When Someone Close to You Struggles With Their Mental Health
When someone you care about is struggling, it can be hard to know how to be present without abandoning your own limits. This essay offers a compassionate framework for sorting responsibility from pressure, reflecting on what you can truly offer, and recognizing that support and boundaries can belong in the same relationship.
There Is No “Should” for Your Feelings
The bottom line: Mental health struggles are exceedingly common which means that the chance you have someone in your life who struggles with their mental health is high.
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And if someone close to you struggles with their mental health , whether it’s episodic or ongoing anxiety, depression, addiction, a mood or personality disorder , you’ve probably often wondered,
“How do I show up for this person?”
Or
“Do I even want to show up for this person?”
Or
“How can I hold boundaries with this person?”
None of these are easy questions and it’s often hard to know what to do or what you’re available for when someone close to you struggles with their mental health.
In today’s post, I dive into this topic and provide a series of prompts and inquiries to help you think through these questions so you can clarify questions you may have if someone close to you struggles with their mental health.
*Statistics provided by The National Alliance on Mental Illness
Boundaries are the limits that clarify what you can responsibly offer in a relationship and what is not yours to carry.
In plain terms: You can care deeply about someone and still decide what support is realistic for you.
When someone close to you struggles with their mental health, it can sometimes feel challenging.
It may also feel easy and seamless sometimes, or you may know nothing different and living with or being close to someone who struggles with their mental health could feel completely normative.
But if you do find it to be challenging , either all the time or some of the time , please remember: you’re allowed to have your feelings.
It doesn’t make you a “bad person” for feeling challenged by the person or their mental health struggles, any more so than it makes the person going through them a “bad person” for having mental health challenges.
You’re allowed to have your experience no matter what it looks like.
This may not be something you’ve heard too often, but it’s more than okay to feel sad, angry, frustrated, tired, hopeless, triggered, or any other feeling you have about being in connection with this person.
I think many of us sometimes should all over ourselves, telling ourselves stories like we should feel one way or the other, we should show up for that person who’s mentally ill even if we don’t want to, we shouldn’t resent or begrudge that person, and so forth.
I don’t think “shoulding” on ourselves is helpful.
When we do that, we’re effectively layering on judgment and shame on top of what already might be tough and painful feeling states, adding even more challenge to our emotional experience that otherwise doesn’t have to be there.
So remember: there is no should about how you might feel or choose to show up when someone close to you struggles with their mental health.
You get to have your experience no matter what this looks like.
Next, remember, you have to consider your own individual context when someone close to you struggles with their mental health.
The Context That Shapes What You Can Offer
“Shoulding” is the habit of layering judgment on your real feelings and choices through rigid ideas about what you are supposed to do.
In plain terms: When you stop treating your reaction as a moral failure, you can make a clearer decision about what you are actually available for.
How we show up for a loved one struggling with their mental health can be very context dependent.
For instance, if it’s your child versus your brother-in-law, or if it’s a parent you don’t care to be close to versus your wife that you adore, a distant acquaintance versus a member of the team you manage at work, the level of investment, care, and availability you have to support this person will vary.
How you can show up for this person will also depend on how their mental health struggles manifest and what your personal capacities are, what resources are at your disposal, what level of personal work you have done to understand, recognize, and assert your own boundaries, how advanced the person’s mental health struggles are, how much space you have left to give them is, etc. etc..
The bottom line: there is no one-size-fits-all model or rule here about how and if to show up for a person who struggles with their mental health.
Thinking about this or about how you have or have not shown up for them in the past, you may feel a sense of guilt or even compulsion, wanting to show up with them but just not being able to do so, or feeling like you “should” support them because of some internalized, pressured belief(s) you hold.
At the end of the day, there is no right or wrong way to respond when a person close to you struggles with their mental health.
You’re not supposed to fix them (indeed, you cannot “fix” them!).
What you can do is figure out how you need and want to show up for someone close to you by reflecting on the context of the relationship, on your own personal boundaries, how you need/want to take care of yourself, and action steps that feel reasonable and realistic to you.
To that end, I want to provide some inquiries for you to help answer and address these questions.
