Coming out, mental illness, and honesty

Hi
I feel compelled to write something here as i feel i kinda understand what your saying , so i will tell you my story and try and give advice , but feel free to tell me if i have the wrong end of stick.
I grew up in a house hold where we didnt talk about feelings at all , i learnt to cope by locking myself in bathrooms so people wouldmt see me cry and finding anyway possible to hurt myself. This was until two years ago when my mum commited suicide and then i think my dad realised we needed to talk about things and we do (well mostly) however we still dont talk about my sexuality or what he knows i went through as teenager as we as a family still have trouble showing are emotions as its the norm for us. My point is mayby your sexuality is a big thing to be opening up about and could u start with trying with something smaller ? I understand with my dad admitting that i have hurt myself would be admitting that made mistakes as parents by not teaching me how to cope with being hurt so that why he denies it. My mum denied my sexuality as somewhere she believed it was her fault could your family be thinking on similar grounds ? guilt can be a very reason for denial.

 

Reading this, I'm struck by a few different things:

1) How resilient you must be, to be functional and capable of forming healthy relationships with other people (from what you've told me about your relationships with your daughter, son-in-law, and girlfriend). Many people raised in these environments become a lot like your sister -- controlling people and everything that happens around them to preserve a fragile sense of self, meet unmet needs, etc, etc. You're different, and you keep reaching out to people. Somehow you didn't lose that basic faith in humanity. That's amazing strength.

2) I think I understand even better now your choice not to come out to your family. It's not emotionally safe for you to come out to them. You were never made to feel safe expressing any feelings or imperfections. Your sense of trust was eroded by being deprived of affection when you didn't act a certain way. You said, "I can't even imagine what it would be like to want them to know me." Of course not. They haven't earned it. And if I may overstep my bounds here, I'm going to say, they don't deserve it. Being chosen as someone to whom you come out is a privilege, especially when the person doing the coming out is an anxiety-ridden introvert like you and I. They didn't buy their ticket in the raffle of supportive family and friends. Which all leads me to ask you if you've ever read anything about Erikson's stages of psychosocial development. If not, google it. It may give you some thought-provoking stuff to consider.

3) How much do you know about emotional detachment from unhealthy family members? I'm still just learning, but it sounds like that might be something for you to look into too. Whether the affliction is alcoholism, mental illness, hoarding, gambling, diabetes...people have disorders whose origins may or may not be their fault. There is no sense in placing blame. No matter the disorder or the cause, however, we all have to accept responsibility for getting healthy and managing our symptoms, or else suffer the consequences of ignoring that responsibility. No one else can truly assume those responsibilities for us, and those who try get sucked into the disorders themselves. You living under this cloud of anxiety and tip-toeing around their comfort levels has sucked you into their disorders. They get to stuff their shit down and cover it, you get to live with the mental anguish for them. Emotionally detaching just means that you learn to live in spite of whether they get healthy or not. Easier said than done; believe me, I know. But not impossible. You don't stop loving them. You accept them with their flaws, accept that only they (not YOU) can fix them, and you love them as they are, albeit from a safer (emotional) distance.

4) The writer in me must note that your mom's home is a giant, living, breathing metaphor for her emotional baggage. She keeps stuffing, stuffing, stuffing it inside, and now it's bursting at the seams. Her hoard is her coping mechanism, and it can only work until the house caves in.

5) I feel truly sad for your experiences. You deserved more than a get well card after the suicide attempt. You obviously needed more before that or you wouldn't have gotten to that point. Lucky for you, you're not that 17 year old anymore. You can seek out in other people what your parents weren't capable of providing you. You can seek it out in yourself.

 

Coming out to those with mental illness can be especially tricky. My mom's side of the family has a lot of OCD. Your sister sounds much like my mom, right down to renting a place for Christmas and forcing everyone to come and pretend to enjoy it. I can see where my mom's OCD has negatively affected her life, and it makes me hesitant to come out to her. If she were better adjusted, I'd be less fearful of telling her. I'm to the point now that I'm done with the charade. I'm working up the courage to tell my parents this week. Consequences be damned...

At some point you have to do whats right for yourself. Other peoples diseases cannot become yours. It's not your job to enable them. OCD can be managed, but all to often they willfully choose not to manage it. I know that if my mom got therapy it would be less of an issue, and she even talks about going some time, but never does. Next thing you know she's just dumping it on everyone else again. I don't have to take that kind of stuff anymore, and neither do you.

Sorry, I didn't mean to make this about myself. Our family's sound like they have a lot in common. Yours is definitely more extreme. I know what kind of drama exists under the surface with family like that. I'm sorry that you had to go through what you did earlier in your life. I'm glad that you're doing better though. There's no time like the present to keep moving forward.

 

Both of my parents came from families that were very closed about things. My mother was sexually abused by her father and suspects other siblings were as well, and she got disowned for telling. About the only person who was really there for her as a kid, her mother, died of cancer when she was 20.

My father grew up with a physically abusive father, an emotionally abusive mother, and an older brother who we suspect was a psychopath (which is a neurobiological problem making them incapable of understanding right from wrong). Even as a young boy, my uncle got into fights constantly and couldn't stay out of trouble, and his mother coped by getting his older sister to keep him out of trouble. When my father was old enough, he too was expected to keep his 9 years old brother out of trouble. Which mostly meant bailing him out when he got into trouble, and never complaining about the horrible abusive things he did to you. When one of my uncle's kids told my father she was being sexually abused, my father finally broke the family rule and got his brother into trouble by reporting this to the police. He was disowned for this, had the two older cousins in kinship foster care with him, they were extremely disturbed and very stressful to parent, and they both independently decided to sexually abuse me. (I was 1-5 years old while they lived with us.) Then my parents realized I was in danger, got them out of our home, and set about helping me to recover.

So we are extremely open about emotional issues. All of us struggle with depression (even my younger brother, because he got bullied at school) and we all know the way to deal with feelings is to talk and listen. We all show our support for each other, and I feel so lucky to have the parents I do because their approach to things enabled them to handle having an autistic child without knowing about autism. (I wasn't diagnosed until I was 15, but my parents listened and respected me enough that they'd mostly figured me out without a diagnosis.) It also enabled me to survive the sexual abuse as well as all the bullying I suffered in school.

So, looking at my parents, I say there's hope for you. You can find the right person and build a new family that supports you and cares about you.

 

Your situation growing up sounds similar to mine, right down to the "committee" of mom and sister dictating what should and should not be said in any given situation. (My sister is the favorite).

Ive always taken on the role of "truth speaker" where I know the truth about situations but keep it all inside so as not to offend anyone.

And yes, I really do think I took longer to come out because of this reason. I was trained from a very young age to learn to "appear" a certain way under all circumstances so as not to offend anyone, and to hide my true preferences about everything (including hobbies, etc). For example I am a very artistic person, that has always been a personal strength of mine, but it was belittled constantly by my parents because "artists dont make money". So I learned to be ashamed of my natural creativity.

Any opinion I had was invalid. For example, a couple of years ago when my brother had a child my mom was making all these "youre next" type comments to me. I said I didnt want children, and she said loudly in front of my (now ex) boyfriend's whole family "SAYS "TAPSILOG2012 hahahah", as though my opinion was ridiculous and didnt matter.

Im at the point in my life where I dont speak to any of them though. My self worth was so damaged by having to hide all kinds of abuse from my dad and many other forms of pain from them that I need a break.