COMMENTS FROM OUR SUPPORT GROUP - by Dede Ranahan

I run a small support group for family members. The following are random comments from
one of our meetings. Perhaps you'll identify with some of them. While trying to help our loved ones, we need help ourselves. (Excerpt from my memoir with permissions.)

Photo Credit: MSJWatson83
Flickr

“My child says she’s fine.  She won’t see a doctor.  She’s forty-five.  I can’t make her go.  We’re running out of money to assist her.”

“If we turn him out, he’ll be on the street.  I can’t live with that.”

“My sister has no boundaries.  She’ll tell anyone anything.  She’ll tell her social security number if they ask.”

“I’ve lost my other children.  They don’t want to be around the chaos.”

“I have one child.  I don’t have the experience of a well child.”

“My ill son is living with us.  It’s very difficult.  I’ve just been through surgery and chemo for ovarian cancer.  My husband is developing dementia.  I have no support.”

“My daughter got a traffic ticket for reckless driving.  They fined her and sentenced her to eighty hours of community service.  She doesn’t have the capacity to follow through and find an organization that will let her volunteer for them.”

“I read something that resonated with me.  ‘A mother is as happy as her unhappiest child.’”

“My daughter’s illness is fracturing the entire family.”

“It seems like this illness is very self-centered.  Everything's about me.”

“I can’t talk about these things anywhere else.  People don’t understand.”

"It's such a relief to know I'm not the only one in this kind of situation."

NOT GIVING UP - Anonymous

Jan is a member of my family mental illness support group. (Jan is not her real name.) She writes:

I got online to write you because I've had a tough week, but thinking of you and our support group helped. I so wish I could come to the meetings, but I pick up my kids after school and so it makes it really hard.

I'm writing to send you love and to essentially say I'm in awe of all the members of the group for enduring to the end with your ill family members. Jason (not his real name) is really hard to raise, and lately I've been really discouraged and have lost much of my joy over it. But truthfully, he's about 8 times better than he was plus he's starting therapy next week. Yay!

I keep looking at our situation and essentially thinking I only have 6-10 more years of trying to raise my kids through school. Maybe I'll create a breakthrough with Jason in the next couple of years and he will suddenly be controlled and respectful.

But then I'll think of our many group conversations and I'll remember that I may never really be done raising him. And once again, my spirit will become swelled up with an abounding sweet respect for all of you who are committed to your children in an extraordinary way -- with intense love and compassion, continuing to endure, worry, and often take care of your adult mentally challenged children.

Often (as it is for me), you're frustrated, sometimes feeling abused and taken advantage of, sometimes living in worry or fear for your children/adults. You hang onto two things: You were blessed with these human beings at birth or through adoption. You know they deserve better in life, and sometimes you succumb to the thought that you deserve better also.

And the other thing that is much easier to hold onto, is the deep down love you feel for them and the love you know they feel deep down as well. For me, that last part is easy. Jason is one of the few people who can get me to absolutely crack up.  It's easy to tell him, "I love you."  And he says it more often than anyone else does in my life.

So thanks for being a great example of not giving up. When I read your blog, it described to a tee what I'd been processing this past month and why I'd missed you and the support group so much lately. I'm proud of you for starting the blog and the conversation that each of us has to start with the greater communities.

Thanks for reaching out to me on your blog this night when I've felt so hollow and withdrawn. 

STAR THROWERS: STORY OF A FAMILY MENTAL ILLNESS SUPPORT GROUP by Dede Ranahan

Sometimes I need to see another face, in person, and give and receive real hugs. Three-and-a-half years ago I put an ad in the hometown newspaper about starting a support group for family members of people struggling with mental illness. I had no idea if anyone would respond. Twenty-two people showed up at my house for the first meeting. At the second meeting, we worked together to establish meeting guidelines:

1. Start meetings on time.
2. Come to support and be supported.
3. Maintain group confidentiality.
4. Listen without judgment.
5. Time-limit personal comments in order to give everyone a chance to speak.
6. Foster a positive approach. Focus on successes.
7. Share resource information.
8. Realize diverse opinions will be expressed. This is good and means we're thinking.
9. Maintain flexibility to meet the needs of the group at each meeting.
10. Add humor whenever possible and appropriate.

As group moderator, I promised I'd always be present (unless sick or out of town) no matter what. Everyone needed to know our meetings would take place without fail even if only two or three were in attendance.

We found a meeting site at the local Raley's supermarket. The store makes its conference room available to groups to use free of charge. It offers anonymity and keeps things simple. We don't provide food and people bring their own drinks. Most bring water bottles. Meetings last about an hour and a half, or until everyone's had a chance to say what they came to say.

Lately, I've wondered if we should continue. People come and go. Some come only once, some come when they're in crisis, and a few come to every meeting. Just when I think maybe the group's run its course, a new person shows up and is so grateful to find us there for them.

So, we'll keep going until we get a sign that it's time to fold our tent and call it a day.  It's only an hour and a half out of the month and if it makes a difference to even one person in a month, that's still one person. It reminds me of the starfish story:

A young man is walking along the ocean and sees a beach on which thousands and thousands of starfish have washed ashore. Further along he sees an old man, walking slowly and stooping often, picking up one starfish after another and tossing each one gently into the ocean.

"Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" he asks.

"Because the sun is up and the tide is going out and if I don't throw them further in they will die."

"But, old man, don't you realize there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it!  You can't possibly save them all, you can't even save one-tenth of them. In fact, even if you work all day, your efforts won't make any difference at all."

The old man listened calmly and then bent down to pick up another starfish and threw it into the sea. "It made a difference to that one."

Adapted from The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley.