When Depression is in your bed

(Depressed) Boy Meets (Depressed) Girl

• Trish Sanders, LCSW • Season 1 • Episode 7

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When I met Ben on Match.com, it was the early 2000s and online dating still carried warnings about meeting axe murderers. Both lonely in New York City, we connected over coffee that turned into a nine-hour adventure across the city. That meeting launched what I fondly call our "Summer of Love" – those magical first months where we experienced what Imago Relationship Therapists call "joyful aliveness."  The phase of Romantic Love in which we felt completely seen, valued, and understood by each other.

But when Ben started a high-stress tech job, our dynamic shifted dramatically overnight. The person who had been so present became consumed with work, which only caused my need for connection to intensify. We fell into classic relationship patterns – I became the pursuing "octopus" desperately reaching for connection, while he transformed into the withdrawing "turtle," retreating into his shell when overwhelmed. From a polyvagal perspective, I stayed locked in sympathetic "fix it" mode during conflicts, while he entered dorsal shutdown, finding safety in withdrawal.

What makes our story universal is how we represent what Imago Relationship Therapists call an "Imago match" – unconsciously choosing partners who embody both positive and negative characteristics of our early caregivers. On our very first date, we discovered I was a "cat person" and he was a "dog person" – which was seemingly trivial and yet actually symbolized fundamental differences that would both complement and challenge us through twenty years together. While those differences created painful disconnection at times, they also offered profound healing opportunities precisely because our partner triggered our deepest wounds.

The journey from romantic love to sustainable connection isn't straightforward, but understanding these patterns creates space for growth. If you recognize similar dynamics in your relationship, know that with conscious work, those moments of disconnection can decrease while connection expands. Take just one step today – any size, any direction – because movement toward healing is possible for everyone, even when depression is in your bed.

- If you are looking to take the first step towards improving your connection and communication with your partner, check out this FREE monthly webinar on "Becoming a Conscious Couple,".

- If you and your partner are ready to co-create the roadmap to the relationship of your dreams, join us for the next in-person "Getting the Love You Want" Weekend Couples Retreat!

For support in how to have deeper connections and better communication in the relationships that matter most in your life, follow the host, Trish Sanders on Instagram , Bluesky or LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the when Depression is in your Bed podcast. Today, I will share with you some of my love story, some of the things that led to my husband and I getting together and falling in love in the first place, as well as some of the things that contributed to it all falling apart. And, of course, I will share with you some of the lessons that we learned along the way. Let's get started. So, while I have been referencing little bits and pieces of my life over the last six episodes, I wanted to take today's episode just to be able to start to tell you a little bit more about what I call my love story, which is the story of how my husband, ben and I came together and fell in love and what our early relationship looked like, that sort of set the stage for me choosing to stay in a 20 year long and still going strong relationship. That has really been really hard most of the time. So I've also said before that I will be sharing about my story, and the story I'm about to share has to do with many, many other people, and I'm going to be very respectful of the fact that I have chosen to start this podcast and not everybody in my story has chosen to start their own podcast sharing their own personal lives and information. So I will give you a very intentionally vague view of some of the family history factors, childhood factors, that sort of set Ben and I up to be who we are and really be such a match for each other in this way, to be such of what I would call an Imago match and I'm an Imago relationship therapist and very soon, in one of the upcoming episodes, I will dive more into imago theory, which has been absolutely life-changing for me.

Speaker 1:

But for today, what an imago match means essentially is it's the person who has just the right collection of positive and negative characteristics that you experienced from your childhood. So essentially it's the good, the bad and everything in between of your early caregivers. For many of us that means mom and dad, but it can be any collection of parents or parental figures or important adults or even older siblings in your life that had an influence on who you were and who you saw yourself to be and eventually who you grew up to become. And so our Mago match is very special because this just right combination of characteristics in somebody else allows us to be essentially triggered in just the right ways so that we can actually come to conflicts that happen in our romantic partnership in a way that helps us heal and grow and finish the unfinished business of our childhood experience. Meaning that in our childhood all of us, even if you had the most loving, most well-intentioned parents, we were hurt in the context of relationship, because no parent or caregiver can be 100% exactly what we need them to be all of the time, and so we came away from certain experiences feeling hurt or disappointed or whatever we felt, and we take that into our adult life Again. I will pause here for the theory a little bit, but just to say that there are important pieces of my childhood and Ben's childhood experience that led us to be who we are today, but because they involve so many other people, I will not so publicly share them, but I will give you a little taste.

