I feel like i only post my woes on this board. I dont have enough experience yet to give meaningful responses. But i do read what everyone posts and my heart breaks for all of us. My daughter is finally responding to the meds and she is acting “normally” now. However, her normal bipolar behavior before her time in prison I now realize always had some paranoia and delusion in it. I had just attributed it to manipulation and drama. Anyway, part of her “normal” behavior included using meth. Every night she stays out and comes home saying that someone shot her with meth while she was asleep. And I’m not sure if that is her delusion or if that is her lie. But she smells like meth. I feel like i have lost her. And that she wants to be lost. She was lost in prison. She was lost in psychosis. And now she is lost again in meth. I keep finding her and bringing her back but its only a matter of time before she gets lost again. And when i say lost i mean both metaphorically and literally. Right now she is living at home but she is just as lost. I try to disengage. I try to detach. And i have gotten so much better and stronger since this all began. But i am always questioning if i am doing the right thing by allowing her to live at home. My friend asked me what would my daughter do if i died. She would survive. What would I do if she died? I dont know.
I’m sorry you are going through this. It sounds incredibly difficult and painful beyond what can be expressed.
I base all of my choices on safety and I read on this forum, and I’m sorry I can’t remember the thread or which member posted this idea: if something happened to my loved one, how would I feel about the decisions I made when I had to make the hard choices?
For me, it’s always safety first and then the softest, most gentle love I can find inside me, a quiet love without expectations.
Katee, like you I feel like I don’t have enough experience and post only woes here too. I just wanted to respond and let you know that my heart breaks for you/all of us too.
It helps me to read here so that I don’t feel so alone. I have no advice for you, but wanted to let you know that your “woes” help me deal with my “woes” too.
I don’t think that any of us feel “experienced” in handling SMI in our loved ones. It is a tough journey, different for each family, but full of woes. It is fine to post woes here. All of us need this site to vent on. There really is often no where else to share our misery, as those who were never touched with SMI in their family, just cannot understand what it is like to live in the midst of the chaos of unpredictable psychosis. I come here every day almost, even though my daughter is the best she’s been in years because the fear, “what if’s” and unknowns still affect me often.
Getting as educated as you possibly can about the illness, the legalities involved and meds/side effects gives a base for future decisions. I would NEVER have been strong enough to use “the system” to get my daughter forced onto meds without this site, other people’s experiences, and the moral support. Yet, it was THE best decision I ever made for her. And she still doesn’t understand what happened fully and may never understand…
I’m so sorry. I wish I knew what to say but I do feel for you. God Bless you!