What are some ways you show support to a partner who struggles with mental illness?
What are some ways you show support to a partner who struggles with mental illness?
r/AskWomen
What are some ways you show support to a partner who struggles with mental illness?
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Listening without waiting to speak and without judgement. Validating their feelings and asking if they’d like help finding a solution or a different perspective and accepting if they don’t.
Kindness, validation, listening. Asking what helps them the most in bad moments. Most of all, avoiding “at least” statements. We often want to minimize for them, but it’s not helpful and makes people feel ignored. So don’t contradict. Someone says they’re feeling down on their self image, don’t say “at least you’re skinny… At least other people find you attractive”. Instead, say “why do you think you feel that way? What makes this feeling worse?”
I just try to listen and be there. Sometimes my partner just needs to talk not have everything fixed
I’m the one with the mental illness in my relationship.
My partner and I have been together for over 20 years and earlier in our relationship he struggled to understand what I was going through. But he put in the work to learn how to make space for me.
I think the main thing that he does for me is listen. And he always asks do you need advice or do you just need to get it out.
He never minimizes how I’m feeling. I’m also on the spectrum and he’s done a great job of learning my triggers that overstimulate me.
He also just acts as my biggest cheerleader. When I’m having confidence issues he reminds me of all the things I’ve accomplished and all of the skills that I have.
After 20 years just having that constant love and support has made all the difference even when I’m at my lowest I always know he’s there.
Ask them if researching and making appointments with doctors and therapists overwhelms them and offer your help.
Listening without judging. Not jumping to conclusions or assuming
I give them grace and understanding on days when they can’t show up as their best selves, and try to gently steer them towards giving themselves the same grace and understanding as well.
Give them a fucking hug.
When they speak of their issues, just listen. Don’t talk back, interrupt, offer advice or consoling words. When they are absolutely done with what they’re saying, ask if they’d like feed back or just for you to listen.
A big part of it for me is treating my partner’s mental illness as a neutral third party that lives in the house with us, not a big scary monster that needs to incite worry and angst all the time. Constantly fretting over his depression makes things worse and can come across as infantilizing. If he tells me he’s feeling depressed, I try to just be supportive the way i would if he was about to take a test or interview for a job. The depression just exists with us the way any other experience/feeling/thought would.
Just be there when they need you. Make sure they are eating, sleeping, and talking to someone, if it isn’t me. Encourage them to get out in the sun, encourage them to take care of their personal hygiene
Honestly the most helpful way to show support is for him to feel like he can always share his feelings with me, especially the ugliest ones. I listen, never shame, ask questions, give him gentle reminders, and then I use the things he tells me to advocate for him when he can’t do it himself.
Sometimes he says things about giving up that scare me. But I have to know those things, otherwise I’d just worry that I’ll be too late to help when he needs it the most. So when he tells me stuff like that I respond with “god that must feel awful” or that I know I can’t take the feeling away, but he can take my hand and we can face it together.
And then I also see a therapist regularly because I have to take care of myself, too. Mental illness fucking blows. It’s not easy to see my husband go through this, and it won’t do either of us any good if I’m neglecting my own health!
Enrolling in therapy (yourself). It would be cool if the partner would also, but it’s pointless to convince anyone to do therapy when they do not want to.
Maintain an expectation for how you’re treated in the relationship that you would of a partner without mental illness. That doesn’t mean always expecting them to act as if they don’t have mental illness. It means talking to your partner to figure out how you guys are going to communicate, reach out to each other, and manage mental illness that results in you being treated the way that you would expect to be treated by a respectful partner. It means not saying “Well they have mental illness so I just have to expect that sometimes they’re going to be mean to me.”
This is a thing that you have to do both for yourself and your partner. Because what often happens in a relationship where one partner suffers with mental illness and the other doesn’t, is that that relationship quickly becomes codependency. The non-mentally-ill partner will think “Well I want to talk to them about how cruel they were to me this morning, but I can’t bring that up now because they’re depressed.” “They can’t be expected to show up to places on time, they have ADHD.” “It sucks that I’ve got to stay home from this party because their Anxiety caused them to back out last minute, but I just have to miss this party, that’s tiny in comparison to all the things that they have to miss out on, my problems aren’t so bad.”
For a lot of people with mental illness, there’s a degree to which they can control it and fight against it and a degree to which it’s too overwhelming. And often times, what causes them to push to work harder at seeking treatment and getting help and figuring out workarounds to address their struggles, is discomfort. Is seeing that they’ve hurt someone. Is realizing that they’re going to be alone if they can’t be a good partner. When you act like it’s no big deal when they call off a date at the last minute that dread that they feel around “ugh I’m so scared to go on this date, but if I cancel my partner will be so disappointed in me” will be smaller. It won’t stand up to the dread of social anxiety. So they are more likely to give in, and now their social anxiety is more powerful. They’re offloading that work onto your understanding. And meanwhile, while it’s fine to miss a date for social anxiety every once in a while, as that keeps happening over the course of your relationship, and as the anxiety gets worse, you feel more and more resentment. “When we were first dating, you went to a ropes course with me! And you’re too scared to go to a drive in movie with me on my birthday? This isn’t fair.” And because you now have set up a relationship where your partner does the best they can and you just have to accept that, you’re just going to suddenly demand they meet you where you need to be or leave them alone, with their anxiety worse than it was before.
Instead, you need to have a relationship where you are clear about what your needs and expectations are with your partner, and you work together to figure out what works best for them to manage their mental illness in a way that allows them to show up for you as a partner. Instead of just “if your anxiety is too bad, you’re going to cancel last minute and that’s outside your control”, it can become “For big events, you’ll decide 24 hours in advance if you’re going to come or if I’m going without you. If it’s a date that you want to back out of for your anxiety, we’ll cancel when you need it, but then I’m not going to spend that day comforting you, I’m going to spend that day doing something that makes me happy and you’re going to plan an equivalent date in the future when you’re feeling better.”
It can feel really really really bad to not sit there and comfort your partner when they’re struggling. And sometimes, they’re in a crisis and you need to drop everything to be there and help them out of struggle. But you need to understand that when your partner struggles with mental illness, their standard normal day-to-day is closer to struggle than yours is. You can not save them from that struggle. And if you try to pull them out of that struggle instead of focusing on how you can go have fun while they can tend to their own struggle, their struggle is never going to get better. Your life will just have more and more and more struggle until you realize that your life will be a lot better without them and you leave them alone worse than you found them.
But that’s not a natural consequence of mental illness. That’s a consequence of you being a codependent with a savior complex instead of a non-enabling supportive partner.
Be there and give affirmation with words they need to hear it again and again just by thinking they will se the act its not gonna happen you need to give them words of affirmation that’s their only love language