🎧Rebuilding Your Relationships | Chapter 5
🎧 Listen to Sarah read this chapter above or on Spotify:
At my mother’s apartment, I knock. It seems presumptuous to use my key. We say hello and hug awkwardly. She still feels fragile. All I want is for her to be better, for both of us to be better.
Her most defining feature is her eyes. They always seem to be moist with compassion yet attentive to whatever she’s reading or whoever is speaking. The exhaustion in them, which was so pronounced when I moved out two months ago, has faded but isn’t entirely gone.
The apartment smells of her. I hang my coat in the closet, where all my coats used to hang. It looks barren.
By the time I moved out, my departure was long overdue. No matter how much those of us with mental illness might need social support, it’s unfair to ask one person to provide it. She spent five years hearing me talk about my diagnoses and medications and symptoms, accompanying me to the emergency room, and being on suicide watch. It’s not that I didn’t help her during the years I lived in her spare room, but it was nothing compared to what she did for me.
The families have it the hardest.
We sit in the living room. As she speaks, her voice shakes. As always, she looks put-together and dignified but fragile. While I was breaking down, I broke something in her.
On Sundays, she says, she goes to church, something she never did before. “It calms me.”
With each tremor in her voice, I want to tell her how sorry I am for the strain I put on her, but that will mean talking about my illness, and she’s said she doesn’t want to talk about it.
I want to tell her about my plan to recover from mental illness—a process Dr. R put in motion. A few weeks earlier, I’d had another suicidal episode. This one was different. The next morning, I knew either I was going to heal or end my life, and I decided to heal. That’s not to imply that we recover from mental illness simply by deciding to or that mental and emotional suffering is a choice. We don’t just “get over” psychosis or depression or anxiety or mania. Recovery isn’t a question of will; at the same time, it can’t happen if we don’t move toward it. I want to tell her all of this, but that would mean talking about my illness, too.
She says, “I need to be more positive. It just can’t be so negative all the time.”
My mother dabs her nose with a balled-up tissue. It will take a long time for the exhaustion in her eyes to fade completely.
*
I never thought talking about my psychiatric diagnoses and symptoms was being negative; my diagnoses were my life—they were me. For twenty-five years and through six different diagnoses, my world was filtered through them.
It seemed to me I was just “talking through” my diagnoses and issues. Venting. Isn’t venting a good thing?
Turns out no. Research shows that it doesn’t even make the venter feel better; it can make things worse. Venting alone stokes the flames of complaint and negativity, as does ruminating about the past. As Ethan Kross, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Michigan, explains that solutions and relief arise from conversations that offer support and perspective. (This is what a good therapist often offers but not in my case.) The goal isn’t just to spew but to talk to someone who will help you step back and see the big picture.
Even without venting, it’s hard not to be negative. Doing so doesn’t necessarily entail positivity and certainly not toxic positivity—that unsettling, social-media-esque obsession with perfect happiness. Positivity doesn’t even come into it; it’s enough to limit our negative thoughts and perceptions.
*
My father and I sit at our usual table in Starbucks. He blows on his ginger tea. I sip from a latte.
His face is round, his cheeks a little jowly. At seventy-eight, he’s in good shape and sharp. His yellow baseball hat reads Cape Cod. His head is slightly large. Or maybe that’s just how I see it because although brain size and head shape aren’t indicators of intelligence, he’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. The facts he knows (e.g., the mating habits of the Patagonian toothfish) and the depths with which he can analyze historical and current events astound me.
He takes a hesitant sip of his tea. He doesn’t ask about my treatment. Not asking doesn’t mean he doesn’t care; he just doesn’t know what to ask.
My parents responded to each of my diagnoses and crises differently. My mother was concerned, panicked, scared, and determined to help. My father chose a more sedate approach. Both approaches make sense. My mother was a school principal, so for her, intervention would have to lead to a solution. As a lawyer, my father kept waiting for a reasonable explanation for what was happening, and there never was one. The worried expression on my mother’s face was a veritable constant, as was the look of puzzlement on my father’s.
My family is the only reason I’m alive. After my mother couldn’t be on suicide watch anymore, my sister took over. At the time, my sister and I weren’t even close. The years I’d isolated myself didn’t exactly lead to strong relationships. Yet she took it upon herself to be responsible for my life, an act of heroism that many family members and friends undertake every day without the appreciation they deserve. My father and stepmother helped pay for my care, which is something so many others don’t have.
I sip my latte. Already, the caffeine is making my heart beat faster. My thoughts race. Nothing has caused them to do so—other than the caffeine. Racing thoughts are my default mode. For years, I’ve listened to audiobooks to try to drown them out. My mind is on repeat, a stream of self-criticism and worry: you were late, this isn’t going well, you need to leave, you can’t do this.
For years, my father and I didn’t talk very often; when we did, the conversation was short and strained. During my worst years—and there were many starting at age twelve—I made the mistake of clinging to my mother and pushing him away. Each time he and my stepmother tried to help me, I responded with silence, sullenness, resentment, and ingratitude. But he and I have found our way back and now meet for coffee every couple of weeks.
I want to tell him about trying to recover too, but I don’t know what to say. It would have been a lot easier to explain it to them—and to myself—if Dr. R had said the words mental health recovery. A quick Google search might have told me that recovery centers on three basic principles: improving health, living a self-directed life, and striving to reach our full potential. These may sound like self-help platitudes, but they’re revolutionary to someone who’s only seen themselves as limited, broken, and hopeless.
There are two types of recovery: clinical and personal. Clinical recovery was once the standard, but it’s tricky. It demands the absence of symptoms. The problem is that the “symptoms” of mental disorders are part of the human condition. Anxiety, depression, mania, rumination, obsessions, compulsions, even psychosis are ways we respond to the world. We’ll never be rid of them entirely.
Which is why the standard today is personal recovery. The reduction of symptoms often occurs, but it’s not the goal. Medication is negotiable. It’s about having agency in our treatment and treatment goals, focusing on our strengths rather than what’s wrong with us and our lives, addressing past traumas, developing resilience, designing a life we can and want to have, and functioning well in that life.
The ambient sounds of Sarah Vaughn and frothing milk drift around us. It’s so tempting to say that I’m going to heal and make it all up to him.
But will he believe me? Do I believe me? The door to the café opens, and a man enters, bringing frigid air.
If you haven’t already purchased access to Cured for $30—about the price of a hardcover book—you can do so here:
» Continue to Chapter 6.
Find resources for mental health recovery.
Enjoying ‘Cured’? Read the prequel, ‘Pathological’ (HarperCollins):
