When Depression is in your bed

Break the Cycle: Uncover Hidden Relationship Dynamics

• Trish Sanders, LCSW • Season 1 • Episode 23

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Discover the relationship dynamic that may be silently sabotaging your connection with your partner. In this eye-opening exploration, I reveal how well-intentioned efforts to help our partners often create a painful pattern where one person feels chronically disappointed while the other internalizes being the disappointment.

Drawing from my personal journey through marital separation and reconciliation, I share how this revelation transformed my approach to conflict. When my husband struggled with depression, I threw myself into "helping" – researching therapists, sharing resources, and offering constant suggestions. From the outside, I appeared to be the model supportive spouse. Yet beneath these actions lay an unconscious message: "there's something wrong with you that needs fixing." Every well-meaning suggestion reinforced his inadequacy and my position as the expert who knew better.

This pattern appears not just during mental health challenges but in everyday interactions. When we repeatedly express frustration with our partners, we unintentionally communicate that they're fundamentally flawed. No wonder they respond with defensiveness or shutdown! As Aboriginal activist Lilla Watson wisely noted: "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." This shift from a hierarchical helping relationship to true partnership changes everything.

Breaking free from this dynamic requires several crucial shifts: understanding nervous system regulation, separating events from the stories we create about them, focusing on our own contributions rather than our partner's shortcomings, and learning effective communication skills. When we move from trying to fix our partner to working together as equals, we create the foundation for genuine growth and lasting connection.

Join me next episode as I dive deeper into specific strategies for creating partnership rather than perpetuating the disappointed-disappointment cycle. Your relationship transformation awaits!

- 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. Are you ready to talk about a common relationship dynamic that is often underlying conflicts between partners and creates roadblocks to change? Would you like to better understand how you can shift, how you think about and address your frustrations with your partner so you can actually improve your relationship? If so, join me today as I talk about the disappointed and the disappointment in relationship. I'm your host, trish Sanders, and I am delighted that you are here. Let's get started. In the last few episodes, I've been talking about how partners can come together in partnership and work on their relationship and decide how to take steps together, instead of what often happens in relationship, which is that two partners often work independently and often unintentionally, against each other, and that really doesn't yield a very positive result. So I've been exploring how partners can attune to themselves and the relationship and choose how to move forward together so that they can actually be working as a team, and in the last episode, I touched on this incredibly significant relationship dynamic. That is absolutely one of the greatest learnings or greatest awarenesses that I developed after attending the Getting the Love you Want workshop that my husband and I attended for the first time when we were separated about 10 years ago, and it was an awareness that I took with me from my experience in the workshop that created a monumental shift in my relationship with my husband and how I understood the conflicts that we were experiencing and therefore was able to actually change how I approach the conflicts and make choices. That actually created a helpful conversation between the two of us and allowed for a whole different avenue of options to be open to us. So we were really able to take on our relationship challenges in a whole new way, and so I touched on this concept in the last episode and I immediately knew that I had to talk more about it.

Speaker 1:

In Imago Relationship Therapy, which is the approach that I use when working with partners in relationship, there is this idea of the disappointed and the disappointment, and basically what it means is that so oftentimes in a relationship, one person commonly feels disappointed. They're regularly frustrated, they're disappointed in how their relationship feels, what their partner is doing. They feel even possibly exasperated by the level of dissatisfaction that they have in the relationship, and then the other partner oftentimes ends up feeling like they are the disappointment because they seem to be the root cause of so many of their partner's frustrations, and this dynamic of one partner feeling like they are the disappointed and the other partner therefore becoming what feels like the disappointment is absolutely painful and it's something until you realize that it's present in your relationship. If it is, in fact, present in your relationship, you're really likely to remain stuck in a lot of the frustrations and the patterns of tension that you're experiencing with your partner. I'm going to talk about this through the framework of when you're really trying to help improve your relationship and that's what you really want to have happen. That's your intention. That could be what you're thinking about, or maybe it isn't exactly what you're thinking about. Maybe you're focused on the frustration, but underlying that frustration is really a desire to help and improve and make things feel better for you and your partner. So think through what our intentions are, our underlying intentions, and then connect that to the unintended messages that we often send by what we say and what we do when we're trying to help our relationship. But it actually ends up fueling this disappointed disappointment dynamic and it really makes progress very difficult.

