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.
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
Some real talk.
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.
