Relationships

Hi, my name is Gail95. I'm here because my brother is dealing with severe depression and anxiety. I am worried about him and am not always sure when to step back. He is also dealing with a relationship where his ex is in distress and constantly asking my brother for help. I see my brother try to listen to his ex, but my brother is too depressed, he then gets overwhelmed by fear that since he can't help his ex will die. My brother can't stop taking calls from his ex. I want to take my brother's phone, but don't know the best way to help him avoid this person.

#MightyTogether

In relationships, I’ve been told many times that I check off all the boxes (kind, compassionate, family-oriented, loyal, and so on). But the one box they never wanted in their life was chronic illness.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I feel like the world we live in needs to understand that literally anyone can develop a chronic illness at any point in their life.

For me, my chronic illnesses started showing up in childhood. So, in some ways, I’ve had a lot of time to learn how to cope, adapt, and figure out what life looks like for me and of course I’m still working on it.

But I don’t think people always understand that chronic illness isn’t something that only happens to certain people. Mental health conditions can appear at any point in someone’s life. Accidents happen. Injuries happen. Illnesses happen. Bodies change. Life changes. Someone can wake up one day and suddenly find themselves navigating a reality they never imagined for themselves.

Not all chronic illnesses are the same, but the emotions that come with receiving a diagnosis and knowing it’s lifelong can be surprisingly similar: grief, fear, anger, uncertainty, loneliness, and the feeling that you have somehow become a burden to the people around you.

But you are not a burden.

You and your chronic illness are not baggage.

Your chronic illness is a bouquet you get to carry every day. Sometimes we carry it gracefully. Sometimes our flowers are blooming. Sometimes they’re wilting, and we’re just trying to make it through the day.

And when they wilt, we don’t throw the bouquet away. We refresh the water. We tend to the flowers. We give ourselves the care we need and try again tomorrow.

Your chronic illness does not make you less worthy of love. It does not make you less deserving of a relationship, a career, friendships, adventures, or a beautiful life.

It is a part of your story, but it is not the entirety of who you are.

And maybe, with time, we can stop seeing chronic illness as baggage someone else has to carry and start seeing it for what it really is: a bouquet we’ve learned how to carry.

Sometimes with grace. Sometimes with both hands. Sometimes with a little help from a friend.

But we carry it.

#MentalHealth #Depression #Fibromyalgia #Lupus #Uveitis #Blindness #Glaucoma #ChronicPain #Anxiety #AnkylosingSpondylitis #Arthritis #HypothyroidismUnderactiveThyroidDisease #HashimotosThyroiditis

Knowledge is power. Those who are depressed feel powerless and therefore have no need for memory or perception (don't want to be here / have no need to remember anything). This is the emotional mechanics of depression and elation or wanting to be here and learn or not.

Reality doesn't care if you like how it works or not. It will only work for you if you understand how it works and obey its rules. Put your hand in a mincing machine and it will be reduced to grated bone and gristle, no matter who you are or think you are.

Sound and motion destroys your ability to think and always has and always will because it stops you turning within and examining your experience, by turning your attention outwards instead. In the same way silence and stillness allows you to do the opposite. These have always been the methods for achieving these states and always will remain so because that is reality.

You can either stay and build upon your presence or cut all links, destroy all relationships and move on elsewhere. This applies to the mind as well as body (mental and physical resources - problem fixing). ‘Only connect’ as C S Forester said, in order to fix things together in physical reality and make sense of them, mentally.

Disbelief frees you to move on as faith keeps you where you are. You stay and accumulate or move and abandon your possession(s), jettisoning everything to move on, mentally and physically (the faster you go, the more you jettison; the slower you go, the more you accumulate).

Disintegrated personalities, that is those in dispersed mental states are like nervous birds, never settling anywhere for long. Integrated (concentrated) personalities on the other hand are like elephants, who are fully grounded in reality.

Failure exists from the point you give up effort – success comes from persevering until you achieve your aims (finding out where your curiosity will lead).