Speaker 1:

So I'm going to share my experience and the two main ways that I'm going to talk about how this has shown up in my own relationship is one in the idea of when my husband was really suffering with pretty severe depressive episodes, how I addressed those and tried to help him. And then also, in a little bit more of a general sense, how, when I was trying to share my frustrations and, in fact, my disappointments with my husband, how I did that in a way that really created more problems for myself and the relationship rather than help them, even though, of course, I didn't realize any of that when I was initially doing it. And even today, when I have a very clear understanding of this dynamic, how I can still often fall into this sort of trap and this old dynamic and I try to catch myself as quickly as I can. That's the best I can really do, and I'll talk about some things that can be helpful for shifting this dynamic as well. So to begin just to think about that idea of our intention versus the unintended messages that we send when we're trying to help our partner or improve our relationship when your partner is depressed and they're stuck in that place, and going back about 10 years, 11, 12 years, my husband was, in fact, pretty frequently stuck in moderate to severe depressive episodes and it was really hard for all of us. It was hard for me, it was hard for him, it was hard for our very young son back then as well, in a whole different way that I won't touch on today. And so my intention was, of course, to help and make things better. And I'm a therapist after all and I've also lived with depression my whole life, so I had a ton of professional and personal experience that I thought would be really valuable to him. So my heart was in the right place, so to speak, and I've touched on this before in other episodes.

Speaker 1:

But I really put in a huge amount of effort into trying to support my husband through his depression. I would encourage him to go to therapy and I would help him look up therapists and look into our insurance coverage, and I had post-it notes on our bedroom mirror with all these positive affirmations and I bought books for him and shared articles with him. Back then I was not yet a certified Imago relationship therapist, but I knew of the foundational Imago book, which is the Getting the Love you Want book, which is theory and exercise for couples to be able to communicate differently and connect through their differences. So I owned that book back then and we read the book together and then when it came time to do the exercises and he struggled with an exercise or didn't have an answer to give at that moment, I jumped in saying, hey, these are your answers, these are the hurts you've experienced.

Speaker 1:

I wanted him to understand what was going on for him. I wanted him to understand his thoughts and his feelings differently. I was trying to be helpful. That was really what my conscious thought was, and I had a lot of feedback from other people in my life about how incredibly helpful I was and how I must be such a committed, loving wife doing anything and everything for my husband. So I had a lot of validation that what I was doing was helpful at the time. And it's not that what I was doing was awful in and of itself. It's not like those actions were bad actions, and I talked a little bit more about this piece of it in one of my previous episodes called when Helping your Partner Hurts you Both a nervous system approach to support, and I won't talk too much about nervous systems today, but if today's episode resonates with you, I would recommend you going and checking out that episode as well, because there's a huge nervous system component piece to that which, like I said, I'm not going to dive into too deeply today, but it's definitely present and very helpful to understand.

Speaker 1:

And back then I didn't understand the nervous system piece. So it was very easy for me to say I'm being helpful, I'm trying to do the best I can, and it really became a dynamic where I did start to experience a great deal of disappointment why isn't he helping himself? Why isn't he doing these things that he needs to do or should do, which I talk about a lot. Should is a judgment. I didn't see it that way then, or realize that judgment was creeping in, and so the more I was trying to help him feel better, the more I was actually unintentionally sending him messages that he was a letdown or that I knew better than him. I definitely was coming as the expert, the therapist, wife.

Speaker 1:

In trying to help him, I was communicating that there was something wrong with him and of course he was feeling like a disappointment. Of course he was feeling not good enough. Of course he was feeling like he was letting me down. Right, he didn't want to be depressed, any more than I didn't want him to be depressed. So it wasn't like he wasn't trying to feel better. He was just on his own individual journey and so much of how I was coming to him was really communicating how disappointed I was in him and how incapable I thought he was, which was not consciously what I thought at all.

Speaker 1:

And I actually think that my husband is an extraordinarily capable person, which in part is why I was coming to him saying, hey, do this, I know you can do it. But I wasn't really saying that piece so clearly, the I believe in you and I know that you can do this. Not that I never said it, but it really wasn't probably the top message that I was sending. It was more like do this, try this, this would help. I was in so many ways unintentionally telling him how I thought he should think and feel and be in this world. So no wonder none of that was helpful. And again, when I went to the workshop and I started to see my role in the nightmare, as we call it in Imago of our relationship, how I was contributing to these painful dynamics, it really created an immediate shift for me and it helped me a lot to respond back then specifically to his depression.

