How Do You Re-Integrate Into a Family That Is Scared of You?

I describe in my book, An American’s Resurrection, what is was like to come home from a Veterans Administration psychiatric hospital after months of inpatient treatment. This time period included months of delusion; months of screaming at my family like they were trying to poison me during visits; months of frantic phone calls to their home, their work, and their friends’ houses begging for release, and then tidal waves of profanity to somehow squelch the delusional pulls at my emotions during those calls. 

When I returned from the VA hospital and walked in the door of my home—the home I had now been hospitalized from twice—I was sure of two things: my family was afraid for me and my family was afraid OF me. 

The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti describes Fear as the “movement from certainty to uncertainty.” And that movement was tangible when I re-entered my family structure. Roles that had been established over decades were now blown apart. Prior to my diagnosis and consequent hospitalizations, I had never thought of myself as separate from my family. Now there was a “consumer” and a “family,” a team and an “other.” 

Yet my entire family was focused on one thing: my Survival.  I will not say my Recovery. It was more than that. Surviving mental illness is not like recovering from a broken leg or pneumonia. My biological father had just died homeless from untreated mental illness after being estranged from us for over 14 years. My family knew the stakes but was not sure how to focus their efforts. 

Like most families, we were not practiced in using interpersonal tools to create relationships to deal with this situation. If anything, the lifelong trauma of my father’s violent actions made for very unstable dynamics between us all. We lived hyper-aroused from the physical triggers that unknowingly dominated most of our lives. Anxious, impetuous, explosive, and closed off, we just wanted to be left alone. We just needed some safety. Some ease. 

But that was gone now and the freefall into the knowns and unknowns of a son, brother, and grandson with a serious mental illness had flooded the veins of my family. 

They needed their wounds tended to with the same seriousness with which my illness was being treated. Their guilts, shames, and laments should have been examined to see how their lives were affected. We just weren’t ready as a family for this event, and we suffered for years in its aftermath.

My family needed to grieve the loss of their expectations and dreams for their unit. We needed to learn how to talk to each other and how to have serious discussions around medication, recovery, anguish, shame, and the death of a known identity. 

Is your patient’s family ready for such discussions? 

My family was asked to do too much and was never acknowledged for the monumental efforts they were asked to take to save my life. They deserved more. They deserved their own treatment paradigm to teach them that the family’s recovery must be conceptualized and worked towards. 

Maybe the family deserves its own diagnosis centered on Trauma to get it fully recognized in this dynamic and terrifying situation? 

Maybe then they can start to deal with their own stigmas and gain the freedom they deserve. 

In your practice, how do you incorporate the family into the recovery process? 

Eric Arauz, MLER, is an international behavior health consumer advocate, trainer, and inspirational keynote speaker. He is a faculty member at the Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Department of Psychiatry, the Vice-Chairman of the current New Jersey Task Force on Opiate Addiction in citizens 18 to 25 years old, and a person with the lived experience of bipolar I disorder, PTSD, addiction, and suicidality. He is the SAMHSA 2012 "Voice Award" Fellow and the author of An American's Resurrection: My Pilgrimage from Child Abuse and Mental Illness to Salvation. 

The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the blog post author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psych Congress Network or other Psych Congress Network authors.