If someone stabs you with a knife, it hurts, you bleed, and you try to get away or stop the attack or fight back.  That's normal.  The pain, the blood, the attempt to not continue to be hurt--  those are all healthy responses to what happened.  When someone is abusive toward you, depression can be a normal, healthy response, and that can include the chemical changes that come with depression.  You are hurt.  The important part is to do whatever you can to not continue to be hurt.  If someone stabs you, it is the stabbing that is the sick behavior.  But if while being stabbed you shut down and pretend everything is fine, ignoring the blood on the floor, you put yourself at increasing risk.  If someone is abusive, that is sick behavior, and if the abuse continues, you are at increasing risk as well.  Think of yourself as this person that you have been entrusted to care for.  How can you care for this person?  How can you heal this person?  How can you reduce the risk this person lives with?  At first, doing ANYTHING is better than doing nothing.  As you go along, you will learn what you need to do.

For me, at first it was just reading and learning about abusive patterns.  That helped me recognize the pain I was feeling as pain.  Then I began to make short-term plans for avoiding the worst of the abuse.  That helped me become stronger.  Then (eventually) I graduated to leaving my abuser.  I had bouts of depression before I ever met him, and again after our separation and divorce and his remarriage.  His behavior wasn't the only reason for my depression.  Maybe the chemical depression kept me from being as aware of the danger signals as I might have been otherwise; I don't know.  I do know that when someone treats you disrespectfully, chemical depression can easily follow, especially if you have already been vulnerable to depression.  But no one, NO ONE deserves to be disrespected.  Every human being --THIS MEANS YOU!!!--deserves respect.  That person that you are responsible for, that person that others trust you to care for and nurture and keep safe and healthy, that person that you have been given to shape and to grow, that person that is your self --that person deserves respect from you and from everyone else, EVERYONE else, no exceptions.  I respect you as a fellow human being.  I hope you can find ways to show respect to that self-person, and to help that person (that person that is you) get out of any situation that is not safe --whether the danger is physical or emotional or spiritual.