A rigid mind pursues the facts and insists on them. A more relaxed mind plays with the facts, creatively (down the rabbit hole and the collapse of ego / intellect). In Zen these are known as the diamond mind, which cuts through everything to get to the truth and the butterfly mind, which flits from subject to subject, without gaining much detail because it doesn’t stay long enough to gain depth (pick and mix versus concrete, certain, unchanging, defined reality).

I've spent almost a decade as a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, most of it as a Clinical Director overseeing programs for autistic kids and their families. For years, I watched something happen over and over, and it never stopped bothering me.

A family would come in when their child was six, or eight, or eleven. We'd build a whole team around that kid — speech therapy, social skills groups, behavior support, school accommodations, a plan for almost everything. Then the child would turn 18, and almost all of it would disappear. Not because the need went away. Because the entire system, from funding to staffing to the way services are even categorized, was built around childhood.

Nobody warns families about this part. I didn't fully understand it myself until I watched it happen to clients I'd known for years — capable, funny, thoughtful young adults who suddenly had nowhere to go for the things they actually needed help with next: how to navigate a first date, how to tell if someone crossed a boundary, how to say no, what consent actually looks like outside of a textbook definition.

We spend years teaching kids on the spectrum how to function in a classroom. We spend almost none teaching adults how to navigate a relationship. I don't think that's a small oversight. I think it's a sign that the system quietly stops caring the moment someone turns 18 — not out of malice, just because nobody built the next chapter.

So I built it myself. I started Capable Hearts, an app for autistic and neurodivergent adults to build friendships and dating relationships, with a coaching line I run personally where I work through the exact things traditional services skip: consent, boundaries, reading social cues — not as abstract concepts, but as skills you can actually practice and get better at, the same way you'd practice anything else.

I want to be honest about something: building this hasn't been some triumphant startup story. Most days it's just me, sending emails that don't get answered, posting content that ten people see, wondering if I'm reaching anyone at all. I've had a regional center tell me flatly they "don't do dating apps," without ever asking what the coaching side actually does. I've had outreach go to the wrong inbox, sit unread for weeks, get politely declined by people who couldn't quite place what to make of what I was offering. It's been slower and lonelier than I expected, and there are days I've wondered if it was worth it.

But then I think about the client who once asked me, almost apologetically, how you're supposed to know if someone actually likes you back — because nobody had ever explained it to him in a way that made sense — and I remember why I'm doing this. That's not a niche question. That's a question every person deserves an honest answer to, and for a lot of autistic adults, there was simply nobody whose job it was to answer it.

I don't think this is a small problem hiding in a corner of disability services. I think it's a system that draws an arbitrary line at 18 and calls it done. If you're a parent watching your kid approach that birthday, or a self-advocate who's already lived through it, or another clinician who's seen this same pattern in your own practice — I don't think I'm the only one who's noticed. I'd like to hear if I'm wrong.

capablehearts.com

‼️Contains mentions of suicide, homicide, family drama, sexual assault and trauma‼️

This is a long story but I'll try to make it shorter here. You can ask me if you want more details.

First a short backstory for context.

I had a difficult and unstable childhood. My sister and dad struggled with serious mental illnesses, and my mum and sister had a very toxic relationship. Much of my childhood and adolescence revolved around the drama surrounding my sister, leaving me feeling neglected. Undiagnosed ADHD, dyslexia, and a processing disorder also made education difficult, and for years I believed I was stupid or simply not trying hard enough. I developed low self-worth, anxiety, and depression around 10–12, followed by suicidal thoughts around 14. As a young adult, I also experienced a traumatic sexual assault. I still struggle with my mental health today, and it ultimately became the catalyst for this story.

After my sister moved out, it was just my mum and me. We were very close and got along well, but over the next two years, our mental health began declining together. We relied on each other for support, but as our mental health worsened, our relationship began to fracture. She increasingly focused on my faults and criticized my efforts, often without realizing how deeply it affected me. I don't blame her—her depression was largely untreated, and the world had become a very negative place for her. But I began feeling worthless and like a burden. The woman who had once been my biggest source of love, joy and support slowly became, in my mind, the voice telling me I worthless. "Am I the cause of her depression or the reason she isn't getting better?" Was a daily though I had.

