Living with Mental Illness: Part 2

Playing it On Loop

Last week, I started the conversation about living and coping with mental illness in the home. This week, I want to focus on the matter of living in the sense of existing and co-existing in the home environment. Mental illnesses, whether we’re talking congenital diseases, developmental disorders, or neuroses that ebb and flow in a person’s life, can make it hard for families because of the unhealthy cognitive and behavioral patterns that cause the sufferer of the illness to lose function. These very patterns are stressful to the loved ones supporting them because they are repetitive and manifest habitually in interactions taken together. They loop in the shared home environment making home less of a sanctuary for everyone.

 Yet there is one thing that I wouldn’t call “good” but I will call “useful” about patterns on loop, and that is that you can prepare your reaction. There’s a certain knowability if not predictability for which you can think about what to do, how to help, and how to ensure you are taking the best care of yourself and your loved one in a sustainable way. Having lived with (and loved through) many different kinds of disorders, anxiety and panic, personality, mood, you name it, I have worked on loop rejoinders from many different angles and I’ve found that what helps one person might be wrong for another. But I’ve also found that home can become more stable and nurturing, and less stressful and chaotic, when harmful loops are met with well-matched healing loops. 

Safety First

While the home environment is a physical space, the hardest part of mental illness both for sufferers and loved ones is the emotional toll it takes on us. For kids, in particular, it is difficult to avoid internalizing family members’ problems, patterns, and pain. Adults who know that a crisis can come at any time can feel like they are always worried, like they can never relax. Both kids and adults often feel a great deal of guilt and shame as well—feeling responsible for the condition or feeling bad for not helping enough, worrying what others are thinking, feeling scared of being judged.  

At the same time, there is a physical reality that is paramount to the emotional reality, and that concerns safety. I remember sitting on my dad’s lap while he was smoking crack with his buddies when I was about as young as my twins are now, feeling afraid of their faces as the drug washed over them and spun their emotions. I remember being terrified as a teen when crazed junkies would come knocking on our door, waking me up at some ungodly hour to get him to get high. I can still taste my fear from when, home from college for the holidays, he would leave me alone in that apartment house full of addicts so he could run the streets looking for a fix.

I routinely felt unsafe as a child and I have felt in abject danger several times as an adult. Now, as a parent, I realize that that is unacceptable. Safety must always come first. For a home environment to be a healthy environment, its inhabitants must be safe.

I have developed a few more coping strategies that have promoted stability and safety in my life. One is identifying a person to call when I’m afraid. Another is having a safe place to go. And finally, figuring out a safe place for my loved one where I can take them or they can be taken when they need to be watched or cared for beyond what family can do. I wish I knew these strategies when I was growing up, so even if you personally don’t need them, if you think you might know someone who does, then please pass them on!