# Depressed Wife



## WLK (Apr 30, 2014)

I'm the wife. I have been suffering from mild depression for a couple of years but on a steady decline for the past 6 months and severe depression for the past 4 months. There are several reasons: moving across the country to follow my husband's job, giving up my job of 12 yrs, struggling to restart my career and having to start at the bottom again (and making considerably less) despite my experience, living 3500 kms away from any support system (friends and family, I'm lonely), suffering from infertility and 7 miscarriages and now dealing with the fact (and guilt) that I will never be able to have a child of my own, or give my husband the child he has always wanted. 
Yes, I have pushed my husband away, physically and emotionally because I was in such a dark fog that I could see what I was doing to myself or my husband. I couldn't think, or feel anything but sad. I had no idea had bad it was nor did I know how to get help. I did ask a dr once (my gynocologist) if she could help me find someone to talk to about my miscarriages and she said she didn't know anyone, she couldn't help me. That deflated me. 

Unfortunately, my husband says he is no longer in love with me. He is mad and upset that I have hurt him because I pushed him away. He says he tried so hard to make me feel better by complimenting me and trying to get me do do things (ie. go out, make friends) but that is not the kind of help I needed. He said he needed me to get help but didn't offer to help me get help. At the time, I didn't even know myself what kind of help I needed. I did show him signs of love, or so I thought, but he didn't see them as such. Total love languages miscommunication on both our parts. 

Since this "I don't love you" conversation, I have gotten help. I am on meds which have really helped and I have been speaking to a few different psychologists so I can find a "good fit". I now know how bad my depression had become and I now know what kind of support from my husband would have made the difference months ago. We still live in the same house. He says he is supportive but really he is cold, distant, sometimes even mad, doesn't talk to me except for very small talk sometimes, wouldn't even say hello, goodbye or goodnight to me for weeks (now he does most of the time but it is not because he wants to), he doesn't ask me how my day was or how I am doing. I feel like he is punishing me for being sick, giving me a dose of my own medicine so to speak. I feel like he doesn't really understand that I wasn't myself and was consumed by this mental illness. I didn't intend to hurt him. It wasn't on purpose. I didn't even know it was happening. That is probably the most frustrating thing...not having my depression be understood as a medical problem but as a character flaw. 

I have always loved him dearly. I feel so much better now except that I have this relationship issue looming over my head on top of everything else. He isn't ready to move forward and doesn't really know if that'll ever happen. It's been 2 months. I know I still have lots of work to do and but it's hard to do it all by myself. 

Sorry to be so long winded. I just need a male perspective. How did you deal with your wife's depression? Did she push you away to the point that you lost your love for her? Were you able to see her pushing away as a symptom of her depression rather than something she could control? Could you forgive her for this behavior? What did it take to fall back in love with her or didn't you? 

I'm trying to be patient. I am trying to get better despite his behavior toward me. I'm devastated at the thought of losing him forever. Completely and untterly devastated! I feel guilty. I have taken responsibility for hurting him. Apologized. I am trying to remain strong but I am hurt too, and frustrated, by his inability to understand why I was behaving this way and why I was so sad. Can someone please explain this to me? Am I asking too much to soon? 

Thanks for listening and any feedback would be appreciated.


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## NotEZ (Sep 23, 2012)

Sweetie, I have been EXACTLY where you are and not all that long ago. I too had had mild depression most of my life. I am 30 and my H and I have been together 16 years with 2 kids 11 and 4. 

Things got really bad for me a few years ago. First, my husband has a life long chronic illness that has gotten progressively worse since after our first daughters birth. In October 2010, when our youngest was about 9 months old, he was hospitalized for routine pain (he's treated with morphine and blood transfusions and usually out between 3-7 days later) except this time, on the 3rd day he was there, he went into complete kidney failure. There is one hell of a bad story behind this whole incident, but I won't go into that again... you'll find it around here somewhere. Anyways, to make a long story short, he was released from hospital just over a month from the time he went in, with dialysis now added to our daily routine.

