family and your mental illness

I cut all communication off from every blood relation two years ago and it's been quite good for me, in the way that cutting off a poisoned water supply is good for a pond. things are a little on the dry side but some meager grass starts growing again. i'm aware of how lucky i am to be able to do this and have some basic support. the lds church was also in the mix in my situation. ultimately i can't see how anyone who is an active part of that organization and claims to care for me is not full of shit and undeserving of a relationship with me plain and simple. it's made things easier, on balance, to follow that truth. even if i feel somewhat brittle, alien and cast off. better than feeling constantly wounded. also i may not exactly be dealing with crippling mental illness though things have always felt a little off in that department, maybe borderline, not sure, enough for therapy to be benerally a good idea.

generally

My family is great. OK, wait, my mom's side of the family is great. My dad's side of the family, by which I mean "my dad" because everyone else is dead, is terrifying because he's miserable and broken and has wanted to be dead for probably decades now, and there's nothing I can do to help because he doesn't answer the phone, and I'm terrified that I'll wind up like him. For decades I felt guilty for not talking to him and it was only recently that I realized that he's been avoiding me way more than I've been avoiding him. But my mom is fabulous. She's always been there for me and while she knows better than to put up with my bullshit she is infinitely patient (or at least patient in a manner which asymptotically approaches infinity) and has never tried to make me not weird.

Family care systems are a crapshoot. A lot of people just wind up with codependency and I have friends whose problems are just being made so much worse because the relatives who are supposedly "caring for them" are broken in non-complementary ways. Unfortunately I feel like this is a problem with every care system I've seen.

My mother is great because she likely is who I got it from. She has the same paranoia and OCD-symptoms I have, the same tendency to freak out and follow "slippery slopes". She doesn't have the benefit of being medicated and seeing a therapist like me, but she has always been there for me about it. My brother doesn't talk to me about it, but he's been supportive, and even asked me what it was like before.

My dad, well....he's never been unsupportive about it, but he's not exactly a sympathetic figure. He'll yell at my mother when she's in the midst of a freakout and make it worse. Which makes me wonder how he would have treated me if mine was as bad as it is now when I still lived with him. I still remember finding an extremely stressed-out mother sobbing on the bathroom rug as my grandma had just spilled shit all over it and tried to hide it. My mom is a neat freak to almost unhealthy levels (OCD likely) but it wasn't about that - she was just really stressed out and it was the straw that broke the camels back.

I comforted her, and in a move I still regret, got dad to come do the same. He hugged her, and then immediately started SCREAMING at her "Will you SETTLE DOWN?", like that was going to help. I was pleading with him to stop and he wouldn't and she was crying even harder. Then he tore off into his room and left her there while I tried to comfort her again.

I confronted my dad, sobbing myself, saying I just wanted to keep us united, and he was dismissive, saying "I don't know how much longer I can take *this*" meaning my mother.

Pretty much since then (that was 11 years ago), I realized he was NOT the guy to talk to about these things. It actually makes me sad to consider the damage my dad has done to his relationship with me and my brother. We both love him, but have grown tired of his manipulative ways, his short temper, and his petty childishness.

This year has been horrible for me anxiety wise, but I took my therapist's advice and confronted my parents on their fiscal irresponsibility and how they've been leeching off of me for 15 years and I've enabled them by not saying "no". This followed a period where they asked me for more money, even after I'd pleaded with them not to move back to Florida unless they could afford it. They did absolutely no research on moving costs and assumed mom would get a job immediately after the move (despite it taking two months the prior time they moved out of state). So I finally stood up and said they were killing me, that I couldn't bear the burden anymore of feeling responsible for their well-being, that it was causing me to drink more and sleep less, and that stress was eating me alive.

My mother completely understood and we had a tearful heart to heart in which she acknowledged fault and apologized for it, and said it would not continue. My dad? A terse message about "I never meant to make you feel put out". I realized talking about it further with him would be pointless.

So when he did something else stupid a few weeks ago and begged for $500 during a particularly stressful week, I erupted at him twice. About how I couldn't believe he was asking for more money when he just borrowed some the month prior and still owed me so much from earlier int he year. He didn't care what it was doing to me, or that it was triggering my panic attacks to come back again. All he could say to me is "I've had a bad week too! How do you think I feel?". Meanwhile mom called me sobbing, afraid I'd never talk to them again.

so in a way my folks are partially responsible for my mental health issues, however mom has done her best to be sympathetic and understand what it's like, whereas Dad could give a shit (or at least, that's how it feels). I hate what he's done to our relationship. On my 32nd birthday, he called me that morning not to say happy birthday, but to ask me if I'd gotten his text asking for $100. That sums up our relationship now.

I think a number of people in my extended family suffer from varying degrees and types of mental illness, but no one acknowledges or discusses any of it (except in hushed, conspiratorial tones about so and so having "the depression" as if it's something completely foreign to the speaker). So I naturally never developed much of an ability to discuss it openly (in general but most pronouncedly among them). When I fell completely to pieces and wound up living with my mom for the better part of two years, there was never any real conversation about my mental state at the time. With respect to my immediate family, I think the avoidance stems largely from tiptoeing around my dad and my dad's undiagnosed BPD (just my own armchair analysis, there). I'm getting better at talking about this stuff with my gf, with the aid of therapy, but discussing any of it with my family feels like it's a million light years away from ever happening.

Branwell -- the part of your post about how your mother's response/feelings about your mental illness and viewing you as a "miniature version of herself" I think is a really important thing to realize/bring up, because I feel that is very common as well as potentially very difficult to deal with. I think it took my mom the better half of a decade to realize that my emotional distress would not be salved with "homemade toast with nice homemade jam and a cup of tea," the way hers were. Once she realized that I was not like her in that way, things have been a lot better. While my mother is a sympathetic person, she is very focused on helping in practical ways: food, money, money for expensive food ... at one point about 6 years ago, when things were really bad, she drove up and cleaned my kitchen, which in retrospect, did make me feel a lot better.

My mom is too out of it and consumed by her own shit at this point to really offer support. My dad tries on occasion (he was pretty great when I had a panic attack at their house) but the first time he ever found out my mom was on meds he flushed them and said no wife of his would see a shrink. sigh. Basically we just don't really talk about it unless required like the aforementioned panic attack. He is a lot better about my mom's MH now but that's only because it became impossible to ignore.