Supporting Your Partner with Depression: A Guide for Couples
Learn to Navigate Depression Through Secure Connection
Depression is often seen as an individual issue, but as an Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist, I frequently witness how profoundly it affects both partners. The persistent feelings of emptiness, sadness, and worthlessness associated with depression can erode a couple’s emotional bond. The distance that results only deepens and reinforces these feelings over time. Couples in which one or both partners experience depression may find themselves feeling hopeless and caught in a cycle of disconnection and misunderstanding.
The good news is that it is possible to address depression within the relationship and create a more supportive, connected dynamic. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) offers a powerful framework for learning how to support a partner with depression while strengthening your bond. Read on to discover how you can apply EFT principles to improve your relationship.
Depression Through the Attachment Lens
Taking a relational view of depression is essential to understanding your partner’s experience and working toward healing together. EFT is rooted in attachment theory, which is based on the idea that all humans have core needs in relationships. When those needs go unmet, we often feel sadness, anxiety, shame, fear, and sometimes, depression.
When someone experiences a loss of secure connection, especially in childhood, insecure attachment can develop through repeated exposure to emotional pain. In response, people form protective strategies. These may include negative beliefs about the self - I’m inadequate, unworthy, unlovable - and about others - People are unsafe, scary, or can’t be trusted. Emotionally, they may cope by either suppressing their feelings or getting stuck in rumination. Vulnerability becomes too risky to attempt. Over time, this can lead to protest behaviors, withdrawal, and eventually despair.
This experience mirrors the internal world of someone living with depression. In fact, over 100 studies have shown that insecure attachment is associated with depressive symptoms and a greater vulnerability to mental health conditions like anxiety disorders and personality disorders.
From this perspective, depression can be understood as both a symptom and a driver of relational distress. In romantic relationships, depression often manifests as withdrawal, which creates disconnection and reduces emotional support from the non-depressed partner. This growing distance heightens distress and deepens depressive symptoms, creating a painful feedback loop.
Building a Secure Base
With an attachment-based understanding of depression, new opportunities for healing emerge within the relationship. By interrupting the cycle of depression, disconnection, and escalating distress, partners can begin to foster emotional safety and reconnection.
Here are three key skills to work on with your partner:
Reframe depression as protection not rejection: Withdrawal can be a way to self-protect. When your partner shuts down, it’s not necessarily to push you away, but because something has triggered fear or overwhelm. Try to see this as a signal, not a slight.
Become emotionally responsive: Tune in to your partner’s emotions and seek to understand where they’re coming from. Rather than trying to fix their feelings, focus on offering reassurance: I’m here, and you’re not alone.
Express needs vulnerably: Share how your partner’s depression impacts you without blame or shame. For example: When you withdraw, I feel sad because I miss you. Encourage your partner to open up about their feelings too, gently and without pressure. Vulnerable communication deepens connection.
Couples Counseling for Depression
Improving emotional connection and increasing compassion in your relationship can be powerful antidotes to the effects of depression. By learning how attachment insecurities contribute to emotional distress, and by actively working to strengthen your bond, you and your partner can begin to heal together.
If you find yourselves stuck, Colorado Therapy Collective is here to support you. Our Emotionally Focused Couples Therapists understand how hard it can be to break negative cycles and are ready to help you find a way forward. Schedule a free 20-minute consultation with our intake team to be matched with a therapist who’s right for you. You’ll also have the chance to ask any questions you may have.
Depression can feel isolating, but you don’t have to face it alone.