I tried to be supportive of him, but he didn't want to talk about it. He is like that. He thinks he can deal with it all, doesn't want to "burden" anyone with his illness, etc. Which works for him but not really for me since his life is my life too. Anyways, the next year was quite chaotic as we got into our new routine.. they also changed his type of dialysis 3 times... first was in hospital 3x a week, then they showed him how to do it manually at home (having to be done every 4 hours) and then they finally got him a home dialysis machine that runs during the night. With each change was more learning and more appointments, etc. The problem was, he often wouldn't even tell me about them until after saying he didn't want me to have to miss work or he could handle it etc. We finally got into a routine and it was going good. The problem was I had started sinking deeper and deeper into a depression I wasn't aware I had. 

At first I was just slightly bothered by the fact I started feeling like the "caretaker" of sorts. There to help him with everything, arrange my schedule so he could get to his appoinments (or find someone to watch the kids. The problem too with his illness is when he needs to be hospitalized, it comes on in the snap of a finger... middle of the night or whenever, its to the hospital and I'm left at 3 am to figure out what to do with the kids the next morning so I can go to work (he is on permanent disability and watches the kids while I work). Now this is all stuff that comes with having a spouse that is sick and is something I freely chose. The problem was that, at the time, I wasn't really feeling the spouse part when it came to his illness as he chose to deal with it "internally" rather than to share it with me... if that makes sense.

Anyways, I went completely downhill from there. I don't know how, why or really when it really got to that point (and is kind of blurry even now). I would cry on my way to work for no reason at all. It never triggered me that something was wrong because at the time I felt like crying so it just happened. I would get home and go straight to my room to watch tv or do something on the computer. I pulled away completely from both my husband and my kids really. I didn't notice at the time how bad it was, it was just my life.

In summer of 2012, my Husband had had enough. We got into an argument about something stupid and he just said "Im done". At that exact moment I though, and said, "good, then get out". He went to stay with a friend that night. In fact, I pretty much made him. He was still home a couple hours after the argument and I laughed and said "I thought you were leaving" (not in a nice way). He finally came back about a week later... but only to the house, not to me. I had thought the entire time that it was going to blow over, but it didn't. He was adamant that we were over and he moved into the spare room. Well, that snapped me out of it pretty quickly. I immediately made an appointment with the doctor and got on anti-depressants and started councilling. In the following weeks, I tried to explain it to him. Even went as far as printing off anything I could find about depression to try and make him understand that it was an "illness" and wasn't my fault. I just could not understand it. How he could hold it against me. How he could walk out on me because of my illness when I never once left over his, etc.

He said he would support me and he did try looking back. The problem was it was never enough or never the "right" support, because at the end of the day we weren't together and no matter what he did or said to help me, it was never "I want to be with you". I remember one night about a month or so after the start, being on the bathroom floor crying my eyes out. He came in and he held me and just kept saying "I'm sorry I didn't know, I'm so sorry". But we still weren't together. Finally I told him that if we aren't together, he just needs to leave and he said he would. It took about a month because he needed to find subsidized housing (disability does not provide much monthly income) but by october he moved into his new apartment with nothing but his clothes and his dialysis machine. He was still taking the bus to our house every morning to watch the kids, then would go home when I got back. He'd take them out for a couple hours during the weekend but couldn't have them sleepover because he literally had no furniture. Not a couch, a bed, a tv, anything. I went to his place once. It was the first time I had seen it and it was empty except for a ratty old chair in his bedroom that held his dialysis machine. I was so upset and I said "you really hate me so much that you would rather live like this than to be at home with me and the kids?". He just looked at me and said "I don't hate you, I will always love you. But you hurt me so bad that I would rather live like this than to risk that pain again".

Until that point, I had blamed him for leaving. It was not my fault, I could not help what was happening, it was an illness. But the pain for him was real whether it was intentional or not. It was that point that I finally and truly turned my councilling appointments into helping me. I thought thats what I had been doing but they were centered around the breakup of my marriage and not myself. Now this is not to say that my anger totally disappeared. It didn't, not even close. I was still upset, I was still mad at him... I was just aware of my part as well. I softened a little though. Even though it wasn't what I wanted, I found a friend looking to get rid of some furniture and arranged to have it dropped off at his place. I realized it was real whether I liked it or not so I might as well make it a place where the kids could stay with him. 

