🎭  What it means to have grown up with a parent with mental health issues

At home, your parent's mental health problems became the center of family life.

You may have learned that their mood swings and struggles would dictate the entire household's emotional weather. You absorbed others' emotions like a sponge, constantly tracking your parent's unstable state to predict what version of them you'd encounter each day. Love felt like a lottery—some days you were cherished, others ignored or punished seemingly for the same behavior.

You may have developed an uncanny ability to read the smallest shifts in expression or tone, becoming hypervigilant to emotional changes around you. In your family, your feelings were consistently dismissed, minimized, ignored, or turned against you. Love meant being the stronger one, the caretaker, the one who holds everything together when everyone else falls apart.