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The illness tends to separate two people in many ways, so the question always arises: What can I, the well partner, do when the symptoms start to push us apart? Depression changes the behavior of your partner, not the person as a whole. It’s a mark of recovery when a depressed person can see the harmful beliefs and behavior as symptomatic of the illness rather than who they are. We managed to stay together by looking at the specifics of the most hurtful things I was doing and coming up with ways to deal with them when I was getting in a bad way.

Writing a story, starting a business or taking on any project that you want to do can bring with it a fear that prompts resistance to getting it done. As he puts it in The War of Art, the goal of resistance is to kill: “the target is the epicenter of our being – our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on earth to give …” Resistance to accomplishing anything that is important to you is a central aspect of depression itself. Resistance is one of the tools of depression to take you out of life altogether, to take away the life force and turn it into a march toward dying. You don’t encounter resistance until you try to get free of depression and to resume your life.

A lot of people think of recovery from depression as an unending process of managing the symptoms. But I have always hoped that recovery is more than remission of symptoms

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy reminds me of the tense time I spent learning how to drive a car. Venturing onto a two-lane highway, I fixed my mind on the big worry – how to get where I wanted to go without crashing into anything along the way