Speaker 1:

So for me, my parents were separated when I was about 16 years old and divorced a few years later and at the ripe old age of 19,. I was surprised by my parents' divorce. I hadn't seen it coming, although now, as an adult looking back, it's very clear what happened, but as I was making sense of it as a young adult, the way that I saw it was that my parents' function matched that's what I sort of called it back then kind of like the things they did well sort of complemented each other in certain ways and that's why they got together in the first place and that's what kept them together and they were together for over 20 years. But I came to see also as much as their function matched that what I called then their dysfunction matched, which meant to me that there were things about both of them that caused conflict and those conflicts either felt insurmountable or they didn't have the tools or the resources at the time, or perhaps from many years of trying, they didn't have the desire or just didn't make sense for them anymore to continue on and they ended up getting divorced. And that was a very difficult experience for me and that, combined with many other aspects of my childhood experience, sort of led me to a place in my dating life. You could sort of say that I was looking for love in all the wrong places and I did not have a history of very stellar relationships. I had a history of pretty rocky, very difficult relationships.

Speaker 1:

When I met Ben, we were both 24 years old. I had not been seriously dating for a little while, because of my past history actually and I decided to go on matchcom, which back then was so bizarre and so weird. And people were terrified that I was going to meet an axe murderer or something. And they said things like make sure you meet in public places and they would want me to tell them where we were meeting and what time, just in case I disappeared off the face of the earth. They knew where to tell the cops that I was at last.

Speaker 1:

But the reason I went on Matchcom is because at that time in my life I was living in Greenwich Village and I was going to graduate school for my Master's of Social Work and when I had come into the city I had really thought that I was going to really find my people. I thought, being in social work school, I was going to find these passionate people who wanted to change the world for the better, and I do think that those people existed in my school. I just think that I found that, being in graduate school, a lot of us had jobs and we had internships and we had really busy lives. And so for me, particularly as someone who lived with depression, while I'm not socially anxious meaning I don't feel anxiety in large groups of people the fear of being judged doesn't shut me down necessarily.

Speaker 1:

But connecting with people can sometimes be very difficult for me because I can be in that dorsal state that I've talked about through the lens of polyvagal theory, where I'm sort of hiding and it feels safer to kind of be in the background. Now, for people who know me, they find that to be actually quite hysterical, because I have a tendency to talk a lot. Making a podcast was not such a leap for me, but it depends what situations I'm in and who I'm with, and my ability to talk a lot does not always mean, as a matter of fact, it often doesn't translate to me being able to connect well. So sometimes I can be too talkative. That makes connection difficult, and other times I can be actually almost silent, which also makes connection really difficult.

Speaker 1:

So when I found myself in graduate school with a bunch of very busy people, I had a very hard time connecting with anybody and luckily, as I've mentioned before, I had cousins who lived in the area, so I was able to see them. But my friends who I had grown up with and had gone to college with. They didn't live too far, they lived just on the other side of the bridge in New Jersey but it just wasn't always easy or convenient for them to come into the city or for me to get back home and see them. So it's not that I was in complete and total isolation, but my day-to-day life was definitely lonelier than I expected it to be moving to the city, which I love New York City and I was raised in Queens and I feel very connected to the city, and so I was really expecting it to be a wonderful experience for me, and when I got there it really wasn't. So that's a little bit about where I was. When I decided to go on Matchcom, I was really looking for friends or anybody that I could just spend some time with, in addition to my cousins, who I luckily had available to me.

Speaker 1:

And so for Ben, I'm going to hold off on his childhood introduction, for when he actually comes on and can speak for himself, I think that it is just a more honoring way for him to tell his story than for me to tell his story for him. But just like all of us, he had his own childhood experiences, his own early experiences that shaped him and led him to New York City. He traveled in what I think is an interesting path to get to New York City because, whereas I was born in New York and led him to New York City, he traveled in what I think is an interesting path to get to New York City because, whereas I was born in New York and had moved to New Jersey in late elementary school and was very connected to New York I wasn't far from home by any stretch, but Ben actually was raised in Maryland and he had gone to school up in Boston and he had come to live in New York City because at the time he had come to New York for work opportunities, to work with certain people that he really wanted to work with. And actually by the time I met him he was already going through a career change. He'd been doing audio engineering for a few years and had had some success with it and had decided to shift gears because of the very hectic schedule and very unpredictable hours of work and he had shifted into IT. So I actually met him right at his shift in career. He had gone on Matchcom at that time for his own reasons, because his childhood friends did not live in New York City. His college friends did not live in New York City and the friends and colleagues he had in the music industry, although they were still there, they were still working the same unpredictable sort of crazy hours that came with that line of work, and so he was feeling lonely himself and of course also a long history of depression and his own, I'll call them maybe challenges with connection led him to choose to go on Matchcom as well so that he, as his profile said, could find cool people to do cool things with in New York City.

