Pumeld Posted July 26, 2013 Posted July 26, 2013 Hi everyone! Background: I try to keep it as short as possible. I would title my problem with my family at the moment with "To ignore accomplishments"; I suffer middle/heavy depression (without psychotic symptoms) for a few years now, with better months and ... bad months. I'm at the moment in the process of re-normalizing my life: Job hunting, slowly building up a new social life and of course re-building self-esteem. Besides psychotherapy I take medication and after switching and taking a higher dose, the meds finally assist me in my endeavors ... less so my family. Acute problem: My problems with the illness are either fully ignored or downplayed to the point of absurdity / laziness, despite being diagnosed by 4 different doctors, taking medication and obviously showing nearly all symptoms of depression. I get (indirectly) called a liar, lazy, non loving and my job type is of course the wrong one ... well here I am. I don't want to suffer any longer under those charges and sacrifice the small energy I have ... but on the other hand I am not ready to deFOO. I don't know how you can help me out here, but I have to try to find some answers. Thank you very much.
cherapple Posted July 26, 2013 Posted July 26, 2013 Why are you not ready to deFOO? Financial? Emotional? Not that you have to. Just wondering why you say that.
Pumeld Posted July 26, 2013 Author Posted July 26, 2013 Multiple reasons: - First off a strong (mostly implanted) sense, that it is wrong (hell it even is in the Ten Commandments, not that I'm in any way religious, but it shows the importance of parents in our society) - Second, financially. Although I pay for my therapy myself, I get a small amount of support, without it would be extremely hard right now (although not impossible) - Third: Emotionally; I don't have a lot people in my life, I just recently (in the past 2 years) ended most friendships because of lacking support and / or I don't agree with them anymore fundamentally. Without my family I would be completely alone with myself (besides some casual acquaintances);
MysterionMuffles Posted July 27, 2013 Posted July 27, 2013 1. Yeah it's easy to understand intellectually that all adult relationships are voluntary, but a whole different difficulty in living that way. I can understand that you've grown up to believe in the high reverance of parents, but ultimately, if they suck at their role, they should not get the respect they have not earned. Now I don't know much about your family so I'm not going to say that you should downright ditch them. However, the fact that you have some ambivelance towards them, do you feel there's a chance to improve your relationship with them? 2. Is it worth cutting costs in other things you have to pay for in order to make this sacrifice? Like you say it's not impossible, but I sense it may be difficult, so try to see if you can continue with therapy without their financial support and if you can cut some of your expenses to make it a little more possible. 3. You may be like me and have only a handful of friends that you can count on one hand...is that the case? If you have a small number of friends do you feel that their friendships are strong enough to want to move in with one of them to a place of your own?
Pumeld Posted July 27, 2013 Author Posted July 27, 2013 1. Yeah it's easy to understand intellectually that all adult relationships are voluntary, but a whole different difficulty in living that way. I can understand that you've grown up to believe in the high reverance of parents, but ultimately, if they suck at their role, they should not get the respect they have not earned. Now I don't know much about your family so I'm not going to say that you should downright ditch them. However, the fact that you have some ambivelance towards them, do you feel there's a chance to improve your relationship with them? 2. Is it worth cutting costs in other things you have to pay for in order to make this sacrifice? Like you say it's not impossible, but I sense it may be difficult, so try to see if you can continue with therapy without their financial support and if you can cut some of your expenses to make it a little more possible. 3. You may be like me and have only a handful of friends that you can count on one hand...is that the case? If you have a small number of friends do you feel that their friendships are strong enough to want to move in with one of them to a place of your own? (1) It's easy to establish this equality with new relationships, whatever kind. With parents on the other hand it's different, because the relationship has been developed in inequality and has to grow in a distinct direction to reach the desired result, which is denied by one part of the participants. Abruptly changing this imbalance to a balanced system triggers some sort of defence mechanism on the parents side, because they don't want to be stripped of their power. This results in the exact opposite which one wants to achieve. (my 2 cents) (2) I live in my own apartment for about 8 years now. So stripping costs is fairly limited and I already live on a minimum. But there is always a way to get other income. I'm looking for a job in my industry at the moment, but could of course take any job to bridge the gap, however this would delay my "real" job hunt enormously. (3) see (2)
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