Hi all, apologies in advance as this is likely to run a little long. For those of you more inclined to write tldnr then I would simply say take a look here:
http://oxfordmindfulness.org/
If you are interested to know why I recommend them keep reading. I write this a little bit from the outside looking in. My wife suffers from depression and anxiety and has been treated with Citalopram for the last 3 years. We have two kids. My wife has always had quite pronounced peaks and troughs on her emotional scale and it is fair to say has a lot of demons from her childhood that have left her with major trust issues. Sadly when her mum passed about 5 years ago she went into her lowest trough and didn't come out.
As much as it pains me to say it, her mum was the last person on earth that my wife really believed loved her unconditionally and it broke her to lose that connection. The result though was a disaster for the family. My wife always had a short fuse and has really only one coping mechanism to deal with fear and sadness and it is to go on the attack. It became horribly predictable how any day would pan out as any small setback (something as simple as getting out the door to go to the shop 5 mins late) would get over analysed, blown out of all proportion and result in her delivering screaming and uncontrolled tirades of abuse.
I don't use the word abuse lightly either. By any reasonable definition of abuse I was living in an abusive relationship. The combination of crippling anxiety and childhood trust issues resulted in incredibly controlling behavior. All the money I earned (she didn't work) had to go into an account that she controlled, every penny spent had to be accounted for, my phone regularly checked, I provided passwords for email and social media accounts so she could monitor my activity there. Verbal abuse of the most aggressive and belittling that you can imagine and the occasional punch thrown (she is tiny she cannot actually hurt me with a punch and she never hit the kids, but the experience of being hit by someone you love and just waiting for it to be over so you can get out of the room is one I hope you are all spared).
Unfortunately the verbal tirades would on occasion be directed at my eldest son. He was 6 at the time this started and a good natured kid, not an angel, but not a terror either. The stuff he had to deal with was just not fair on him at all. Behavior that would be considered funny one day could make her snap on another and the unpredictable delivery of uncontrolled character assassination to a 6 year old left their relationship on the cusp of breaking down all together. He had no coping mechanism (who would at 6?) and relied entirely on me stepping in-between them and focusing her wrath on me. My son then stopped going to her for anything, I got all the questions about how stuff and life works and he ran to me if something broke or he got hurt. The problem was the more he turned away from her the angrier she got accusing me of turning her child against her. It was a downward spiral and it was hurting everyone.
I have no doubt that she loved us all. In the moments where the depression lifted enough she could see the damage she was doing and I firmly believed that if she had to chose to step infront of a truck to save any one of us she would do it. The problem was that it was beginning to get to a point where we would not actually have to be in danger for her to consider sacrificing herself for the greater good of the family. This behavior had been continuing for about 2 years by this point. You may wonder why I would hang around for two years in this environment, but I always thought that she would get better. I thought she was grieving and that she would readjust over time and I would get back to the person I married. What I didn't understand was that she was depressed and that without help she may never get better. It was only at the point where I was considering leaving to get the kids out of there (even she had agreed that if we were ever to split up that it would be better for us all for me to have the kids) that I started reading about abusive relationships.
I didn't have many friends left that I could talk about this with. My wife had pretty systematically driven them out of my life or made it impossible to maintain a reasonable relationship as I could not communicate freely with anyone. It just happened that the Guardian started running a series on abusive relationships and I was startled to find that I was in one. There are none so blind as those that will not see as they say. I realised that what I was experiencing was not a normal grieving process and my home life really very unhealthy. I should put a thank you in here to the Guardian, it is thanks to the thoughtful, well written, properly researched and socially aware quality journalism that I became educated in what was happening and how to take the next steps.
I read copiously, and found the links between abuse and mental illness. The more I read the more I understood of the sickness of depression and the more I recognised the symptoms. The reading gave me coping methods for dealing with my situation, it gave me more empathy and consideration for her and gave me the confidence that I could make a positive change and that I had the weight of medical opinion on my side. I was able to explain to my wife that she had an illness, one that so many of you in this thread have very eloquently described and that like a cold or virus that she should seek treatment.
Our local GP diagnosed her as suffering from depression and anxiety and immediately prescribed Citalopram and to seek out an NHS therapist. The drugs gave her some bad dreams at the start, but it did even her out. She would describe the effect as just feeling less. Her lows not as low her highs not as high, but also a feeling like she was not there, like she was watching her own life on TV, not really feeling it or participating in it. To me that is not really a solution it is the treatment of a symptom.
In my opinion NHS psychiatric therapy was pathetic. There is an article, again on the Guardian website that mirrors our experience (Titled "The NHS mental health 'service'? There isn't one"). It explains far better than I can the inadequacies. It was tough enough for my wife to leave the house never mind go through the exhausting process of starting from ground 0 with new person after new person, none of which seemed to know the details of any previous therapy session or any of her medical history. She quickly lost faith in the sessions and I can't blame her.