We still saw each other everyday, of course, because he was at my house watching the kids. We'd text quite a bit but nothing real serious. In December I decided to move in with my family for a while as I was still struggling a bit. My dad had been my biggest support through it all. He checked in on me every day, would spend hours on the phone with me... did everything he could. He understood because my mom has dealt with depression most of her life. That lasted a whole week because my mom can be really hard to deal with when your dealing with something. She has a habit of making it about her so her idea of support was how could he leave you after all I'VE done to support him, etc. I called my H and asked if I could drop the kids off for a couple nights while I went to stay with a friend. When I got there he told me I could stay as well if I wanted. I've never left.

Though we essentially moved in with him that night, we still weren't together. We did everything together and as a family, but at the end of the day, I'd sleep in the kids room and him in his. We lived like this for about 5 months and finally in May of last year, I had pretty much given up on us. I told him that I was going to find a new place and that I was going to move into my sisters until I could. I had been at my sisters for 2 days when I got a text from him that said "I don't think I tried hard enough to save our family. I would like to try again".

And we have now been back together for about a year. Its not easy though. We have talked a ton about all that has happened. There have been times that I feel myself falling down again, for no real reason and I tell him so we can deal with it. Just talking about it (even though there usually is no real thing that is causing it) helps. We also discuss things a lot more when it comes to his illness as that is a huge part of our lives and can be extremely overwhelming when we don't talk about it. 

So, to answer your question, it is possible to move on from something like this. But it will take time. Its not the answer you want, but he isn't likely to "get over it" or to come back anytime soon. The fact that depression is an illness does not erase the hurt that it causes for our loved ones. It took a long long time for my husbands heart to soften towards me again and it probably will for yours too.

You have to look at it from his perspective. He tried over and over to get through to you and you pushed him away. Now that he is leaving, you are trying to fix it. They read that as "my feelings didn't matter, my pain didn't matter but now that YOU are the one hurting you are going to fix it?". He sees you all of a sudden getting help now that he is leaving and he wonders, why couldn't she have done that 2 months ago, or 4 months ago, etc. And, at the end of the day, whether we feel like we could have or not... the choice to get help could have been made at any time. It just wasn't until it was too late. That, to me, is one of the worst things about depression. Only you can decide to fix it but a person with depression is unlikely to do it before they are pushed to it by something like this as depression in itself takes away your ability to care about yourself or anything else really. Its sad and its unfortunate but its the reality of the illness.

So, my advice to you is just to continue working towards getting better. As hard as it is, you have to put your entire focus on you and not on him. I can guarantee you he is not trying to "punish" you or "give you a taste of your own medicine". He is hurting too, he is in survival mode. He does not understand what you are going through just as YOU don't understand what he is going through. He can't snap his fingers and get over his hurt anymore than you can snap your fingers and magically be better. It doesn't work like that as much as I wish that it did. Despite the fact you didn't purposely hurt him, the fact remains that you did. I reacted and felt almost EXACTLY as you do now but you have to realize that it is doing more harm to your marriage than good. My husband and I have talked about that time quite a bit, especially when we first got back together. He was actually hurt by my attempts to make him see it was all the illness and not me. He said he did realize that but that his pain was real too and he saw my attempts to write it off as minimizing what he went through. He said their was zero acknowledgement of the fact that I had really truly hurt him and yet I expected him to come running back to be my support as soon as we found out it was "depression" and not just me being a b****. He said that while he was happy that I was getting help, he did not trust me with his heart. My trying to guilt him with the "illness" thing did the opposite as in his eyes it was a continuation of what he had been dealing with the entire time... his feelings not mattering. And I see his point (now). 

It is a hard hard thing to accept but "it wasn't my fault" is not going to save your marriage or you. The ONLY thing that is going to help is to focus on yourself and on getting better. The ONLY thing that is going to help your marriage is for him to "see" you getting better. It takes a long time to be vulnerable with someone who has hurt you. 

