FoName - dealing with a sib is its own special stress. If you managed to intervene and prevent the need for institutionalization by getting sib to treatment, good for you - and you deserve time to re-energize. Right now my sib is in the hospital, again, and calling to talk to me with the usual heart-wrenching statements ("I don't feel safe here taking a shower") combined with Cassandra Cruelty (the ability to unintentionally twist the knife in all of my emotional tender spots) and complete psychic break stream of consuiousness. I know that there are opportunities for rape or sexual manipulation when someone is hospitalized for mental illness, and some of the statements sib has made over the years lets me know that we have had very different life experiences. In a way that terrifies me and makes me respect the extent to which she is a survivor. But I also know that any current pressure to get her to shower is probably just to reduce her body oder. But it is a tangled web of guilt and denial and there-but-for-the-grace-of-god. And my parent was only damaged from growing up with mental illness, not suffering from it directly so the emotional drain I feel is probably significantly less than yours.
I also find myself retreating into comfortable books I've read a lot or childrens books that won't challenge me. I'm middle aged and reading Ann of Green Gables and Pern novels. And it is OK, because dealing with a sibling in a mood can leave you feeling raw and in need of time to rebuild protective coatings. So, take care of yourself. And let us know if you decide to have a sit-down with your acquaintances. They were tuned in enough to know that something was up, the question is whether having a post hoc discussion would benefit you or educate them in a useful way enough so that it would be worth the inevitable frustration of them not getting it.
#239 sara_k said "Speaking of guidance: I need help communicating with my bipolar spouse. He doesn't want to tell me stuff, he doesn't think he's bipolar and was until lately unmedicated, but some things I need to know for safety and financial planning etc. Should I disagree when he assigns motives to me that I don't have or says things happened which did not?"
Sara_K, oy, you are in a tough spot. Folks upthread had good advise on meds and therapist but that also requires you having access to those folks who are treating your husband. Please recognize that you might need more than your spouses treatment team, you also need to seriously think about the legal protections that you could put into place. Mental illness is a sliding scale and I've dealt with a sib who slides to the extreme during a breakdown, so my take on things might not be correct for your situation but here is what I have learned from my n of 1:
1. unmedicated OR medicated but the medication hasn't stabilized the person yet plus denial of mental illness in someone who already has a firm diagnosis can be a good warning sign of an episode. When someone is in that state, it is a really uphill battle to get them to stick to reality so the issue isn't just your communication with him. The issue is what to do when your attempts at communication may not be enough. Is it it information that you need from him? Or control of the finances? Or to make sure he isn't doing stupid shit that leaves you in debt? These are three different things that require different strategies - some require him to cooperate, some might require you to take legal action.
2. Be clear on what you need to know, and what you need to get done in order to protect yourself (and your children and your spouse) and set boundaries. Be willing to declare your loved one a danger to himself and others and get him hospitalized if that is necessary for safety.
3. You need good documentation that your spouse has a mental illness because that diagnosis is really, really useful if your spouse starts making things up and other people get confused and believe him and start seeing you as an estranged spouse acting in a manipulative way. If you are not already up to speed on this topic (And it sounds like you probably are), you need to get educated on your legal liabilities from his behavior and legal options with respect to power of attorney generally, for health (to have access to medical records), and financial conservatorship to be in charge of money issues. Even if you are in a really loving and stable marriage, you might want to start asking around for a good family law/divorce attorney who understands mental health issues so that you can get legal advice on these areas.
4. You will need to have at least two conversations with your spouse - the what do I do to get this information I need when he is crazy (which might involve letting him believe all sorts of crazy things as long as you find a way to extract the information you need) and the lets sit down and discuss now that you are under control. Things you say during previous conversations can be misremembered, twisted, or entirely forgotten. You will have to assess what you can get from your spouse when he is in an episode. You have to assess how rational your spouse will be when medicated and what strong-arm measures you might need to take during an episode will cause permanent damage to your relationship versus temporary damage. It is really hard to figure out how you ought to act since mental illness is such a sliding scale and what works for one person might not apply to another.
5. From the outside, an episode can seem like a funhouse mirror and it can really exaggerate self-centered and paranoid behavior. Will disagreeing with spouse be productive in extracting the information? I'd avoid "no, you are wrong about me" and try sideways conversation because you are dealing with someone who isn't in the most linear of mental spaces. You might need to start with a "remember this good time" story to try to get the spouse into a different mental space. Flattery is good. If one conversation fails, try again. Listen hard for patterns of paranoia. Try having the conversation WITH his therapist or a third party professional so that you have a witness to his behavior and support for your arguments. It helps if the third party is someone he respects.
I feel at a loss to provide really helpful advice, but I hope that some kernel of what I have said can be useful to you. Good luck, and remember to take care of yourself after any such conversation.
#59: Really? Good to hear a different perspective. At least for me the Tolstoy quote rings true because it expresses what I feel when looking from the outside into a happy family. There might be lots of different flavors of happiness but looking INTO a happy family from the outside evokes a feeling of isolation and deviation from the norm.
