City. He wasn’t like rest of us. He was a street fighter who dared you with his eyes to step anywhere in a ten foot zone around him when he walked the streets. And when he grabbed you, it was to land a rock in your face, a sharp boot in the groin or a fierce punch in your solar plexus to blast the air right of you. He didn’t fool around with fighting, he went in for a quick kill, got a terrifying scream out of his victim then ran like a cheetah to get as far out of sight as he could.

I don’t know why my brother decided to take him on. Maybe he’d just had enough of this one-man gang. I was afraid of the outcome of this fight and didn’t think Jimmy had much of a chance.

Behind me in the cathedral living room, I could hear my father dragging his arm chair and ottoman into position, settling down with a cigarette, patting his beanbag ashtray onto one arm of his thickly upholstered chair and setting a beer coaster on the other. I heard him popping the can open, catching the quick gush of foam in his mouth, clicking on the TV, and settling in for the Friday night fights.

My mother was stretched out on the couch, an arm flung over her forehead, the fingers of that hand limp by her cheek until lifted to peel back a page of her Ellery Queen mystery magazine. My father made lots of noise, loudly clearing his throat, creaking the chair springs with a one-arm push-up to clear a bubble from his gut as he groaned about gas. But then, at the referee’s signal from the center ring huddle with the fighters, Dad started his action-packed commentary. It wasn’t so much commentary as groans and get-em’s while his favorite took or struck a punch. His own fists followed the action, shooting a jab, an uppercut, a body blow or just shoving away when the fighters leaned on each other in exhaustion, weakly glove-slapping a kidney punch to make it seem like they weren’t playing for time.

Mom suddenly sat up on the couch, wiping her forehead with her handkerchief. “Where’s Jimmy? It’s 9, and I haven’t even seen him tonight.”

I shrugged and muttered that I didn’t know but I didn’t turn around to face her. She hadn’t directed the question at me so much as at the room in general. Her voice had that angry, hurt edge to it that I knew well. It always cut through whatever she was talking about and warned of trouble. I had no idea why – my mother and father were just sitting there – but something must have happened to cause that fearsome and intense quiet of hers. My father looked preoccupied with his boxing, but I knew that when my brother walked in – especially if he’d been in a fight with Halstrom, the balance might be tipped. This fight would begin.

“Why didn’t he say something?”

“He no consideration for anyone!” said my father pausing a moment between swings in his TV fight.

“I didn’t ask you,” my mother shot back as she swung herself down on the couch again, pushed her arm over her forehead and lifted the magazine before her eyes. She couldn’t have really been reading.

Then I heard it, a brief outcry from the Halstrom house, booming sounds of slamming doors, as if sucked shut by a vacuum within emptying rooms, another shout pulled from deep within a male throat and chest, a physical tearing out of a pent-up hurt, far below words, below feelings even, some primitive roar of pain. Del was getting another beating from his dad.

A side door at the top of a flight of steps flew open and shut in a single action. Del stood there for a second, slightly crouched as if ready to spring at anything of danger nearby. He was a tall, lean 14 year-old boy, all wired muscle, taut beneath the denim jacket and pants that pulled back slightly from his rapid frame, as if always a moment or two behind his quick steps.

His small intense eyes scanned across the yards and street below him, as if taking in possible traps or prey. In a clatter of action I could hardly take in, he was suddenly at the bottom of those steps, out the driveway, onto the street, lurching forward in his straining way, his head and eyes yanking the rest of him along. His thin legs reached ahead in big strides, his torso in tense hunching posture, his eyes daring anything to move into his path. Halstrom was out stalking the neighborhood and on his way to beat up my brother.

I heard my father loudly battling through the fight, and then, as he sensed the impending knock-out win, shouting his man on to flatten the bloodied opponent with that magical left hook that came out of nowhere, then finish him off with an uppercut of awesome force. My mother kept silent with her Ellery Queen.

She hated Dad’s antics but couldn’t shut him out. I could imagine the familiar look of disdain, even disgust on her face. I sensed the tension as she scuffed through more pages than she could possibly be reading. That scuff, scuff sounded like a warning signal. Something was about to happen, though I didn’t know what or why.

I focused out the window again and waited for my brother’s fight to be done. took place about a block off stage. They’d agreed to meet down where the brook flowed under Argyle St. – it was out of sight below the street level and shielded by trees from the neighboring yards. Hallstrom had warned everybody else to stay away, and nobody would dare defy him.

The whole thing was over in a couple of minutes, just as I had feared.

There was a quick shriek. I knew it was my brother, though I’d never heard such a voice of pain from him before. And sure enough, a couple of minutes later there went the streak of Halstrom back toward his house. That was that. My brother had lost and would soon come back, hopefully with no more than a welt or bruise. But that shriek – I couldn’t it out of my head.

Behind me the TV fight was over, the television clicked off. My parents just sat there, waiting for Jimmy to walk in the door.

I couldn’t make a move.

Brief Dreams of Recovery – 2

john — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:11:50 +0000

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In this dream, I heard myself saying: I am waking up out of the earth. I wasn’t at all sure what that meant. Was it supposed to be some mythic arising, or was it just another way of seeing myself as so much dirt? Then I realized I’d been sleeping outside – in the ground.

I couldn’t tell how deeply I had been buried, but it seemed quite natural to be sleeping there. I had no trouble getting out of that dark bed. Standing up, I brushed off my clothes but felt terribly dirty, inside and out.

Looking around for water to wash off the rest of the gritty soil, I saw that I was standing on a small bench of land just above a wide river. There were tall shade trees along its banks – enormous cottonwoods amid dense bushes of new willow strands. They broke the sunlight into tiny streaks of color glinting along the slender shoots.

I walked through them to the river’s edge, knelt down and started splashing myself clean. Then I had the strange sensation that this water was somehow filtering into my body through the skin. I looked upstream and saw its clear flow coming toward me and, somehow, right through me.

I stepped back a few feet from the water and realized all at once that I was that river, that in a strange way I took in its entire length, tributaries and all, right down to the smallest dips of land that carried rains toward it. I imagined its source, my own, high up in the Sierra Nevada’s melting snows, and I felt part of the water trickling downward into the first tiny rivulets.

All these finger flows merged into each other, picking up more and more water from all sides. I seemed to be part of its increasing speed as the onrush filled larger and larger creeks. These were like capillaries leading to veins carrying blood back to my heart then flowing out again.

As this mass of movement and I became a single energy, we crashed into boulders, dropped suddenly down long falls, plunging and roiling through huge pools in foaming confusion. There was a wild, thrilling freedom without the tight binding of bone and muscle. I could be shoved against cliffs only to splash apart, rain back into the main flow and move on.

We thundered across broken rocky beds and surged into the tormenting darkness of a long deep canyon. Finally the whole rush of violent energy spent itself, and I moved quietly with a wide calm river flowing smoothly across the open valley.

Suddenly I knew I wasn’t alone there anymore. The changing river was everyone, at least everyone I knew or had ever known. Merged at some invisible level, all of us – my close family, relations of every generation, friends alive and long gone – were gliding downstream together.

I knew they were there because I heard them. All those voices, mine blending in, were speaking through water. I couldn’t distinguish any words – only a blended, murmuring chorus. We seemed to flow on the sound waves of a single voice.

Then I was standing at the river’s edge again, confused but exhilarated. I felt whole and strong and started off to look for something – I don’t know what it was. Everything was getting vague and dim then.

I snapped awake for real and felt more fully alive than I had for so long. This dream has stayed with me ever since, like calming music.