Anyways, I'm going to end this here as this post is horribly long. I check in all the time and am willing to help in anyway I can. Whether its to talk or to answer questions. I've been there. I know EXACTLY what you are going through and how hard it is. I KNOW.


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## frusdil (Sep 5, 2013)

NotEZ said:


> So, to answer your question, it is possible to move on from something like this. But it will take time. Its not the answer you want, but he isn't likely to "get over it" or to come back anytime soon. The fact that depression is an illness does not erase the hurt that it causes for our loved ones. It took a long long time for my husbands heart to soften towards me again and it probably will for yours too.


This is so true. Depression is often harder on those around the person who has it, than the person themselves.

My mum suffers from severe depression. She went through a very bad episode about 15 years ago. She said the most awful things to us, particularly my dad and youngest brother. Dad deserved a medal for not divorcing her. Their marriage was pushed to breaking point, it survived but it was different after that...a lot of simmering resentment under the surface. It was made worse by mum's refusal to ever apologise for the awful things she said. She wore (still does) the depression as a badge of honour and said she was mentally ill and therefore not responsible for her words or actions.

BS. Yes she is and was. My relationship with her was permanently damaged because of the things she did and said during this time. I could probably move past it if she apologised, but she won't. To this day, even after my dad died, I still cannot bring myself to hug or comfort her.


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## NotEZ (Sep 23, 2012)

frusdil said:


> This is so true. Depression is often harder on those around the person who has it, than the person themselves.
> 
> My mum suffers from severe depression. She went through a very bad episode about 15 years ago. She said the most awful things to us, particularly my dad and youngest brother. Dad deserved a medal for not divorcing her. Their marriage was pushed to breaking point, it survived but it was different after that...a lot of simmering resentment under the surface. It was made worse by mum's refusal to ever apologise for the awful things she said. She wore (still does) the depression as a badge of honour and said she was mentally ill and therefore not responsible for her words or actions.
> 
> BS. Yes she is and was. My relationship with her was permanently damaged because of the things she did and said during this time. I could probably move past it if she apologised, but she won't. To this day, even after my dad died, I still cannot bring myself to hug or comfort her.


My mom is like this too and has been my entire life. I wouldn't say she wears it as a badge of honor but she lives with it because its easier than fixing it. For her its "I've been on anti-depressants for years, they obviously aren't doing anything". No, but you have to do the work too. Anti-depressants aren't a cure. There is not a single "bad" thing I've done in my life that she doesn't remember. When she gets down, she doesn't just wallow in bed... she sits in bed and grabs her cell phone and starts texting us (my twin and I, our younger sister has never been included). Its starts with something random like "so are you going to register "enter kids name" in swimming lessons this spring or should I just go ahead and do it. I don't want your kids to miss out on something just because their mom is too lazy to do anything with them". Text back "already done mom"... She writes "Oh, well guess you are a better mom than me then. All I did was trust my kids that they weren't skipping school or when others told me they saw you where you weren't supposed to be. My fault, I must have done something wrong" and on and on it goes. My dad too has stuck by her. He says that she's always been that way. That he chose to marry her and that he loves her and will never leave her. He spends one heck of a lot of time outside with his animals, let me tell you.

She is fine for the most part, the problem is it is completely random. If she is tired, if something upset her, it just comes out of nowhere and she is just the meanest person. And somehow it always ends with her in tears saying no one loves her. But any other time, she is a wonderful mother, grandmother, wife and person. 

She is the reason that I feel so much guilt for my time above... I know EXACTLY what its like to be on the other end and I still repeated it with my own family. I have vowed to myself that I will never let it happen again. 

I am actually grateful to my husband for leaving me. Without that happening, I could have ended up like my mom. He gave me incentive when I couldn't find it within my self. I grew stronger and more aware during the year we were separated then I had ever been. We have been together since I was 15, much like my parents who were married at 18. My dad has always been by my moms side so she's never had to stand on her own two feet. She's always had him picking up the pieces for her. I always had my H too until I didn't. And when he was gone, I had no choice but to pick up my own pieces. And doing so made me stronger than ever and it made our family stronger (afterwards). 

