Wednesday, May 22, 2013

The elephant in the room...keeping secrets...



As I was reminded by a friend this week, we are only as sick as the secrets we keep.  This friend told me about a situation with a family member.  The family member is trying to keep a secret from other family members.  About her mental health.  Of course, it isn’t really secret. And my friend is dealing with the results of that “secret”.  The situation is this: This woman has a chronic and serious physical illness.  It impacts her mobility.  As she has aged, it is progressing.  She has started to have panic attacks as a result.  She isn’t talking to her family about this.  She wrote a letter to her doctor, which my friend found.  And being the daughter of this woman, she read it.

Privacy issue aside, it really does create family ‘drama’.  Having panic attacks is a mental illness.  And there has been a history of mental illness at other times in this family. So, what does all this create? Denial. Lack of trust. Drama. Some of which doesn’t actually have to be.  In my family, there was a similar pattern.  As a child, I always felt like we danced around what was going on.  Mom’s behavior changed.  She looked different.  But did we talk about it?  I don’t remember any discussions.  I do remember that we acted like it was all reasonable. At least sometimes. It wasn’t.   
  
When my Mom and Dad went to the counseling that I set up for them at 16 years of age, I remember that nothing was said about the fact that my Mom hadn’t bathed in years.  Not at least in front of me. The therapist asked my Dad to say one nice thing about my Mom.  He said something about her being a good Mom. This was a bald-faced lie.  Much as I loved my Dad.  She spent years telling me I was a slut. She didn’t keep the house clean.  She was nastier (if you can believe it) to my sister. She spent hours a day ignoring us as she sat on the couch smoking cigarette after cigarette and looking into the distance.  She wasn’t capable of much beyond that in terms of parenting. She wasn’t a good Mom. She wasn’t normal. She was sick.

There was a HUGE elephant in the room.  We walked around it. We jumped over it. But we didn’t actually deal with it.  I held on to a huge resentment about that for many years. There wasn’t much that my Dad did that I resented, but that was truly something that I did hold on to.  Part of that was connected to feeling like I wasn’t protected from her.  Even at 16 years of age.  It was a horrible feeling.  And we were keeping a secret. At least from ourselves. The secret was---Mom had a mental illness.  Her behavior was out of control.  There, I said it. And no lightning bolt hit me.  No crevice opened up in the earth and swallowed me.  Nothing happened. My hope for my friend is that her Mom realizes that the elephant keeps her separated from her loved ones.  And this is a loving family.  It isn’t right or fair for her to treat her family that way. Or to avoid the truth and avoid the potential for love/support by discussing this with them. We really are only as sick as our secrets. Learning how to be honest is the first step in learning how to handle reality. We can do that. All of us.   

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