TLDR: Reaching out for insights and support about coping with being in a family that knows exactly what to do when you’re having an episode, yet they are unsupportive and/or hostile when you have symptoms. How do you cope with that deep level of rejection from the people that you’re told to lean on? 

Even  though I know it’s irrational, it makes me feel unlovable and profoundly  f***** up. I know it’s not my fault, but my immediate family treats me as if it is. They talk about it like I had the ability to make choices—even when I know, and they know I’m theory, that I didn’t. They’ve shown necessary compassion to my older sister who has a near identical illness to mine, but the opposite for me. People talk about de-stigmatizing mental illness + increasing support for it, yet I’ve seen very little of it in my daily life.


Want to note:
1) I have a “chosen family” who I know loves me
2) I’ve been in therapy since 2014
3) I have brought this up to them my family and they aggressively deny it.
4) PLEASE for the love of Buddha don’t tell me what to do. You don’t know my whole story. Pls just share if you’ve experienced this and how *you* cope. 
6) i thoroughly work CBT and DBT,
and affirmations just don’t work for me 
7) I’m an atheist so please spare me God talk. 

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My experience: 
I wish I could say that my family couldn’t recognize my mania or accompanying psychosis, and therefore distanced themselves from me. I wish I could say that they didn’t know what to do. However, my parents have been in NAMI for 15+ years. My Dad literally runs one of their support groups. This is because my older sister has severe schizophrenia, which entered our lives in about 2000. The whole family loved and supported her unconditionally, despite the fact that she was violently psychotic and hostile. They got her care and gave her patience, have been by her side through several attempts and hospitalizations. They went to NAMI and explained that it was a physical illness, like cancer, and to have compassion and still reach out to her.

Cut to 2012, when I first started to experience mania, depression, and psychosis. My delusions were common ones, and my parents/family barely acknowledged that I was delusional. I was literally telling them that I was  “interpreting messages” from crows, and their response was anger and talking to me less and less. Not once did anyone suggest that I see a psychiatrist or therapist. It took 3 years and suicidal ideation to have *one* of my aunts care and suggest that I go to therapy.  

One of the things that hurts me most is that they knew it gets harder to treat the longer it’s around without meds. They knew it gets more and more emotionally torturous when left untreated. They knew this, yet everyone held me accountable for my mania—even when I expressed that I was having “panic attacks” daily and getting of 2-4 hours of sleep each night.

Maybe the most poignant example is that once, when my dad was driving me to high school, he told me that his worst fear was my sister becoming homeless because of her illness. Yet, I experienced homelessness for a month in 2013 because of mania, and when I told him the next month he just looked shocked, didn’t comment on it, and never brought it up again. I later asked to live with him when I had nowhere else to go, and he rejected the idea the first couple of times I ask. Mind you, my sister treated them “worse” than I ever did, and they were always warm and welcoming to her. 

I try to reassure myself with the facts, but it still hits a deep, primal wound.



Thoughts?