Trying to Save Marriage with Depressed Husband

[IWillSaveOurMarr]

I'm not an expert on long marriages, but I just wanted to say hello and let you know someone read your story and is thinking of you right now. Congrats on finding this site, you are exactly where you need to be.

Congrats also on your "grace under fire" by letting your husband go stay at the friends place. It must be incredibly difficult to see him every day, yet encouraging that he's staying in touch via text messages.

I am however, very familar with depression, and let me tell you, a two year long recovery is a heck of a long time. It doesn't sound like he's been getting therapy or medication back then or now though, and he needs it if he's having 2 year long episodes! It concerns me that he's interested in becoming a police officer because it makes me think he hasn't done any career counseling either, or why would he put off life saving depression treatment just for a potential career, especially at his age?

Seeing this depression again would be really hard for the kids, so maybe it's a good thing he's not staying at home 24/7.

It's good you are dealing with it differently, because you're right, I don't think the crying probably helped any last time. I also want to reassure you that when people (me) are depressed, we can be incredibly self centered and just focused on the minute to minute survival - so much so that we ignore people who we know want to help us. When you are super depressed, it can feel like a huge burden just to listen to your voicemail, even though you turned off the phone purposesly for a few hours to "Get some peace and think w/o interupption".

Everything took me longer and was harder than it should have been. Nothing felt good or fun to me anymore. All I could see was despair and darkness ahead of me in my world. This is not the way I feel now, of course, but I've been there recently enough (Feb/Mar this year) that I know what I'm talking about. During that time, I was "too tired" to even journal day to day, and could barely drag my butt out of bed. I ended up getting a new antidepressant that has helped tremendously, and I'm out of the dark woods now and can feel hope and potential for my future.

I don't plan on being on this medication forever, probably until either the D goes through and I'm surviving successfully on my own, or until a few months after we reconcile, when I get my husband back and we rebuild our marriage. It just helped lead me out of the dark, and doing my own work with my therapist and exercising and working on GAL will do the rest of the job and at some point I won't need the medication. Some people are really worried about having to stick to something for life, that's why I am explaining this to you. I will always be on one medication for depression because I need it due to chronic depression as well as especially bad bouts like I did in Feb/Mar that were severe enough to warrant additional medication/stronger self help measures, but I will ditch the "extra" medication once the crises of this D settles one way or another.

The point is, and you seem to have gotten this, is that this depression/MLC may not be about your marriage at all, but your husband needs help to recover. His recovery is much more important than him changing careers. It literally can be life and death to him, and will change your children for the better when they get their dad back, acting as he should be for them. For their sake, he's got to get some help.