I want to talk more about mental health. I think now is a good time to get a therapist, but as is the bitter irony of mental health issues–the time when one most needs a therapist is the time when it’s the hardest to summon up the energy to find one. This is a well-known problem with depression, by the way.
When I first got out of the hospital, my depression was about 90% gone. My anxiety was down by about 60% (meaning I had roughly 40%) what I used to have. Over the years, both slowly crept back. Now, I would say my depression is about 80% of what it used to be (before my medical crisis), and my anxiety is about 75%. In other words, they are both back in almost full force.
Am I surprised by that? Not really. I have had depression since I was seven, and I’m sure I’ve had anxiety nearly as long if not equally so, but I just never recognized that anxiety was a thing. Not even when I was a psych major in college. It just wasn’t really well-recognized back then. Now, it’s acknowledged to be a thing, which is good. But I have a hard time grappling with it, even more so than depression.
Depression is…weird. Since I’ve had it for so long, in a weird way, it’s almost a friend. Or at least a longterm adversary with whom I am so intimate. I know it so well. I know every trick in its bag, but that doesn’t mean that I know how to deal with it or repeel it. I do think I’m better at dealing with it now than I was twenty years ago, but better does not equal good, sadly.
One thing I would really like to learn in therapy is to set healthy boundaries. Again, I’m better at it than I was twenty years ago, thanks to Taiji; I’m still not good at it, however, especially with my parents. I think this is the biggest problem, frankly.
My mother thinks of me as her emotional support person. This is not just a guess on my part–she has said, out loud, with her outside voice, that I was her therapist. When I tried to protest, she said that she could not find a legit one because she knows all of them personally in Taiwan*.
One thing you need to know about my mother–if she makes up her mind about something, nothing will change her mind. She can find a million excuses not to do something. I’m saying this while shaking my head beacuse I’m like that. I’m sure I get it from her, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it. In fact, as the truism goes, it probably angers me so much because it points out something I don’t like in myself.
The hardest thing is that she has successfully made me feel like I’m responsible for her emotional stability. As much as I try to not make it my problem, I have not been able to shed my guilt/resentment around this topic. One time after I got home from the hospital, she and my father had a huge fight. Against my better judgement, I stepped in between them. Terrible things were said; voices were raised. I yelled. I’ll admit it. I yelled at my father who had just been shouting at my mother. It was an awful fight, and I did not know if I was going to have to physically restrain my eighty-something father from attacking my eighty-something mother who was half a foot shorter.
The next day, she said that she shouldn’t be brinigng her troubles to me and apologized for it. That made me angrier because I knew she was not going to stop. I even said it to her with a bitter smile, “But you’re going to keep doing it.”
Here was the perfect time for her to say that she would not do it any longer. Or, at least that she would try her best to not do it. Or even more basic than that–that she would think about not doing it any longer. The last is absolute horseshit, of course, but at least it would indicate that she had any inkling of doing it.
Instead, she said, “I have no one else to talk about it with.” Which, yeah, that meant she was going to keep doing it. I was furious, but I tried to keep it under control. I told her if she was going to keep doing it, then I did not want her to apologize. to me, that was just adding insult to injury. She tried to excuse herself by saying that some of what she talked about included me because he was my father.
I did not want to hear that because she was just making excuses. Yes, there were things I needed to know like how he was doing in general. I did not, however, need to hear anything about their marriage. She can’t even use the excuse of his dementia because she’s been telling me details about their marriage since I was eleven.
It’s breaking me. Every time I talk to my parents, I am depressed for at least a half hour if not longer afterwards. I often just click off my cordless and just put my head on my desk. I remain motionless for several seconds, trying to regain my energy. My mom always tells me how much better she feels after dumping her shit on me to which I don’t say anything. Lately, she’s been taken to saying she hopes it’s not too hard on me.
What the fuck am I supposed to say to that? Again, it really annoys/angers me because not only does she want to dump her shit on me, she wants to feel ok about it. In order to do that, she needs me to pretend to be ok with it. I never say I am, but I also don’t say I’m not.
She doesn’t care if I’m ok with it because it’s not about what I want or need; it’s all about her. She has enough sense to know that she should feel bad about it, but she doesn’t. More tomorrow.
*She brought sandplay therapy to Taiwan, and she’s now called the Grandmother of Sandplay Therapy in Taiwan. I don’t doubt that she knows most if not all of the therapists/psychologists/psychiatrists in Taiwan (it’s very small), but I have tried to press her to find a thearpist in another country. She claims she can’t because of time differences (when I mention America). When I suggest China or Japan, she has other excuses ready. Her pastor? Oh, no! She can’t talk to anyone at church about my father (because they both still attend church sometimes).