Speaker 1:

I wasn't on Matchcom for very long. I don't think either of us were on it for very long. I had gone on a couple of dates, I think maybe three or four dates, before meeting Ben. Actually they were only all first dates. They were perfectly fine, but they weren't people that I necessarily wanted to be friends with and they also weren't necessarily people that I wanted to date. So they all fizzled out pretty quickly. But then I met Ben and my relationship with him started off really strong right off the bat.

Speaker 1:

Back then, after moving off of the matchcom chat, we went to chatting on AOL Instant Messenger, if you remember for those of you who remember that, and I was in the end of my semester in school, so I had a lot of different papers to write. And he would message me and I would say I'm writing a paper and then he would message me at some other point. I'd be like I'm writing a paper and it kind of went on like this and at one point he said hey, you know, that must really be one amazing paper because you're working on it around the clock. And I thought that was really funny because I had many different papers that I was working on and I told him so. But he was very sweet because this spanned over several weeks and I kept trying to give the message like I do want to connect.

Speaker 1:

I'm just busy at the moment, which, by the way, is a huge theme in my life, even today. It's a major barrier that I have to connection in general and it's kind of something that I live with and the people who are in my life now and of course Ben, but I mean other people, friends and even family if they're in my life, they kind of, unfortunately, have to know or I imagine they have to know that I love them, even though I sometimes go dark, I get overwhelmed, I get busy, I'm trying to do a lot of things and I just have a very hard time managing my social connections in addition to the to do's in my life. So, anyhow, that's a whole other episode, another day, but it's been like that my entire life. So I was really grateful that, even though I kept saying, hey, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy, but I was also saying like, message me later or, you know, as soon as I'm done with my semester, like I'll be able to chat more. So he didn't take it personally and he hung in there for those several weeks and I just thought it was really sweet and he would just send me cute little funny messages and he wasn't pressuring, he wasn't gross, he wasn't sending me, you know, like sexually charged, unsolicited messages or anything like that. Like he was just really sweet and seemed really kind.

Speaker 1:

So after my semester was over, we decided to finally meet for the first time, and so we did. I will let Ben tell you his version of the story at some other time. Perhaps we have slightly different stories. He says that I was running very late and he was going to leave the first date. I don't recall running as late as he remembers. But that has also been a lifelong challenge for us, because I have a tendency to run just on time, which often makes me run a little bit behind schedule, and he's the kind of person that would rather be there three hours early than a minute late Very common relational challenge dynamic right there, by the way.

Speaker 1:

But I did show up and in our very first conversation we talked about how I was a cat person and he was a dog person, which was so interesting. It was a funny, silly conversation then, although true, but it really set the stage for our entire lives and our whole relationship and the idea of being an Imago match, that a lot of the time, imago matches have qualities that are very different, very opposing or very opposite, and so the fact I was a cat person, he was a dog person, shows up in many, many, many ways throughout the whole rest of our lives. But we enjoyed each other and we had a very nice time, and our coffee date actually turned into nine hours of hanging out together and we went to Washington Square Park and we went to Grand Central Station, because I told him I'd never been there before and he couldn't believe that I'd grown up in New York and I'd never been to Grand Central Station before. So we went there and we went to dinner eventually, and then I walked him to the subway to say goodnight and I can't say for certain, maybe we hugged, we might have just shook hands, but there was no goodnight kiss that I can tell you. And we started dating, the details of which maybe I'll share another time. But we did eventually start dating exclusively, and I've referred to this before.