To her credit, though, my mom has been trying for a while now. She used to turn to beer and thats when the texts started coming. After I started getting better, about February of last year, I cut her off completely after a texting episode. I didn't speak to her for over a month, which is huge in our family as I talk to one of my parents (by text at least) almost every day. My dad learned just for the purpose of texting us lol. Great man he is, though slow on technology... he's only 52  Anyways, she had another episode with my twin, this time in person where she (my mom) actually slapped my sister while she was holding her 2 year old son. I talked to my dad, who I could tell was just feeling hopeless (this happened while he was at work, heard about it hours later). Outside as usual, had no idea what to do. Was in tears because he will never leave mom and doesn't know how to deal with all of this etc... So I told him, I will deal with it. I called her Dr (the one that delivered me as well as my girls... not that that matters, I just think its cool) the next day and set up an in-patient treatment for her. Called my dad at work, said this is whats happening. And it did. She was only there for a week before leaving... However, she has only drank once since then (going on 16 months now). There have been 2 or 3 texting episodes since, the one time she did drink and the others saying she wants to drink "because of us". But that is an improvement. And in the last month I have received 2 texts saying, I'm losing it what do I do?" and I've been able to talk her down with no incident. It doesn't sound like much but its progress. She has never, in my life time anyways, asked for help. I'd like to think there is still hope. She's my mom, I love her. I also imagine that, having been on the other side as well, I have a little extra to give than most people who have had to deal with it.


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## NotEZ (Sep 23, 2012)

frusdil said:


> *Depression is often harder on those around the person who has it, than the person themselves.*


This part is not accurate, though, IMO. Someone who has not suffered from depression can not truly understand what it is like to go through it. Just as it is very difficult, if not impossible, for someone who's had depression to truly understand the impact and hurt it can cause for the people around them. Even myself, having spent a life time being the target for my moms depression yet still going through it myself and subjecting my own family to that, could not reconcile the two. 

Being subjected to a loved ones depression is one of the most heart breaking and damaging things a person can go through. And knowing its an illness does not change a thing, I know that. I've ended up in tears so many nights through out my life because of the things my mom has said. She has picked me to shreads time and time again. Her life was horrible because of me, everything in the world is my fault, I can't do anything right. It doesn't matter that I know its not her "true" feelings because every word is like a knife to the heart regardless. And the next day, she is great again and its all fine. And I go along with that because she's my mom and I love her and that part of her is sooo much better than the other one. I take it when I can get it.

I've been on the other side, where there is nothing but darkness. I can't even remember much of it. I remember general things, crying on my drive to work, which was a daily occurence. Same with going to work and immediately going to my room when I got home. I don't remember specific conversations or arguments I had with my husband, or things I said. Even when I look back right now, I can't remember anything about my kids during that period of time. Nothing. I can remember staying up all night because I didn't want to wake up in the morning. I often went to work on an hour or so of sleep because I didn't want day time to come. I remember thinking over and over again how easy it would be to just end it and not have to deal with life. I remember the drives in the morning, with tears in my eyes, thinking how easy it would be to just swerve in to the other lane. I remember the constant ache of my heart, the pit in my stomache, the feeling of drowning that I could never get rid of.. like I was carry a weight on my shoulders that threatened to crush me but just wouldn't fall no matter how hard I willed it too. I can remember all those things... but even remembering them and remembering the true and utter conviction with which I felt those things at that time... I still can't put myself in my own shoes right now. 

It is for that reason that I can say for certainty that anyone who would describe either "being depressed" or being the "loved one of a depressed person" as worse than the other... has never experienced both. They are two totally different things, neither of which can be truly understood by someone who has only experienced one or neither.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think depression is an excuse. I won't accept it from my mom and I quickly learned that I wouldn't get anywhere accepting it as one from myself. That does not make the illness itself any less debilitating for the sufferer. It truly takes away a persons ability to care, to function, and to live. It is not worse for one or the other, it is tragic for both.


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## homedepot (May 13, 2014)

He just needs time. He will realize that you got help and will begin to soften up.


Good Luck


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