It’s been nearly a decade since my work as a sex writer took a turn into researching and then writing about how depression affects our sex lives, our romantic relationships, and ultimately all of our relationships. It’s also been more than double that amount of time since I started to navigate all of that in my own life. I’ve learned a lot in that time, but I still hesitate to put things forward as the absolute truth. After all, I’m not a doctor or a therapist. But even as just a very curious sex writer with a theater degree, there are some things I simply know as true. One of those things is that we do not talk enough about how much shame shapes the experience of depression and how much shame impacts our relationships. In fact, I think a lot of us don’t even realize the role that shame plays in these parts of our lives.
Coming from writing about sex, talking about shame wasn’t actually a huge pivot. After all, shame is a huge part of what keeps so many people from effectively learning about and talking about sex, and ultimately from having healthy, happy sex lives. So when I was researching my first book, The Monster Under the Bed: Sex, Depression, and the Conversations We Aren’t Having, I knew right away that a big part of why people were struggling so hard with addressing the impact of depression on their sex lives was that shame keeps us from talking about sex. The thing that took me longer to understand, even as somebody who has struggled with depression for years, was how much shame keeps us from acknowledging and sharing our experiences with depression at all —even with those closest to us.
It makes sense. We want to believe that the people who love us, especially our romantic partners, are seeing the absolute best versions of us. We hope that who they see is an elevated, amazing version of who we are, and that we would love that version of us if we saw them. So it’s really hard to get your head around the idea that to navigate depression together you have to acknowledge, out loud, that it is happening for you. After all, depression doesn’t tend to be anyone’s best version of themselves.
When I fall into a depressive episode, I always want to pretend that it’s not happening, handle it myself, and then emerge victorious so that I can later talk about how it happened. I want to leave people to say “oh my goodness I had no idea she was struggling so hard, it’s so impressive how she overcame that all on her own!” Spoiler alert: I’ve learned not to do this because it has never actually worked. What would happen instead is that I would struggle really hard and eventually start to resent my partners, who somehow “didn’t see” that I’m struggling (A lot of us are really good at not seeing the things we don’t want to be happening!) and they would start to resent me because I was behaving wildly out of character and they didn’t understand what my problem was. Then, once we were resenting each other, the relationship would really start to suffer.
While I got a bit better about this over the years, I didn’t really grasp completely until I was working on my second book, In It Together: Navigating Depression with Partners, Friends, and Family, and I found myself writing this passage:
“It is very tempting to not reach out when we are struggling because if we reach out, we have to acknowledge the depression and our current state and once we’ve done that, it becomes canon: it will always be part of our story, no matter how desperately we don’t want it to be.”
This one simple passage opened my eyes to how it wasn’t necessarily the depression that had been shaping my relationship with my family, friends, and partners over the years. Rather, it was the deep, dark pools of shame I felt about it. Turns out that sometimes you legitimately learn stuff as it comes out of you and onto the page! Much like understanding the role that shame plays in stifling our sex lives revolutionized my sex life and helped the launch of my career as a sex writer, understanding the role that shame plays in my mental health has been a complete game changer in my day-to-day life.
To navigate depression together we all need to be aware of the huge role shame and its good friend guilt can play in the situation. It can make it so hard to not just acknowledge depression, but to also resist the urge to run and hide from the people who love us because we might be full of shame about our lives in general or feeling guilty about the work we’re not doing or the sex we’re not having or the house we’re not cleaning or whatever. Recognizing that, calling it out by name, acknowledging it together, can be a huge forward in terms of maintaining relationship health and happiness in the face of depression.
In It Together is available from Amazon and Bookshop.
Read an excerpt from In It Together on handling feelings of guilt and shame when you’re depressed.