What is your story and does it match your reality?

Often times we have a story about what life with our children should look like.  It may be based on our own childhood, values or teachings from our parents, or from observing others around us.  

When you have a child with mental illness or addiction, life with your child may not look like that story. 

And each time you think about the fact that life does not look the way you had hoped or expected, you may feel any number of difficult emotions such as sadness, frustration, upset, disappointment, etc. 

You may look around you at friends, cousins, siblings, and see their child going off to college, getting a job, getting married and even becoming a parent, and become sad because you may feel this would not happen for your child. 

This happened to me. I knew these things weren’t going to be part of my oldest son’s reality due to his illness. I knew I could hold tight to the vision I had and continuously feel sad and even blame myself.  Instead, I chose to change my expectations to match my reality.

Changing my expectations of what life should look like meant I needed to rewrite my story.  My story I likely got from expectations growing up and seeing the experiences of friends’ children. 

I slowly began to believe in, relate to, and accept my new story, and as I did this, my body and mind felt more balanced.

What is your story and does it match what life looks like? 

In my book, Finding Peace amidst the Tears, I not only share the struggles I went through with my oldest son’s mental illness and addiction, I share how I dealt with these challenges and also how I rewrote my story to something that felt true and positive and how this helped me on my journey towards finding peace.  

I’m excited that my book will be out in May! Through sharing my story of the love and loss of my son through his mental illness and addiction, my hope is for my book to help parents on a similar journey feel they are not alone and give them hope for peace and healing and the inspiration to go on.

Sending love and light,

Debbie