Silent Storms

It's All My Fault: the guilt complex

First, thank you all for your wonderful comments. It is great to hear from all of you, and also to know that I am not alone in this.

A note: to simplify typing (and reading!) I abbreviated "schizophrenia" to "SZ".

Today, we'll address the issue of guilt. Many people in today's world, especially those growing up in extremely religious homes, are riddled with guilt complexes of various kinds. Of course I don't want to malign any religion. Religion can be a wonderful and beneficial thing. It is however unfortunate that guilt often plays such a large part in religion and child rearing. I was no exception. I've been weaned and raised on guilt.

And this translates to my relationship. In the beginning of my relationship with Darling I was bewildered by a variety of things, not least of which was the fact that my marriage seemed to be crashing. And the bad turns of SZ didn't help. When having a relapse for example, Darling would become excessively religious and lay on the guilt trips. He would for example get into my not so rosy past and make me feel lower than as he would put it "shark shit" (an expression he picked up in the Navy).

Maybe the guilt was a good thing. I did a fair amount of as-honest-as-possible soul searching. Was all this really my fault? Why was he having relapses? What could I do to change this? This is the kind of guilt that many partners of SZ sufferers live with on a daily basis. Since we want so much to help, we tend to take the blame for everything, even adding to the guilt already caused by the situation itself.

The good news and the bad news is that nothing is anyone's fault. The great sinner is the illness; over which neither the SZ sufferer nor the partner has any control. So we can absolve ourselves. And we can do our best. And we can try to understand.

The manifestations of the illness is no more the partner's fault than the consequences of cancer or heart disease.

On the other hand, there are steps we can take to ensure stability, which is crucial to a mentally ill person's life. We can work on ourselves to be loving and secure instead of angry and afraid. We can help our partners to realize the importance of taking their meds regularly and keeping their stress levels low. We can find out everything possible about the illness in order to understand and to help. Feeling guilty, while it could lead to better self-knowledge, is hardly helpful to the situation.

So rather than guiltily trying to establish what it is we could have done to trigger the latest relapse, let's try to keep our partners' lives as stable as possible, and ourselves as happy as possible.

Posted by cathi at March 4, 2004 09:38 AM | TrackBack