Questions That Clarify Your Boundaries
Open a Google doc or crack open your hard-copy notebook and write down your answers to the following:
What is your level of responsibility to this person (are you a parent/legal guardian? A sibling, manager, or more distant connection?)
What’s your level of investment in this relationship? In other words, do you care about this relationship and want to invest in it? Or is it a relationship you would be happy to see fade from your life?
What is the story you tell yourself about how you think you “have to” show up for this person?
Where did you learn this story?
Is this , the story you tell yourself , empirically true?
Answer honestly, what feels good for you in terms of showing up for this person?
What would feel hard for you?
In what ways is this person asking/insisting (either implicitly or explicitly) that you show up for them?
In what ways do you struggle to show up for this person?
Is it an option for you NOT to show up for this person in this way and instead utilize different resources/options to get them support?
Who are the other people/resources that can support you? Who is your support team?
What resistance comes up for you (if any) when you think about changing the way you show up?
Do you struggle with setting boundaries in any other areas of your life? Does it feel hard to think about setting boundaries with this person?
If you could hold better boundaries with this person, what would they look like?
What’s the cost if you keep showing up for this person and keep feeling drained?
What do you stand to gain if you can change how you show up with this person?
What are one or two immediate action steps you want to take now that you’ve clarified more about what you are and are not available for?
Support That Can Be Sustainable
If, after completing these inquiries you realize you do want to show up for this person but are struggling to imagine concrete steps you could take to do so that might be appropriate and effective, consider the following:
Educate yourself: If you know what the person close to you is struggling with, consider educating yourself on their diagnosis/issues. Often when we learn more about the symptoms, side effects, and needs those who struggle with particular mental health challenges face, it can be helpful in terms of helping us understand what they might need, that their reactions to us may not be in their control, and education generally helps us feel more in control when we can sometimes feel out of control.
Practice empathy, lots and lots of empathy: You may not have experienced what the person close to you is going through, but still you can attempt to understand the experience by recalling times you have struggled, by reading or listening to stories of others who deal with what the person close to you deals with, etc.. You can also ask them to share more of their experience with you, tell them you want to understand better.
Ask them what they would like from you: Sometimes, with the best of intentions, we project our experience onto others and imagine they would like us to respond in a certain way because that’s how we would like to be responded to. But that may not be the case. If you’re wondering how to show up for the person close to you, ask them. You may be surprised at their answers. Of course, check in with yourself to see if you can meet their requests but if you can, try those out.
Cultivate supports and remember your boundaries: At the end of the day, when someone close to us is struggling with their mental health we are challenged to practice self-care and to recognize and assert our boundaries in myriad ways. Even as you support this person, don’t forget to pay attention to yourself and give yourself what you need and want to make showing up for this person sustainable and reasonable for you. You absolutely do get to practice self-care and to hold boundaries when someone close to you struggles with their mental health.
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
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Also, you might want to consider reading this prior blogs of mine:
101 Self-Care Suggestions When It All Feels Like Too Much
How boundaries impact every area of your life and what to do if yours need work
Yes, sweetheart, you do get to grieve this…
I hope you found this post helpful and perhaps even a bit validating.
Q: How can I support someone with mental health challenges without losing myself?
A: Start by considering your relationship, your responsibility, your current capacity, and what support feels reasonable and sustainable. You are not responsible for fixing another person.
Q: Is it wrong to feel angry, tired, or resentful toward someone who is struggling?
A: No. The essay is clear that your feelings are part of your experience, not proof that you are a bad person. Adding shame to an already difficult situation rarely helps.
Q: What boundaries can I set with a loved one who is struggling?
A: The boundary will depend on the relationship and your circumstances. This essay suggests clarifying what you can offer, what would be too costly, and what other resources may be available.
Q: Should I educate myself about a loved one’s diagnosis?
A: If you know what they are struggling with, learning about symptoms, side effects, and needs may help you understand their experience and decide how you want to respond.
Q: What if I want to help but cannot meet the requests they make of me?
A: You can check honestly whether the request is possible for you, offer what you can, and consider other people or resources that may be able to support them.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Focus · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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