When Someone You Love Seems Different During Antidepressant Withdrawal

There can be something particularly unsettling about looking at someone you know deeply and feeling that, somehow, you no longer quite recognise them.

They are still there. They look the same. They may still be going to work, making a cup of tea, walking the dog, answering messages or carrying on with some of the ordinary routines of life. And yet something feels different.

Perhaps they have become quieter or more distant. They may seem unusually irritable, impatient or easily overwhelmed. They may no longer want the contact they once welcomed, or seem unable to engage in conversations that would previously have been easy. Affection may have changed or disappeared. Plans may be cancelled. Messages may go unanswered. Things and people that once seemed to matter deeply to them may appear to have lost their significance.

Sometimes the change is dramatic. Sometimes it is almost impossible to describe. You simply know this person, and something has shifted.

When that happens during antidepressant withdrawal, it can leave the people around them with an extraordinarily difficult question: is this withdrawal, or is this who they are now?

There may be no immediate answer to that question. What can help, however, is understanding why the question arises at all, and why the explanations we instinctively create for another person's behaviour may not tell us the whole story.

What Change Can Look Like From the Outside

Antidepressant withdrawal is experienced by one person, but it rarely happens in isolation. Partners experience its impact. Parents notice changes in their adult children. Children may notice that a parent seems different. Brothers, sisters and friends can find themselves trying to understand why somebody who was once engaged and available has become distant, irritable or difficult to reach.

From the outside, what we see is behaviour. We see somebody leave the room. We hear the irritation in their voice. We notice that they have not replied to a message. We experience them cancelling again. We feel the absence of warmth or curiosity that once came naturally. We realise that conversations have become shorter, harder or more easily derailed, or that we have started carefully choosing what to say because almost anything seems capable of becoming too much.

What we cannot see is the experience behind that behaviour.

And because human beings find uncertainty difficult, when information is missing the mind tends to fill the gap. We try to make what we are seeing make sense.

That is often where misunderstanding begins.

What You See May Not Be What They Experience

One of the central ideas behind WITHDRAWN is that the same moment can look completely different depending on which side of it you are standing.

Someone who repeatedly declines invitations may appear to no longer want to see you, while from inside they may be struggling to tolerate conversation, stimulation or expectation. Someone who asks to be left alone may appear to be rejecting you, while solitude may simply feel like the only place where nothing more is being asked of them.

Someone who cannot reassure you may seem uncaring, while they may be unable to access the feelings or words that would allow them to give you the reassurance you need. Someone who becomes irritable when asked what appears to be a perfectly ordinary question may seem unreasonable, while that question may have arrived at a moment when their capacity to process one more thing was already exhausted.

None of this means that we can know what is happening inside another person simply because they are experiencing antidepressant withdrawal. Nor does it mean that withdrawal explains every reaction or behaviour.

It means something much simpler, and much more important: what we observe and what we decide it means are not necessarily the same thing.

The behaviour is real. The effect it has on us is real. But the interpretation we place upon it may be less certain.

The Interpretation Trap

When somebody we care about changes and cannot explain what is happening, interpretation can rush in to replace the missing information.

We may begin to believe that they no longer care, that they are being selfish, that they are angry with us, that we have done something wrong, or that they have become a completely different person. These conclusions can arrive with surprising certainty because uncertainty itself is uncomfortable. If we can explain the change, even painfully, at least we feel we understand what is happening.

The difficulty is that once we have created an explanation, we begin responding not only to what the other person is doing, but to what we believe their behaviour means.

If I believe your silence means that you no longer care about me, I may confront you about it. If I believe your need for space means that you are leaving, I may seek more reassurance. If I believe you are withdrawing because you no longer want me in your life, I may try harder to reach you. If I believe your irritability means that you are angry with me, I may become defensive.

Each response is understandable from where I am standing. Yet from the other side, every attempt to obtain reassurance, explanation or connection may feel like another demand at a time when demands are already difficult to tolerate.

A painful loop can develop. One person reaches harder because they feel somebody disappearing, while the other retreats further because being reached for has become too much. The increased distance then confirms the first person's fear, so they try again.

Neither person may intend to create the distance. Both may simply be responding to what the situation feels like from where they stand.

When Someone Says, “They're Not Themselves”

People often describe someone going through antidepressant withdrawal by saying that they are “not themselves”. Sometimes those words are an attempt to describe a very real and striking change.

If you have known somebody for many years, you have a history with them. You know something of how they usually respond to stress, affection, disagreement, difficulty and uncertainty. You know what tends to matter to them and how they generally relate to the people around them. When something changes significantly, your observation has value.

But there is an important difference between recognising that somebody seems different and deciding that we know which parts of their present experience are genuinely them and which are not.