#65 Sara_K – You and your kids – and your husband – have my best wishes. The most difficult and important thing when dealing with someone with mental illness, in my limited experience, is setting boundaries. And even when you KNOW that it is the illness talking, mean hurtful statements still sting and cut to the quick. And it can be very frustrating when the episode is over and the person with the illness doesn’t even remember doing such hurtful things. That is one thing that I’ve come to appreciate over the years – and talk to my sister about. People can have radically different memories of events or, especially when ill or medicated, absolutely no memory at all.
Mara at #62: good for you for having the courage to strike out on your own. And I’m sorry that you have to deal with the pain of your brother not being supportive when that is the one genetic relationship you think is worth salvaging. May he quickly come to his senses.
Arachne Jericho: Thank you for the courage to post your comment. I’ve been a lurker on Making Light for a long time, because I was too scared by the high level of conversation to jump in (uhm, does watching TV count as making something? What about if I am lousy at writing poems? What if I am completely unable to contemplate a situation where I’d need to decipher a message by pulling an old engineering text off my shelf?). But I felt I needed to say something on this thread because folks like me from lightly fractured families are conditioned to fake it and say everything is OK. That can crowd out the space for honest discussion. But talking about mental illness can be done in a clumsy way (because it can sound so “SHE has a problem, not me, no way, I’M the normal oneâ€). I hope that my comment wasn’t one of the ones that made you frustrated.
And AMEN to the comment about Christmas. Virtually every single time my sister has had an episode it has been in the stretch from October to January. Holiday time. I spent some time living in a few non-christian countries and it is such a deep and enjoyable relief to not have The Cult Of Happy Christmas shoved down one’s throat. I wish there was a TV channel, radio channel, and newspaper that I could read during October to January that would completely NOT go down the holiday rabbit hole.
No Tolstoy quote yet? (Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way)
Raising my cup to each person who has survived the trama of truly disfunctional families by turning away and creating their own families of choice. You have my respect.
I also want to raise a cup to honesty since there is so much pressure to pretend to be close and cover over all the cracks and fault lines -- and not talking about all of the thousands and thousands of ways and reasons for families to be different in unhappy ways.
Family trama and its emotional reverberations exists and in thousands of different forms. And even families that present themselves as happy and functional have fault lines and issues. This Making Light space is designed to be a safe space to talk disfunction so that means dropping the cover-up.
I try to be honest about one major fault line in my family: Mental illness. My sister has serious mental problems, at various times called bipolar and schizophrenia. My paternal grandma had something seriously wrong also. My grandma never got treatment (that I know of). My sister is firmly in the mental health system. And thank the flying spagetti monster for that government system. Because mentally ill people can target family when having episodes (I'm talking knife attacks and other types of physical violence here, people) and family interactions can make things worse. The lovely social workers and mental health professionals are the best most wonderful folks to deal with this type of illness precisely because of the lack of emotional relationship.
And, to be honest, people with mental illness NEED extra support because their families turn away from them to protect against the hurt from the mental illness personality and also because it takes courage to say in public that you are related to a "crazy person." Because discrimination exists against both the person with the mental illness and the family.
In my sisters spiritual quests she has belonged to many different religious organizations from Reformed Jewish (part of our family tradition) to Wicca to her current Anglican affiliation. And one stop along the way was Assemblies of God. And the talk from the far right that family and church will take care of problems so we dont need a well funded social welfare system? Bullshit. Ive never seen people run farther and faster than the Assemblies of God churchfolk confronted with my sister in the midst of a serious mental illness episode. Because a serous mental health episode ain't pretty and no one will be around the type of manipulative nasty behavior that mental illness can provoke if they are not paid professionals. Properly medicated, when the medication is working and all is stable in her life, my sister can be a sweet and thoughtful person -- a huge contrast to the "having an episode" personality.
Still waiting to see how the Anglicans will respond to a major episode (better, I suspect, but mostly because I get the sense that the Anglicans are in general more willing to leave mental health treatment to mental health professionals and be friendly at arms length).
This comment is wandering all over the place, but I have two points. The first is that not just parents but sibling behavior can have long reverberations. I don't have kids and the long shadow cast by my sister's mental illness is one huge reason (emotionally - the actual odds of having a kid with mental illness means that most kids wont have a problem, even coming from a family like mine with a history of mental illness but you still have to weigh those odds and determine if you are emotionally prepared for the knife attacks, both verbal and physical).
My second point: Anyone who has survived where one or more parents has treated or untreated mental illness? You have my deep respect because I have some slight insight on how hard it is. Another toast to all the folks who have to jump into parenting nieces and nephews or grandchildren when their relatives are not up to the job.
Final thought - I love the Dune card. Our family problems have been made 1000% better by humor and sending a family member a Dune-like family disfunctional card is IMO a sign of being healthy and functional.
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