I’m taking it slowly as far as telling friends and family about my mental health problems and the extent to which they have shaped my life.
I’m pretty transparent about the fact that I have them if we’re going to have a conversation with personal sharing involved.
For the longest time I didn’t know I had issues, so it makes sense that a lot of people in my life don’t know. Even my therapist took a while to connect the dots as my symptoms weren’t obvious on the outside.
There’s the family of origin which birthed these problems. I haven’t been in much contact and when there is contact I don’t talk about my struggles because it doesn’t feel safe to do so. That is for sure applicable to group family gatherings. With that said, I’m starting to move towards getting to know my family members individually and depending on how that goes I may share more about what’s going on with me. That’s a journey and a process in and of itself. If a particular family member has not been directly part of the problem, there isn’t a safety concern with sharing. However it might take longer for me to open up and it helps a lot if they go first (that actually happened very recently with an in-law and it was great).
With friends it really depends on their level of interest and understanding. There are two kinds of people in the world when it comes to geeking out over mental health. The ones who geek out and find the subject fascinating and the ones who would rather not talk about it at all. If my friend shows signs of being the geeking out kind, then I’m more than happy to share quite a bit and also listen to her experiences. If she’s the other kind, then there’s really no point in me talking about it with her unless for whatever reason I feel it’s important to educate her, and then I may or may not share my own experience. It would depend a lot on how the conversation went.
With coworkers it’s an interesting dynamic. My boss knows I’ve struggled with the effects of trauma and abuse and I’ve had open conversations about that with him and he’s been very understanding and kind. A few of my coworkers know a bit. But more often than not time and focus constraints make it hard to get into it too much. Usually I’m interacting with them for a work related matter and so that’s what we focus on. And similar to with friends, there’s also the level of interest each one may or may not have that would need to be taken into account. My boss actually trained to be a therapist before becoming a priest so I know he would be interested and empathetic and he’s always responded with a lot of compassion and has never acted like he was worried about my job performance or anything.
With everybody else I might encounter it really depends on their demonstrated level of interest as well as the kinds of things they themselves share with me.
When I first began to realize I had mental health issues (even before I knew fully what they were) I felt like I needed to tell people, explain to people what was going on with me. Now I feel like I have plenty of support including online right here, and enough people know that I can reach out when I really need support. Not everyone needs to know. It’s probably better to have a few people in my life I feel close to who don’t know, because that helps me remember that even with some mental health challenges I am a normal human being. Not everything in my life revolves around my mental health challenges.