My Personal Resiliency with a Parent with Mental Illness: A Story
As a junior in college last may I was tasked with writing a research paper I was passionate about for a class of mine. I decided to analyze data from research studies on children with parents who are diagnosed with mood disorders. As I formulated my ideas and turned them into sentences, and eventually wrote a non-biased analytic paper on adolescents with parents with mood disorders, I noticed something extremely interesting. The statistics I found, the resiliency factors I discussed, and struggles of day to day living was my own reality as an adolescent coping with my father’s mental illness. I found that I saw myself in the research, and was that same adolescent I described, often times scared and confused about what was happening to my father. My father was diagnosed with major depression, bipolar depression, borderline personality disorder, ADHD, and ADD. At the age of 14 I made the adult decision to cut contact and eliminate my relationship with my father due to his destructive nature.
Often times prior to this, I was visiting my father and he was always disoriented, disheveled, and carrying around mementos such as pictures constantly in a rolling bag. My mother was extremely concerned, especially with the nature in which he kept his house. His house was in an undesirable state covered in dog poop from our dogs, papers and pictures everywhere, and an unstable and unsafe place for an adolescent to sleep and spend time at. Regardless, my mother allowed me to spend time with my father in the earlier years, because she knew the unconditional love I had for him. In the end, it came to a point where my relationship with my father was detrimental to my development, emotionally, and I had to cease communication with him.
These detrimental experiences include themes that are mentioned in my research analysis such as, parental-child role reversals, being careful and scared not to trigger an episode, and carrying an emotional responsibility that is far beyond my years. My mother would attempt to explain my father’s manic episodes in a sense that I would be able to understand. She would explain it as a rollercoaster, starting at the bottom (his mad and upset emotions) to the top of the rollercoaster (feeling happy again.) Such experiences also included traumatic events such as him screaming at my mother because she had hired a babysitter when he was available, (my parents divorced when I was four years old and shared custody), starting a physical fight with another parent at the hockey rink in which my brother played, and I believe the worst of all to happen is a physical suicidal threat to me over the phone and email starting at the age of 16.
During my sophomore year of high school my father won a court case forcing me to attend reunification therapy. I had not seen my father in two years at this point, and had a private session to express my fears of reunifying, my personal experiences, and questions about mental illness. At one point in time, I had questioned my genetic risk for having the same mental disorders as my father, and for quite some time had anxiety about it. I attended the first session with my father, and found that he was as always disheveled, and his conversation was never the future but rather like he always had a mirror looking back. He carried mementos piled high of happy memories, and literally cry about the past in therapy sessions. The way in which I explain the nature of my relationship at this point with my father was, “I would give an inch, and he’d take a mile.” Often times, we had boundaries and limits to communication, i.e. phone call once a week. This resulted in five phone calls, most of them being ignored by me, and brought up in therapy.
The reason the court ordered therapist eventually concluded and agreed that I could terminate the therapy was due to a traumatic experience where he physically threatened over the phone (when I was a junior in high school) a disturbingly descriptive way in which he would commit suicide if I did not force my brother to get on the phone with him. (my brother was three years older and at an age where the courts would not force unification therapy upon him)—We developed a plan to inform my father that we were ceasing the sessions without using words such as “permanently” and after a while, I found myself again, giving him a second chance at fixing things with me. Eventually there were more and more reasons that this ongoing therapy would not work out for me and eventually canceled permanently.
I found that through these experiences I have developed emotionally far beyond my years, and matured at a very young age. I was comforting my father in ways a child never should, trying my best to not hurt his feelings, and ultimately putting my father’s well-being in front of mine.
Looking back on these experiences I believe that I will always love my father, but will never again be ready to initiate a relationship due his emotionally abusive nature. What my therapist has taught me is that everyone has baggage, a situation that they have to deal with every day, and no matter what it is what you do with the experiences that you have is what is important. Fast forward almost five years, and I am accomplishing things I never thought I would. Attending college, majoring in education (like my father), and most fascinatingly writing an analytical research analysis on children of parents with mental illness. I have persisted to understand mental illness, especially guided by my therapist, and despite the genetic risk I have, I will do everything in my power to ensure my own personal successful in every aspect of my life. I found that by having support, and an understanding of mental illness described through my father’s emotions and actions, I was better equipped to understanding that it is not my fault, and I am not my father. I have learned through trials of therapy that I am not the answer to his happiness and medicine to his mental illness (which most of the time he believes I am). The therapy may have failed, and I had a felt bad disconnecting once again, but I needed to put my mental health before his need for a relationship with his daughter.
I am that same example of that resilient adolescent, thriving and succeeding in life because of the support I received from peers that I felt I could externalize my problems to, the psychoeducational background I had a luxury of because I was afforded many therapists throughout the years (art therapy in the earlier years), and support and guidance from extremely strong-willed mother. Looking back, I have been afforded knowledge through these preventive factors, and learned how to cope with my father and experiences alike, and focusing on the present I have realized my own very success over mental illness.
My own personal experience, and passion for research has led me to advocating for peer support programs in the United States. During the entirety of my adolescence I believed I was alone, the only child experiencing this, and if there were programs in place to help kids like me, I believe we could make a huge positive impact.
