As a young adult, my fiancée lost her mother to cancer and her brother to suicide shortly after. She struggled badly with her mental health prior to the loss of her mother and brother, but obviously losing 2/3 of her nuclear family members made things much worse.  

I have always struggled with anxiety and depression. As a child, I had a terrible home life. So many adverse childhood experiences. As an adult (now 26), I attended therapy for 1.5 years before feeling really great and thinking I could handle everything on my own. It’s been 2 years since then and I am recently struggling more than usual. 

One of the things that I’ve always loved about my fiancée is how supportive she is when I am struggling. I try to support her in the same way, but she would rather be left alone in hard times. Naturally, I’ve been coming home from work and dumping everything onto her. 

She reached her breaking point the other night after a particularly hard day, when I cried while we were having dinner out. She screamed at me in the car, mocking me for being “depressed”. She compared her life to mine and screamed “what the fuck do you have to be sad about?!?!” To anyone who doesn’t know me well, it might seem like my life is awesome - great job, great income, nice home.  She implied that people who work with me must think that I am such a whiny bitch since I am always having a bad day.

She apologized the next day and acknowledged how it wasn’t right of her to downplay my mental health struggles like that. Today, I’m really struggling and it sucks because I feel like I can’t talk to her. I know that I shouldn’t rely on her so much for this, which is why I am writing here.

Has anyone her ever experienced something similar with their partner? How did you remedy things?