@GabrielsLamb I see what you are saying, and I see the difficulty from the other person’s point of view. Often, a depressed person says the opposite of what they mean, and how can a friend or partner of theirs understand this? That’s why I spend a lot of time here trying to explain.
I’ve been through it, of course, and I know what it’s like to say no one loves me and I’m worthless so you should just get rid of me when what I really want is to be held and made love to and told I am worth something enough times that I can believe I’m not being lied to.
People tell you nice things all the time just to be polite. You know that as well as I do. Polite isn’t good enough. I need to know I am truly loved, not just loved to placate me. I don’t want that. Rather die than have that.
The problem is, that we put up barriers in order to test people’s true love, and the more we put up barriers, the more people think we really mean it and the more they believe they don’t actually love us. This is the weird, upside down, inside out logic of the world of a depressed person. Sorting it out for someone who has never experienced it is almost impossible.
I definitely understand that it feels like manipulation and it is manipulation if you just see it as the depressed person trying to get you to love them, or to provide symbols of that love. However, it is also sincere. It is the only way most of us can think to try to find what we want, I guess. I mean, don’t you think we’d do it another way if we thought it would work better?
But it’s a trap. You need expressions of love. Yet you need honest expressions of love. Therefore people have to give them voluntarily. But they don’t volunteer. So you have to ask. But if you ask, you don’t know if they really mean it. So when they respond to your asking, you have to deny it to see if they persist. If they persist, then maybe they really mean it. If they just give up, then you know they didn’t mean it.
So what a depressed person needs is for the other person to persist and insist that they love despite all the times the depressed person denies it. But who is going to do that? Not many people. Most people will cut and run because the depressed person needs too much. I don’t blame them one bit. I don’t think I would have persisted before I knew what it was like. You have to be sure, inside yourself, that the depressed person is not seeing the world correctly if you are to keep on loving them despite all their efforts to push you away.
In any case, while I see the effect can easily be interpreted as manipulation, I don’t think that is fair. Manipulation has the connotation that they are doing something just to get over on someone else. I think depressed people are not trying to get over on someone else. I think they are trying to survive. I think their efforts are sincere and they don’t know what to do to get what they need. It’s not that they want a cushy life or to transfer all their responsibilities to others. They want some kind of proof of their value and that people care enough.
Of course, other people have lives and those lives are busy and they already have too much work, and so to take on the work of the depressed person is just too much. Like I say, I don’t blame anyone for seeing us as too needy or too insensitive or manipulative or lying or whatever anyone accuses us of. You have every right to take care of yourselves and to not submit yourself to this kind of manipulation.
All I can say is that I hope you don’t. I hope you can get enough of a glimmering of understanding and faith to believe that if you do give a lot, you will eventually be rewarded when the person gets better. You can be sure that the person will think unkindly of you, should they get better without you around, not that that should matter. We are quite used to people disappearing as soon as they find out what is wrong with us. That’s just the way it is. Mental illness has and I suspect always will have a huge stigma for people, which is why few are willing to admit to it. I know I’m not willing to admit to it anywhere where people actually know who I am.
I think you have to experience it in order to understand, but experiencing it does not ensure you will understand it the way I describe it. I know you see it differently, @GabrielsLamb, and please understand that I’m not trying to judge your view. I think I understand where it comes from and I think it is reasonable. Maybe you read my words and you think I’m all wrong. Maybe you read my words and they might remind you of something you felt or thought when you were depressed. Maybe your experience is just different. I have explained this many a time, and mostly people who have been or are depressed seem to identify with what I say, so I think my experience is fairly common, even if it is not your experience.
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