Speaker 1:

But we had what I call the summer of love. We had met in May for the first time and because he was going through this career change he actually was finishing up his IT certification and I was taking some summer class, but it was a light caseload, and so we had this little window of time before he ended up starting his new IT job in September. So we had these few months where we really got to have this connected, almost no stress, no real world stresses going on in our life, and it was just beautiful and neither of us were depressed and neither of us were stressed, and I would say that we were just our authentic, true selves and we got to know each other and it was really delightful. I felt really important and I felt really special and he was way different than the guys I had previously dated and I was pretty all-in after what I call the summer of love.

Speaker 1:

And then, once he started his new job, which was for a very high stress startup company, things started to change pretty much overnight and so I started to see a different experience of Ben stressed out Ben and, through a polyvagal lens, you know, I got to see him in survival mode a lot more of the time. He was either in that fight or flight mode of sympathetic, when he was super busy with work and he would get up all hours of the night when they needed him to do whatever they needed him to do. You know, he was in IT, so he had things that went wrong or work he had to do in the middle of the night sometimes and he was either, you know, kind of like there's like fires everywhere and I have to put them out constantly, and so he was like super stressed and really overwhelmed with work but doing it and making it all happen and his energy was really being exhausted on that, or he would be depressed and shut down, particularly if we had had an argument or a conflict, usually about me feeling that I was now less important than his job. I had felt so important and so valued in that summer of love that when he started spending so much time at work I really felt very unimportant and very unloved. And so we really started to have this very challenging relationship, dynamic and in Imago Theory that I'll talk to you more about in an upcoming episode, I took on what we lovingly call the octopus role or the maximizer role of really reaching out, trying to talk and problem solve and, you know, address the issues.

Speaker 1:

And he took on in Imago what we lovingly call the turtle and he would withdraw and shut down. And there were so many nights when I was awake, crying, upset or maybe numbed out watching Law and Order, svu Special Victims Unit, which I used to watch a lot back then and he'd be in bed sleeping because he would just shut down after an argument and he would just go soundly to sleep. And I couldn't sleep because I was wound up. Now, from a polyvagal perspective, I was in a sympathetic state, a fight or flight response, a fixed response, like I have to fix this, I have to do something about this and he was in a dorsal response, which was I have more safety in shutting down and withdrawing than facing this thing that I don't know how to face. So we kind of stayed in that dynamic really for most of our lives.

Speaker 1:

Honestly, I mean, things got better and worse at certain points and we learned different things that were helpful a bit here and there along the way and we did absolutely get back to places where we were both in polyvagal terms I would say we were both in ventral, we were both in regulated states, we were feeling grounded, say. We were both in ventral, we were both in regulated states. We were feeling grounded, connected, safe, and my octopus tendencies, his turtle tendencies, would ease and he would stick his head out of his shell and my tentacles would relax and, you know, we would certainly be able to have little glimmers of that summer of love. And so I knew that we still had what we had had in the beginning, but we had it a teeny tiny amount of the time. There was a lot of very challenging times for us and again, we both had this really long history of depression and in our early days we both felt in a manga we call it joyful aliveness and that is such an excellent description of what we had during that early romantic love phase in our relationship, we had absolute joyful aliveness. We had this true connection. We both felt seen and heard and cared for and understood and important and worthy and secure and safe and it was really glorious. And when we lost that it was extremely painful.

Speaker 1:

In Imago we call that the power struggle, and we were really stuck in the power struggle a lot of the time. In Polyvagal we would say. We were dysregulated a lot of the time, a significant amount of the time, a huge amount of the time. Yet when we were able to get back to a place of regulation, back to a place of safety, back to a place of connection, it was as wonderful as it had always been. And so we really fluctuated between huge amounts of power struggle and dysregulation and rather small slivers of regulated, connected, pleasant, lovable, enjoyable, wonderful space up until the time we ended up getting engaged, which was five years into our relationship.

Speaker 1:

I definitely can talk more about and will talk more about what led to us separating. It feels like it makes more sense to have that part of the conversation with Ben, so maybe I will invite him. I mean, he's already been invited and is interested in joining the podcast, but maybe I will invite him specifically to talk about that part of the relationship as his introductory episode onto the podcast for his first co-host experience. But for now I will sort of pause on that place so that I can explore that further with Ben. But just to say that we were just like my parents Again, when I was 19, I used the words function and dysfunction.

