Nothing Prepares You ...
Nothing prepares you for loving a person for who they are one day, only to have to learn to love them all over again for who they are not, the next.
Nothing prepares you for the unbearable idea of possibly loosing and grieving someone who is still alive, or the even more unbearable fear of wondering if they'll be alive when you come home from work today.
Nothing prepares you for the utter and complete surprise of mental illness; for the chaos it brings to your marriage, for the pain of watching a loved one suffer, for the nasty voices in your own head that tell you it was your fault, for the fear and uncertainty.
Maybe nothing prepares you but once you're in where you were never prepared to be, there might not be a way out, but there is a way to be there that isn't quite so hard. At least sometimes.
To sound cliche, welcome to your new normal.
I'm sharing my own journey with a much loved son who lives with a mental illness and while you may find somethings helpful, this is not a "how to" or a magic elixir; it's simply a story and you may take from it what you will, if you take anything at all.
So, about my child...you've probably heard this before. Straight A student who never had to study hard. Brilliant, with a well developed sense of justice and compassion, gifted athlete, terrific sense of humor and nothing to suggest a mental illness. Of course, things weren't perfect. As in every parent child relationship, there are power struggles and lessons to be learned and yes, I could have learned more from him myself. Definitely.
At 9 or 10, he began to have fits of rage and we chalked it up to pre-puberty, and gave him appropriate consequences accordingly. I hate the word appropriate now.
At 16 he began to loose interest in his sports and we chalked it up to normal teenage angst and of course, online gaming. I hate that we ever bought him a gaming system.
In grade 12 he went from straight A's to barely graduating and we chalked it up to boredom.
After graduation he enrolled in college and promptly dropped out after a couple of months and we chalked it up to uncertainty about his vocation and the need to take a break from learning.
He began to work retail but had a hard time keeping a job. Attempts to discuss these things with him, to encourage and or find his motivators were met with resistance and we chalked it up to depression. We made attempts to get him into counselling - career, life coaching, whatever... all to no avail.
He took to his room, and would not interact or engage. He talked about being depressed but said he was getting better and did not need counselling. Then during late 2011, early 2012 he did seem to get better. He suddenly got energetic, got a job, started hanging out with his friends again, and began talking positively about his future.
Then seemingly overnight it all changed. November 2012, his first mental health episode.
Nothing prepares you.
He refused psychiatric care and assessment, he refused counselling, and we soon discovered that because he was an adult, there was nothing we could do. We sought help from "the system" and even spent hours at the police station discussing our options, only to be told that unless he was a threat to himself or someone else, the best they could do was arrest him under the criminal code - for example, vandalism for punching the wall in his bedroom - take him to the hospital and hope that he was admitted to the psych ward for assessment. But, the police cautioned that 9 times out of 10, the hospital don't hold adults who talk there way out, and that the likely outcome would be not only a non-diagnosed mentally ill son, but an angry one with a criminal charge on his record.
For close to 2 years we had an adult male we did not know living in our house and at times were so tempted to just kick him out and change the locks. I hate admitting that, and completely understand families who give up after years of heroic measures. The stress is unbearable.
After several months of trying to figure it out on our own, we plugged into our local community mental health organization, took a 12 week course on strengthening families, read everything we could get our hands on, and began implementing our learning with new strategies...because obviously, the usual ones weren't working.
My husband and I set aside Saturday's as our sanctuary day. We took hikes, reconnected with one another and creation, sat in silence, and refused to talk about IT.
We began to practice stillness, and engaged in prayer together.
We began to implement ideas from a framework I'd developed for restorative circles and conflict transformation, and changed the conversation we were having. For example, our son lacked insight into his illness. From his perspective he was not sick, so why talk to him about being sick? We began to talk instead about his need for sleep, and eventually he agreed to see a doctor about his sleep disruption. That led to him agreeing to take a mild anti-depressant, sleep aid and anxiety meds, enough to stabilize him.
We changed the conversation about work, a future, and expectations for living in our house; we used his own tirades about our "stupid rules" to begin a conversation about how he might make up his own rules living in his own place, which led to buying a nice used RV and having him live in it, in a campground just 7 minutes away from us.
Things are far from perfect and we still have a long ways to go and we're learning to accept that. We accept that this is our new normal and that when we are in the heat of navigating and negotiating life with a loved one who has a mental health condition, we need SHADE, an acrostic for a Safe, Humble, Accepting, Discerning and Encouraging response:
Safe - suspend judgement, demands and expectations; create safe space if and when necessary. It was essential for us to create a safe space for both our son and ourselves, so supporting him while he lives in an RV with his dog has been one way we've done that
Humility - we don't have the answers, and must be teachable. We basically have to learn the relationship all over again and that takes humility. Loving a mentally ill person teaches us much about ourselves, our motives, intrinsic values, and yes, even our self-serving attitudes. It takes humility to own the fact that our loved one's mental health condition may not be our biggest problem; our attitude about it is.
Acceptance - you can't change this, so you might as well find ways to gain the serenity while in it. Acceptance is a grace, often requires more faith than fortitude, and entails unconditional acceptance of who your loved one is, not who you hope them to be one day when they get better. In fact, suspend ideas about them ever getting better because if their eventual wellness is the hook for your continued love and engagement, then both are, I hate to say it, conditional.
And practice the grace of acceptance towards yourself too!
Discernment - we need wisdom and understanding for the unique problem solving that is inherent to mental illness. Discernment does not occur in an isolated vacuum, it occurs in community, in stillness, and yes, in letting go. We go from impasse to insight when we stop focusing on the problem and struggling for solution. Sometimes we just have to leave it alone, to be still and know. Then God speaks and we hear, because we're silent.
Encouragement - give and receive support from someone. If you don't have a tear wiper, mirror holder, prayer warrior and truth teller in your life, find one! We need the courage to keep going, to stick with it, to advocate, and yes, even let go if it has to come to that, and courage is found in the company of genuine friends. We also need to learn how to give courage to our mentally ill loved one, though I find myself thinking a lot these days that the most courageous person I know is the son who is living with this.
And because nothing prepares you, life well lived with a mentally ill loved one is lived as a learner, and well informed advocate, one day at a time.
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