After almost 2 years on the Citalopram my wife heard about the mindfulness classes at Oxford University. By this time our lives had normalised a little bit. The worst excesses of my wife's behavior had the edge taken off them, I had taken back an acceptable amount of my independence and the family was just about working in our little unit. However my wife was in no way improving beyond what the drugs were doing for her. The Dr was not going to reduce to dose or begin to look at taking her off the drugs until the underlying problem was under control and frankly without the drugs the depression was clearly there ready to come seeping insidiously back in.
To be frank I thought that mindfulness sounded like hippy bullshit. However I did my due diligence and thanks largely to the fact that it is run as part of Oxford University my opinion eased. Oxford Uni is at the cutting edge of psychiatric treatment, as it is at the cutting edge of so much else, so even if it is hippy bullshit, it will be the very best hippy bullshit you can find. We paid to get my wife on the 8 week course. It cost £350. You can get referred to one through your GP, but there are a bunch of hoops to jump through and as I have previously mentioned we were thoroughly fed up with dealing with the NHS mental health service.
The funny thing is that it actually worked. The mindfulness people themselves will admit that it does not work for everyone and I think this is to be accepted. Mental health treatment is as individual as your finger print and what works for one will not necessarily work for another. However for my wife it began to make a difference before the course was even half over. After every session my wife would come home and probably spend longer than the session took explaining what she had learned and how it was effecting her. As she taught it to me I began to see how they were giving her the coping mechanisms to deal with her depression. They were teaching her how to identify when she was beginning to feel anxious and then once it is identified (no small feat I can tell you) how to organise her thought processes to prevent it from overcoming her.
She taught me about triggers. We all have triggers, the little things that generate an automatic response from you without having to engage thought. The flash of anger is someone changes lane without indicating or the frustration salt being in the wrong cupboard, the sort of thing that can impact on your mood in an instant way beyond the actual effect it has had on your life. Mindfulness teaches you to be in the moment. It really sounds like hippy bull as I write it, but the practical difference is that when you find the salt in the wrong cupboard you don't just turn around and yell because you are angry. Instead you recognize the salt being in the wrong place as a trigger, you recognize that this makes you angry, you accept the feeling and then you analyze the anger and have the coping mechanism to weigh the real impact on your life of finding the salt in the wrong place. On understanding that in the big scheme of things the salt being there is not really such a big deal you are able to act in a more proportionate way and gently inform the culprit that they put the salt in the wrong place. It sounds a bit trite in the example I have just given, but I'm sure you can get the idea. All that thought process happens in a flash in your head, but the output as a human being becomes one of calm correction rather than a burst of outrage.
This describes only a small subset of the tools and coping mechanisms that the course provides and I won't try and explain them all here. I heard it all second hand anyway so I am probably not doing it a fair service with my retelling. All I will say is that I saw it work on my wife. I could almost see the thought process going though her head as she tested out what she had learned in real life and I was so proud of her working so hard to implement it. We would even catch ourselves using triggers before we did them and share in a laugh as we see the other person bite their tongue on something as they realize the impact it might have.
I hope you can understand how important it is to say sharing in a laugh. I love to laugh, I even think I'm a pretty funny guy, but I had not shared one with my wife for years. I had pretty much stopped trying to make her laugh as I would get shot down as being stupid or flippant. This is tough for me as I am a real "Chandler" using humor as a defense mechanism. A couple of years of conversations being little more than making sure the bills are paid and the fridge full, punctuated by blazing rows can really grind you down. Sharing a laugh is a motherfunsting break through (I'm tearing up as I write this bit so I know it means some serious shit to me).
In short I'm beginning to get my wife back. I don't know if things will ever be the same as they once were, but I'm not sure that life works that way anyway. You can never cross the same river twice they say. Anyway, all we can do is work at making tomorrow better and mindfulness is the first thing that really helped us take a positive step in the right direction.
I'm not going to kid around, the course takes effort and there is homework (mostly meditation) to be done every day. You need to turn up and take part and it will be hard as it asks you to take a good hard look into some of the darker places of yourself. I'm so proud of my wife that she fought through all her demons, her anxiety and impulses to not do something and made it through the whole thing homework and all. Also I can only speak for the course run at Oxford University. I'm aware there are courses all over the place but they and they may use the same techniques, but I have my own trust issues with psychiatric care so I was only happy with going to the source.
I did warn you I may go long on this one and I'm pretty knackered myself from writing all this out. If you have any questions I'm happy to try and answer them. I understand the importance of having a safe place to ask questions and this thread is a really good example of just such a place. good luck to you all.