Speaker 1:

And the second example of how this shows up in relationship that I'll talk a bit about as well is just the idea that when you are trying to improve your relationship Depression aside when you're frustrated and you want your needs to be met and you want to be heard, and you're trying to communicate, and those are all really really important things to do in a relationship, so of course, they need to be done. However, our approach to doing them is often really not helpful, and again these unintended messages get sent when we're constantly talking to our partner about what's frustrating us and we're telling them that something is wrong with you. Our intention is to help things get better, and yet our approach often again contributes to this dynamic of you're disappointing me, you're not good enough, what's wrong with you? Why can't you do this better? Why don't you just change that?

Speaker 1:

Here's another thing that you have to work on, and it can really pile on pretty quickly, and so it really is not surprising that when I come with him in frustration and say we need to talk about this, he can respond with some exasperation or, oh you know, like what did I do now? Or what did I do wrong this time? And he might not actually say those things to me, but I have come to understand and realize that that is what's underlying. And I will also just say quickly here that this just came up for me in my relationship with my son, who's 13, just over the last couple of weeks, where we were having a conversation in the car about something that was going on with him and I was trying to be supportive, trying to be a mom, but again therapist mom was creeping in. I think I didn't realize it. Thankfully, he said to me mom, every time we get in the car, do we have to have a conversation like this? And I was like, oh right, like this probably isn't that most helpful approach. I realized it and I was able to pull back and I did subsequently talk to my son about this very concept that I am never trying to communicate, that he's a disappointment, although I realized that maybe I sometimes do exactly that and I definitely have done that and still continue to do that with my husband Not as often as I used to, but I absolutely can fall into that dynamic where it feels like a lot of frustrations are building and I can get stuck there sometimes.

Speaker 1:

I'm human, I'm imperfect and though I continue to learn and grow and expand my awareness. I still make mistakes and the best I can do is recognize them and try to make a repair Right. So if I'm hurting my husband or I'm sending this message that he's a disappointment, then it's my responsibility to repair that. And it doesn't mean that the frustration doesn't need to get addressed. It's just there's a way to address the frustration and I will touch on that in just a few minutes.

Speaker 1:

I want to go back to the idea that so many people in my life validated me how hard I was trying, how frustrating it was it was, and it was so easy for me to almost feel sorry for myself or just feel really justified and like how awful it was to be in this relationship and how hard it was to be in this relationship, which I've said many times, and it's true, my relationship has in fact been a very difficult relationship a lot of the time, but it's not because of my husband, it is because of us and our dysregulation and the stories that we have created around each other and our relationship and the stories that we brought into our relationship from our childhood experience and so much more. That has been hard and when we actually are able to get to a place of regulation and come together in partnership, which is what this whole podcast is about is how to come together with your partner so that you can co-create the relationship you want to have, no matter what you're experiencing if depression is present or anxiety or just life stress or whatever it is there is absolutely a way to come together and to make that happen. And so it was so easy for me to see his impact on me and of course, that makes sense. If we feel hurt, we're going to notice, ouch, that hurts. And it makes sense that we would want to tell somebody about that, like hey, you're hurting me, don't do that anymore, or whatever we want to say.

Speaker 1:

But it was harder for me to see his experience and when I started to realize how bad I was unintentionally making him feel and that's also complicated. You can't really make someone feel a certain way but, given who he is and his experiences, his interpretations of what I was doing and saying made complete and total sense and, as I talked about in the other episode that I mentioned earlier, there was a whole nervous system dynamic going on that I wasn't feeling safe and calm and grounded when I was helping him. I was in a mobilized fight, response like something bad is happening to me, so I have to do something about it. And so, of course, he was feeling attacked, right? Of course he was going to feel like I had a negative perspective about him because I was treating him in so many ways like the enemy, even though I consciously would have said that I was really trying to help and I was trying to help, but the implementation was really really off. And so, once I started to understand the dynamic, I started to have enormous compassion for my husband and not 100% of the time, in every and all moments, by the way but I started to really understand.

Speaker 1:

Gosh, it's been rough to be disappointed so frequently, but it must feel pretty awful to think that the person that you love, that you want to make happy, is so disappointed and you're the reason why they're disappointed so often. So that's a pretty horrible feeling and why people can get stuck in this dynamic. Because if someone feels like they're the disappointment all the time or so often, that's not really motivating for them to do anything about it, because there's a huge hopelessness about that, like, oh, no matter what I do, it's still not enough. No matter what I try, my partner is still frustrated and disappointed. No matter how many great things I do, there's always one thing that my partner says is wrong and so nobody can withstand that. It's not reasonable for anybody to be able to just say, okay, I'm going to keep trying, I'm going to keep trying and show up and put in effort because they're not feeling safe. So it makes sense that they would go into, in polyvagal terms, the dorsal shutdown, that freeze response, that collapse response. It looks like they're not trying at all, but yet they're hurting a great deal, and understanding what's really going on can start to really begin to shift the dynamic.

