How does support behave? I have to credit my T with the wording. I like this wording a lot. He told me how love would behave in a certain situation.
My personal experience with support is that it is merely words. Expressions of caring, empty offerings lacking tangible, measurable acts.
My sisters tell me that they support me. They may communicate the sentiment that they love me and that they want to help me. But when I exhibit symptoms of my mental illness, they are nowhere to be found. They accuse me of shutting them out. They put forth no effort other than an occasional email. They take my symptoms personally, I guess.
What does support look like? I have no idea. When a person is in the throws of mental illness, and when that means isolating, negative thinking and voicing that negativity, hiding and sleeping, anger, anxiety and paranoid thinking, extreme pessimism, emotional lability…how does support behave?
My sisters and mother would use what I can only conclude to be tough love. The old “let her sit in her own shit” attitude, choosing to be present only when I’ve gotten over myself. They would never put themselves out there and grab my hand and drag me out of the house. Never. They could never listen to my negativity with the understanding that cognitive distortions are most likely driving the bus. They would desire to employ the swift kick in the ass, even when that swift kick could be the final blow to my being.
When I express vast insecurity and am in need of reassurance, they accuse me of “fishing for compliments.” How insulting, how invalidating. So they decide not to dignify my questions with a response. When they do that I feel like a complete fool. I then shut down. I then pretend that everything is OK if I have the energy to do so.
It seems to me that in my family, the idea of support is greater than the reality of support. I am unworthy of support when I am in the throws of an episode.
I’m sure that supporting a loved one challenged by depression or bipolar disorder is taxing. But then again, I wouldn’t know. My loved ones, as I said, run away the minute my illness takes over. My mother is a retired psych RN who worked in a state hospital for over 20 years. You would think that she would have some compassion for those with psychiatric illnesses. She was a good nurse, but that did not extend to life at home.
Mom worked with the sickest of the sick, before the atypical anti psychotics came out and before the powers that be decided to close the doors of psych facilities and put our mentally ill into the streets. Her patients did not achieve symptom control on the psychiatric medications available at the time. Her patients did not, as a rule, get discharged. I wonder what happened to them when the newer drugs came out?
Maybe that is what colored her way of not coping with my own mental illness. I’m not schizophrenic with severe, poorly controlled symptoms. Therefore I do not merit TLC.
At any rate, I honestly do not know how support behaves. I’ve read accounts of people who have been severely depressed and how their loved ones sat with them while they could not get out of bed, of people who would fix them meals, try to get them out of the house, bring them to the doctor, fill their meds for them, read to them, just be there…I have never had that experience.
Is that how support behaves?