From inside the experience, being repeatedly told “this isn't you” can feel profoundly invalidating. Whatever the person is experiencing is being experienced by them. Their anger feels like anger. Their disconnection feels like disconnection. Their need for space feels like a genuine need for space. If somebody responds by insisting that none of it is real because it is “just withdrawal”, they may feel even less understood.

We do not have to deny what we have noticed in order to respect what they are experiencing. Nor do we have to accept every current feeling or behaviour as evidence of a permanent change.

There is room between those two positions.

We can recognise that something appears different without claiming to know what that difference will ultimately mean.

Understanding Without Explaining Everything Away

Understanding antidepressant withdrawal should never require us to turn withdrawal into an explanation for everything.

A person remains a person while going through withdrawal. Relationships still have histories. Families still have patterns. People still disagree. Old hurts still exist, and new hurts can occur. A relationship that was struggling before withdrawal does not suddenly lose its history because withdrawal has entered the picture.

Something happening during withdrawal does not automatically mean that withdrawal caused it. Equally, behaviour that seems completely out of character does not have to be immediately accepted as evidence that this is simply who the person has become.

There is also an important distinction between understanding behaviour and denying its impact.

Somebody may have had very little capacity and still have hurt another person. They may have been struggling enormously, while somebody close to them was also struggling with the consequences of what was happening.

Both experiences can be true.

This matters because compassion becomes distorted when one person's experience has to disappear in order to make room for another's. WITHDRAWN is not about deciding whose experience matters more. It is about making enough room for both experiences to be seen.

Staying Connected When Connection Has Changed

When somebody we care about becomes distant, the instinct is often to move closer. We ask more questions. We try to begin the important conversation. We seek reassurance. We remind them of how things used to be. We try to solve what appears to be going wrong.

All of these responses make sense when we are frightened of losing somebody.

There may, however, be periods during antidepressant withdrawal when less is easier to receive than more. A shorter conversation may be more manageable than a long emotional discussion. A message that does not require an immediate answer may feel easier than a series of questions. Practical help may be easier to accept than repeated attempts to talk about feelings. Sitting alongside somebody without requiring conversation may sometimes offer more connection than trying to draw them into one.

It can also help to listen to what the person says they need rather than deciding what they ought to need.

Some people want company. Others desperately need solitude. Some want to talk about what is happening, while others cannot bear to talk about it at all. The same person may need different things at different times.

There is no perfect formula for loving somebody through antidepressant withdrawal because there is no single withdrawal experience.

Sometimes connection may need to become quieter.

Quieter does not necessarily mean absent.

When You Don't Know What to Believe

Perhaps one of the hardest things for the people around someone experiencing withdrawal is living without certainty.

You may want to know whether the person you knew is coming back. You may want to know whether they still feel the same way about you. You may want somebody to tell you that the changes you are seeing are temporary, that everything will return to exactly how it was, and that nothing happening now should be taken seriously.

Those are understandable things to want. They are also things that nobody can responsibly promise.

People change throughout life, with or without withdrawal. Relationships change too. Some things recover. Some things need repairing. Some experiences are understood very differently with the passing of time. There is no way to know with certainty what withdrawal will mean for one particular person or one particular relationship.

What may help is learning to distinguish between what you know and what you fear.

You may know that somebody is communicating less, while fearing that they no longer care. You may know that they are asking for space, while fearing that you will lose them. You may know that they seem emotionally different, while fearing that the change is permanent.

The fear is real and deserves to be acknowledged. But fear is not the same thing as knowing.

Sometimes the most difficult and most useful position is simply to recognise that something has changed, while accepting that you do not yet know what that change means.

You Matter Too

Understanding somebody else's antidepressant withdrawal does not require you to disappear.

You are allowed to be affected by what is happening. You are allowed to find it difficult. You may feel frightened, lonely, angry, confused, rejected or exhausted. You may grieve the ease that once existed between you, or feel deeply hurt by things that have happened during this period. You may need understanding and support of your own.

You are also allowed to have boundaries.

Understanding that somebody may have reduced capacity does not mean accepting cruelty, abuse or unsafe behaviour. Compassion does not require endless availability. Giving somebody space does not mean putting your own life indefinitely on hold.

There is an important difference between understanding somebody and abandoning yourself in order to understand them.

WITHDRAWN exists in the space between those two experiences.

The person going through withdrawal deserves to have an experience they may barely understand themselves met with curiosity rather than immediate judgement. The person standing beside them deserves acknowledgement that loving somebody through profound change can be confusing, frightening and painful too.

If someone you love seems different during antidepressant withdrawal, you do not have to decide today who they have become.

You can notice the change without defining it. You can take what is happening seriously without assuming that you already understand what it means. You can listen to what they tell you about their experience without pretending to know everything happening inside them. And you can protect your own wellbeing without turning their struggle into a moral failing.

The question may still remain: is this who they are now?

For a while, you may simply not know.

Sometimes understanding begins by allowing that uncertainty to remain open.