Chapter Three: Family and Mental Illness
Chapter Three: Relationships and Mental Illness
The type of relationship I want to talk about is family relationships. I will discuss romantic relationships in the next segment of this series. Sadly, some of you may not have a relationship with your families, others may have had close family members pass away. I don’t like to just say a family can be anyone who chooses to stick together, but sometimes this is the truth, which I will get into further down.
One of the earliest relationships I remember was of me and my dad. I have memories going back to a very young age and the joy I had doing things with my dad like going to wash his car, him letting me steer when we were on a vacation in the mountains. I was only three or four years old, but life was really wonderful and I felt very loved.
I don’t really know what happened between us that caused us to end up at odds with each other, but it was a slow process. I will never forget being just six and my dad punching me in the side of the head so hard he knocked me down and I was proud of myself for not crying. The truth was, violence was a part of my life those 45-some years ago. If you acted up in school, you could be punished by being strapped. I was bullied by fellow students, and my brother pushed me around a lot. Plus, at the time, parents and even people who caught you doing something you shouldn’t, saw nothing wrong with spanking and slapping kids.
There were some really good times with my dad. He loved to take my brother and I fishing, we also had a sort of tradition that once a month he would drive my brother, sister, mom and I to downtown Edmonton and my sister and mom would go shopping and my brother and I would go with my dad to get a haircut. Then we would meet in the cafeteria in the basement of the old Hudson’s Bay store in the cafeteria and I would almost always have fish and chips.
I couldn’t tell anyone what brought on the physical abuse. I do know that I had a hard time because I couldn’t talk back or argue with my dad or I would get hit. When I was around 14, I told my sister about how much I really loved my dad but we always got into arguments that ended with him getting violent. In a way I sometimes blame my sister for that negative period of my life because she told me her and her boyfriend were going to let me stay with them if things didn’t change and they never changed and my sister never took me in.
I was a very political person in my later teen years while at the same time being very depressed and cynical. Night after night I would get into screaming matches with my dad. At that time, I had a good relationship with my mom. There was even a point where my mom said she would leave my dad and help support me but that too never came about. As a final irony, when I wrote my first book about my life growing up with mental illness, my mom had forgotten all the abuse and even her offer to take me away from my dad and once again I was the target of the finger of blame.
It may seem odd for me to look on this as sort of a positive thing, but when I became severely mentally ill, a lot of things changed with my family relationships. I can recall my sister telling me that my dad was in tears almost any time he had to talk about my breakdown and my poor mental state. Still, this wasn’t enough to reconcile us.
After leaving the hospital, I went back to live with my parents and my dad put the pressure on for me to move out. What worried me sometimes is that my dad recently told me that it was my mom who had wanted me out, that she was ‘not a big fan of me’ as he said. I have a hard time believing that, but there is a chance that it was true, even though I had been my mom’s favourite child just a short while ago.
Where my dad and I finally began to reconcile just 20 years ago, which is a short time if you consider I was 30 before I could really get along with my dad. Despite our being at odds with each other, there was a lot of clear evidence that he loved me. 20 years ago, I had just been released from a six-month stay in the psychiatric hospital and I was unable to take care of many of my own needs. I was put into a group home where I was supervised, my medication was monitored, and I had regular meals. At this point, my dad would drive to the group home, pick me up and take me to the river valley in Edmonton where we would take long walks every day. This was my salvation and likely the one thing that really allowed me to heal. Now my dad is in his mid-80s and the roles have been reversed, I now do things to help take care of him.
I wish I could offer some kind of sound advice as to how to heal strained family relationships, but I don’t really have much. One of the things that often came up with my dad and I was that he was a heavy drinker when I was younger. No matter how loud I screamed for him to stop drinking, no matter if I brought my mom to Alanon meetings, he wouldn’t stop or even slow down his drinking. I could still say that Alanon meetings help in situations like this. If you have a family member or other loved one who has a drinking problem and it affects you, this 12-step meeting based on Alcoholics Anonymous encourages you to clean up your own side of the street and not let your loved one’s drinking affect you as much. The program encourages its members to admit powerlessness and in that find strength, and also to bond with others who are going through the same thing.
The amazing thing that happened with my dad is that despite years of heavy drinking, he was able to quit with the help of hypnosis. The main problem with that is he didn’t have to change his attitude or learn ways to control his anger in order to quit. But thankfully, after a few years off alcohol, he became almost like someone who had never drank.
My last piece of advice for dealing with family members and their drinking is to try and find ways to spend time with them when they aren’t drunk. For example, I could have bought my dad and I some fishing gear and gone with him to a lake or river early on a Saturday or Sunday and we could have bonded over that.
I am kind of ashamed of it, but there was a time that I was so upset over my dad’s drinking, and his drinking and driving, that I was going to pay someone to spray paint the word “drunk” on the side of his van. I am really glad I didn’t go through with it, but I hate to think about how he indiscriminately drove drunk and could have killed someone, one of his family members or himself. Certainly, if he got caught, our family would have lost our house and had some pretty hard times without his support. It was only recently that my dad started to talk with me about some of the things he had seen during the Second World War and just after like refugee camps where people died of horrible diseases and starvation by the thousands, and the fear that ran through everyone while the German military occupied Denmark. Him telling me this gave me a new understanding of the kinds of trauma that he wanted to erase with his drinking.