One day, after returning home from a holiday intended for RnR, but that had actually ended up worsened my mental health, my mum and I had several intense arguments. Although they were about seemingly small things, they reinforced the belief that I wasn't good enough, wasn't trying hard enough, and that I was a careless, horrible burden. I couldn't cope anymore. I went to my room and cried uncontrollably, eventually contemplating suicide. My thoughts spiraled, and I became completely overwhelmed by my emotions. Hundreds of negative thoughts flooded my mind, drowning out my ability to think rationally. I was detached from reality and saw everything in black and white—my mum was the enemy, and I was the victim. In that state, I became convinced she hated me and was deliberately breaking me down until I killed myself. I even began thinking about taking her with me and wondering if she deserved it for making me feel this way.

Of course in hindsight, and while able to think rationally about the situation I do not feel this was about my mum. I love her very deeply and only want the best for her.

Is my emotions and thoughts increasingly became out of control intense intrusive thoughts and to my mind, depicting ways in which I kill myself and her. These intrusive thoughts created an internal battle. Although having thoughts homicide and suicidal I knew even in that state I didn't want to hurt her. If you've ever had a thought of running into traffic but simultaneously knowing that is a bad idea, that might help you to understand the situation I was going through. In this moment I felt confused, frightened, angry, depressed, overwelmed and profoundly alone. My mum came to my door and attempted to enter. At this point my emotions burted out of me, I screamed, yelled, insured and threatened my mum. My defence and fight reason what in overdrive. I didn't want her to come in and yell at me and make things even worse. I now know she wasn't going to.

A repetitive, intrusive thought began looping in my mind. It was driving me crazy. The words “Get a knife” kept repeating, without any further instructions or intention attached to them. I tried desperately to fight the thought, but eventually I became convinced that the only way to make it stop was to act on it. I took a knife from the kitchen and started walking back toward my room. As I did, my mum came out of her room. My fight and defend response immediately kicked in, and the situation escalated into yelling, screaming, and threats. Understandably, my mum became frightened and left the house. Although I made threats in that moment, I did not act on them or hurt her.

The police and ambulance were called and within about 15 minutes arrived at my house. From there I was questioned in my driveway while still in a mentally unstable dissociative state. I proceeded to tell them everything as I believed being open would result in getting the help I needed. The ambulance took me to the hospital where I then spent 3 days in a health ward. During the second day I was informed that an AVO (like a restraining order) had been issued by the police on behalf of my mum, but not requested by her. In fact she had told the police that she did not want an AVO and that she understood I was in a mental crisis. She cried on the phone to me that day while telling me about the AVO. I was released into police custody from the mental health ward and held in a police station cell for several hours while crying and rocking back and forth. I was issued the AVO that stated it would be in place for 2 years, prohibiting any contact, or being within 100m of my mum and my home. Within approximately 48 hours after an intense mental breakdown everything I needed the most was taken from me. I was seperated from my cat, who is my world, my lifeline and more then once the reason I haven't kill myself. Everything familiar, my mum, my cat, my routine, my art, my safe place, my support services, my belongings were all taken away. I moved in with a friend and for about 2 months I've been struggling more then ever before. Multiple times I've been very close to suicide, thinking this is all just too much and the pain is unbearable. I cry most nights and have to take a seditive to stop the suicidal thoughts and emotional pain. I miss my mum more then words could describe. My mum has been fighting the AVO since day one but currently it is till in place.

My trauma resulted in a mental breakdown and was "delt" with by giving me more trauma and I'm expected to now fix myself and prove to the court I'm getting better in order for the AVO to have a chance of being changed or removed, but even if I became mentally healthy that's not a guarantee that the AVO will be removed/changed.

I understand that the police have a duty to protect people. But throwing one solution at every problem doesn't work. And the lack of consideration for the individuals involved often makes things worse.

I imagine it this way, someone brakes their leg by accident and they have their other leg broken as punishment for it. Then they are told that to get the help they need they have to crawl 10km over gravel and dirt to the hospital. But, by the time they get to the hospital will then legs be too damaged to be repaired?

If you made it to the end of this story I thank you and appreciate you deeply.