Speaker 1:

I wouldn't use function and dysfunction anymore. Now I have a much deeper understanding of the unconscious forces that attract us in relationship and how the things that we most long for in our relationship are often the things that are hardest for our partner to give us. And that's because it's actually connected to our childhood unmet needs and it's also connected to, in a manga, what we call lost parts, which means that there are characteristics that our partner lost access to and what we need from them is usually a direct link to the parts that they kind of gave up or lost. I will talk more about that, but now I have a much more rich understanding of those dynamics, but it really was so very similar. The details were different, but it was very similar to my parents' experience and, I think, very similar to many people's experience in relationship that when we first meet somebody, there is usually this period of time in a manga we call it romantic love where we feel so complete, so whole, so seen, so in alignment, like this is my other half, this is my perfect person, person where have you been all my life.

Speaker 1:

And there's this really delicious, fun, exciting period where it feels like we could want for nothing, you know, like just being together is all we'll ever need and they have everything that we need and we have everything that they need and we're just two peas in a happy little pod and that's a really delightful time in relationship. And most people have some period of romantic love, we say in Imago that can last anywhere between two hours and 18 months. Generally, and I would say usually it lasts for probably three to six months in most relationships For Ben and I. I actually could go back. I have a journal from those very early days and I probably could pinpoint exactly when the power struggle hit in for us, but it was probably around the three or four month mark, I would guess.

Speaker 1:

And for many years I used to say to Ben that I love the real Ben and he would get really offended by that, which I thought it was a really lovely thing to tell somebody like I love the real you, but what I was really saying was, like this sort of person that I didn't know and didn't particularly like a lot of the time, quite honestly, was not the real Ben and he was like, well, this is who I am. Like what do you mean? Like I don't know what you're talking about. Like this is the real me, and now again, through a polyvagal lens, there's such beautiful language around like when Ben is regulated, he is. You know, of course, we're both imperfect humans, but he is just very much the person that I love being with. I really like him as a person. I think he's really wonderful and funny and intelligent and interesting and I just like being around him. I just like being with him, I love sharing our lives together.

Speaker 1:

However, when he's dysregulated, and sometimes that looks like that sympathetic, busy at work kind of chaotic, overwhelmed part which is challenging to be around, or that depressive experience of being shut down, collapsed. And again, I think that it feels most honoring to talk about some of Ben's depressive episodes with Ben present, so that I have full consent over what makes sense for him to say, because he'll be saying it not me, but the story I tell myself at this point in our lives is that I think that I could say this for both of us we have both grown a lot in our depression and our relationship to our depression and our relationship to each other, and we've learned a lot along the way and we are both in such a different place than we've ever been before and it's been such an incredibly rewarding journey. It's also been a very hard and long journey and if I had known 20 years ago the things that I know now, it still would have been challenging for sure, because healing and growth journeys are in fact, challenging at parts along the way, but I think that it would have been a shorter journey in a lot of places. I don't regret it, because I couldn't have known then what I know now, but what I can do is be able to share what I have learned with others, and that's why I'm here with you today. So I hope you enjoyed hearing just a little bit more about my love story with Ben, and I look forward to having Ben come on and co-host with me so I can share more with you about our relationship and I will continue to share my learnings and the pearls of wisdom that I have come across along my path, so that you, too, can grow and heal in a way that makes sense for you and your relationship, so that you can come to a place in your life that feels much, much better than those really hard struggling parts.

Speaker 1:

As our time comes to a close, I ask you to keep listening for just a few more moments, because I want to thank you for showing up today and I want to leave you with an invitation as you hit, stop and move back out into the world on your own unique wellness journey In order to move from where you are today to the place where you want to be. The path may seem long or unclear or unknown, and I want you to know that if that seems scary or daunting or downright terrifying or anything else, that is totally okay. Know that you do not have to create the whole way all at once. We don't travel a whole journey in one stride, and that is why my invitation to you today is to take a step, just one, any type, any size, in any direction. It can be an external step that can be observed or measured, or it could be a step you visualize, taking in your mind. It can be a step towards action, or towards rest, or connection, or self-care, or whatever step makes sense to you.

Speaker 1:

I invite you to take a step today, because getting to a place that feels better, more joyful, more connected than the place where you are today is possible for everyone, including you, and even when depression is in your bed. If today's episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you can be notified when each weekly episode gets released. I encourage you to leave a review and reach out to me on social media at trishsanderslcsw. Your feedback will help guide future episodes and I love hearing from you. Also, please share this podcast with anyone who you think may be interested or who may get something from what I have shared. Until the next time we connect, take care of yourself and take a step.