“Remember: you can love them, but you cannot fix them.”

Cultivating an understanding relationship with your family about your mental health needs, can feel challenging and isolating. Using therapeutic tools like compassion, understanding can help in reminding you, you are not alone.

Starting a therapeutic journey to improve your mental health can be very difficult to begin. Often it takes resources like courage, motivation, time, and a supportive network to just start the process of finding a therapist let alone maintain once the emotional and trauma processing begins. It can be very challenging for individuals when mental health struggles like anxiety, depression, or history of trauma, are present or active to seek out support.

It is even more challenging when your closest network of family, friends, or chosen family, are not supportive of therapy both intentionally or unintentionally. This could be making hurtful or sarcastic comments about your mental health or the therapeutic process, financial concerns that it is an unnecessary expense, or even projecting trust issues with therapists or mental health professionals.

As you begin your therapeutic work and start to uncover or unravel some of the longstanding family patterns, relationship dynamics, or nonadaptive coping strategies you or those around you employ, it can feel really isolating, discouraging, and even hopeless to create positive change for your mental health.

Many individuals feel the struggle of having close family members misunderstand their mental health or feel unable to give constructive feedback to family members about stuck relationship patterns. It may look like a family member blaming or using a mental health diagnosis against you, to invalidate your experience of a situation. This can cause even more self-shame or blame around your mental health and be counter to the healing process.

Why Might My Family Be Unsupportive?

There could be many reasons why a family member would be unsupportive to your mental health journey both intentionally and/or unintentionally. Here are a few examples:

Stigma

Stigmatization around mental health and receiving support for mental health diagnoses are improving. Through increased education of mental health, shared stories of what struggling with mental health can be and normalizing that just as we have unique physical health, we have unique mental health. However, while it is improving, there are still harmful beliefs, narratives, and stereotypes surrounding people who may struggle with their mental health. These harmful beliefs or narratives could be from the cultural zeitgeist or from religious beliefs. It may be viewed as a weakness to seek support, or that support is only necessary for those with severe mental health issues. People who still hold and carry stigma around mental health may discourage others from seeking therapeutic support.

Lack of Understanding

Family members may not understand what therapy entails, be ignorant or unfamiliar with the process and so discourage others from seeking support. Lack of understanding could come from many areas including:

Personal insecurities or experience: Some family members may have personal insecurities with discussing and identifying their own emotions and mental health and so feel discomfort at the idea of you exploring your own. Or they may have had a negative personal experience with therapy and discourage others from trying it.
Misunderstanding of interconnectedness: Some family units fail to recognize that behavior of one person impacts the reaction and behavior of the family unit. If one family member is struggling with their mental health, all members may be impacted or playing a role in how it is manifesting, often through misunderstanding.
Enabling or avoidance behaviors: Loved ones may unintentionally enable unhealthy coping like distraction or suppression instead of encouraging therapy. They may prefer to avoid confronting difficult emotions that therapy could support.
Control issues: Some family members may feel threatened by the idea of someone seeking outside help and prefer to maintain control over your mental health.
Fear of change: A family member may fear the changes that therapy could bring to the individual or the family unit and may worry about how therapy will impact the relationship dynamic.

How Do I Navigate It?

Depending on the type of lack of support you are encountering from your family unit, close circle of friends, or chosen family, you may choose to seek additional support. But here are a couple helpful and general options to take:

Understand Their Perspective

Compassionately listen: Try to listen with empathy and compassion for where the person is coming from in their perspective. They may be holding on to an old belief, misunderstanding, or fear and so be gentle while imagining what it is like from their perspective. Try to create an open dialogue about what it might be like from their perspective.
Offer education without preaching or pressuring: This can be a challenging balance to strike, but if they seem open at all to learning more about their misconceptions or expanding their own self-awareness, you may offer reputable resources, or even have them chat with a clinician to learn more.

Communicate Your Needs Clearly

Express yourself: Clearly communicate why therapy is beneficial or necessary for you to help support your mental health. Remember this doesn’t have to be a verbal expression! It can be very effective to write a letter or email to ensure you have all your points clearly communicated. It’s helpful here to use “I/my” statements like, “It’s important for my mental health…” or “I feel better when…”
Set boundaries: If conversations become unproductive, or contentious, you can set boundaries with your family members. If you need to set clear, firm boundaries with family members for your mental health that is okay. Remember, boundaries can be temporary! Sometimes it can be helpful to take a break from discussions and let things settle, before approaching them again.
Lead by example: Prioritizing your own needs, mental wellbeing, and self-care is leading by example for your family members. As you change or improve through therapeutic support they will likely notice and that may create a different or improved dynamic.

Find a Supportive Network

This might be online! There are many online communities, support groups, or forums where you can connect with others who may be facing a similar challenge. These can provide valuable empathy or advice on navigating more specific dynamics.
Find allies: Friends, coworkers, or other people within your community who are advocates for your mental health and supportive of your choices will be invaluable as you begin your therapeutic journey.
Talk to your therapist: This is a great topic to bring into therapy if you haven’t already done so. Your therapist can give you specific support to your exact situation, and help you navigate with more creative and unique options.

Give It Patience and Time

Changing attitudes, longstanding patterns, and beliefs take time. Try to hold patience and understanding for those family members who may be experiencing their own sense of stuck-ness with acceptance.

Feeling like your family doesn’t support your mental health or mental wellbeing is a really difficult situation. It can feel isolating, unsupportive, and discouraging. Therapeutic work is challenging enough and while it is ultimately rewarding, feeling isolated at times throughout the journey can be difficult. There are no simple fixes or one-size fits all solutions. But using therapeutic tools to navigate challenging situations, like patience, compassion, understanding, and supportive boundaries, will only make you more adept at utilizing them in other areas of your life. Remember that you aren’t alone on this journey and that you are doing the best you can.

If you are thinking about starting your journey and don't know where to start because of some of the limitations discussed above, we'd be happy to help you navigate. If you are in the state of California and open to 1:1 support, please feel free to reach out and schedule a free 15-minute consultation call with us.