Speaker 1:

I want to share a quote by Lilla Watson that I think truly sums up how to approach relationship work, and she is not talking about one-to-one, intimate partner relationships. Lilla Watson is an activist and an educator, and she educates people about the Aboriginal knowledge and culture in Australia, and so what she's referring to is quite different. In truth, it's also a relationship, and Lilla Watson's quote is if you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. And when I heard that quote years ago, I actually loved it so much I made a poster of it to hang in my office because I think that it really just pulls so much together about what we're often doing that works against us in relationship and what to do instead.

Speaker 1:

And so if we're coming at our relationship as trying to help our partner and fix our partner even if it means we're trying to help them to feel better, to not be depressed, to be less anxious, or if we're trying to communicate our needs so that we feel better and our relationship feels better how we go about that is so vitally important, because if we're doing things that contribute to us validating ourselves or being validated by others in our life, yes, there are reasons why we're frustrated. It's not like that's not true. This is about how to think about it. So we don't keep hurting our partner by unintentionally sending these messages that we don't think they're good enough, or we don't think that they're trying hard enough, or that we know better than them, or that they don't care. There are so many messages that we end up sending by accident that really contribute to rupture and separation and disconnect, and if we do things that contribute to that, then we are absolutely not going to be able to get the relationship that feels connected and safe and loving and warm, and be able to work in partnership with our partner as we truly desire.

Speaker 1:

And so, really thinking about that, how can we come together because our our feeling better as individuals is connected and working together in a balanced partnership, not where one partner is taking the expert role and the other partner is then left with the not knowing, not good enough, disappointment role how we can do that to be able to create real shifts and changes in our relationship? It's really quite exciting and I'm sure I've said this before, but it's really how I feel. I am regularly amazed and inspired and in awe of the shifts that have occurred in my relationship with my husband, and we still have plenty of growth to do. Growth happens over a whole lifetime, but we have more and more of these moments where I'm like, hey, wow, we had that conversation differently. Remember years ago, when it would have been a total mess, right and so exciting. And this is one of the core shifts I think that are so important to make. So I will mention just a few things that you can actually do, new ways you might be able to come to your relationship that can support breaking down this disappointed disappointment dynamic, and I will expand on them in the next episode, so I'm just going to list them for now.

Speaker 1:

As I mentioned, my previous episode talks a bit more about this. But regulating your nervous system is vitally important and nervous system work might not sound like it resonates for people like, oh, nervous system, what does that mean? What does that have to do with anything? It really has to do with everything. So I really do invite you and encourage you to seek out information about nervous system regulation and how it impacts relationships. As I said, you can check out some previous episodes or you can look elsewhere. There's a lot of great information out there. But nervous system work is key in understanding what we actually need to do to shift our experience in a positive way. And again, I will talk more about this next time.

Speaker 1:

But staying out of our story is incredibly important because our brains like stories. We like to make meaning. So when things happen or our partner says something or does something or doesn't do something, we make up a story about why that is, and then we get all stuck in that story and we get frustrated and more angry and feel more justified because of these stories and these narratives that we make up. So again, I will talk about what that event means. But staying out of the story will help you in so many ways and it will open doors that you did not even know existed. And the third thing I will share is for you to focus on how you are contributing, or not contributing, to the relationship you want to have. You will get so much more mileage and be so much more empowered by thinking about what you're bringing to your relationship.

Speaker 1:

Believe me, I know I have focused on my husband and how he has shown up or not shown up in this relationship a huge amount of the time in the last 21 years, and I can tell you from all that experience it's never helpful. It's not helpful. There are ways to talk about my narratives and my stories, and certainly my frustrations and my needs. Of course, I'm not saying that there's not information that needs to be shared, but that brings me to my fourth point. How to talk about all of these things is a game changer. We must learn how to communicate effectively. It's not something we're born with. We're born with survival skills, not communication skills, and so we have to learn them, and a lot of the time, what we do in service of survival actually goes against communicating well in a way that supports relationship building. Anamaga Relationship Therapy is all about how to communicate effectively and really understand what's happening in your experience and being able to share that with your partner in a way that really leads to change. So if you want to hear more about that and the new ways that you can show up in your relationship that can create significant change for you so that your relationship feels better for you and your partner, join me again next week.

Speaker 1:

As our time comes to a close, I ask you to keep listening for just a few more moments, because I wanna 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.