The Grief Nobody Tells You About

An honest conversation about parenting teens with mental health challenges

The night my daughter told me she was suicidal, I curled up on the couch and sobbed.

I didn’t realize it then, but that was the beginning of my own grief journey.

It’s only in hindsight that I can trace the ways grief colored my family’s year of crisis. Recently, as I was a guest on a podcast, the host Tracie asked, “How did you handle the news about your daughter’s mental health breakdown? Did you go through the stages of grief?”

Tracie’s question made me pause.

I wonder how many of us are conscious of what’s happening inside our hearts when our child is in a mental health crisis. Instinctively, we often focus all our energy on our child’s needs.

We may not realize the deep grief that follows parents like us. When I learned that parents raising children with serious mental illness experience grief similar to those of parents whose children have died,¹ it resonated.

Here’s what grief looked like for me, in stages such as denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance.

The Manager

It’s easier to slip into denial when you are constantly busy. I’m a Type A personality who loves to solve problems. So when my daughter first disclosed her depression and anxiety, my first instinct was to take action. On the one hand, that was absolutely necessary. My daughter had been carefully tucking severe depression under a black cloak, successfully posing as a “just a moody teenager” during the pandemic. Once she revealed the truth, I knew she desperately needed help now. It was a matter of life and death.

So I immediately became her case manager. What did she need? How would I line up all the professionals like chess pieces on a board? How would I partner with the school to alleviate the crushing academic pressure? How could I learn as much as I can, as fast as possible? I know many parents who feel like they are racing to understand how to help their kid in crisis, with an endless task list.

It’s even harder if our kid needs significant parental supervision. When Ellie’s treatment team asked us to watch her for fifteen hours a day, I felt like I had stepped back into parenting a newborn. Except I was parenting a teen who was antagonistic, deceptive, and withdrawn, and there was no break. You cannot hire a babysitter for a severely depressed, bulimic teenager so that you can go to the gym.

What I couldn’t see at the time was that my case manager role also served a darker purpose. It enabled me to stay in denial, emotionally. Of course, I felt glimpses of sadness when I explained my daughter’s condition to a clinician or school administrator, but mostly, I kept my case manager hat on. When you’re doing business, there’s not much room for sobbing. It also gave me a false sense of control over an impossible situation. The act of sprinting through recovery tasks left me breathless enough to escape the tender realization that my daughter had an illness that could destroy her.

Even with that, I remember moments of outright denial. One afternoon, I assumed maybe Ellie wasn’t feeling as depressed anymore because she hadn’t mentioned it. I hoped perhaps a few weeks of therapy had brought more peace, even a sense of small resolution. When I mentioned to Ellie that it seemed like she was doing better, she looked at me with a mixture of pity and frustration. That would not be the last time that I erroneously assumed she wasn’t as sick as she really was.

The Anger Stage: Blaming Ourselves

Even though we might try to avoid or deny our pain, it always resurfaces. Sometimes grief manifests as frustration, irritability, or even rage. My husband and I took our anger out on ourselves and twisted it with shame.

The dark side of my Type A personality means I don’t handle failure lightly. Throughout my kids’ lives, I had become accustomed to messages from the school and our community about how wonderful and successful my children were. Translation: My husband and I were amazing parents! Watching my daughter’s mental health plummet alongside her grades and her functioning threatened that glowing perception of our parenting skills.

I asked myself, “How could this happen? Clearly, I have failed as a parent if my daughter is sick. This must be my fault.”

A unique overlay for me: I have thirty years of recovery from eating disorders. The last thing I wanted was to pass this illness on to my daughter. So I tried to instill healthy practices around food for my children. I was adamantly against negative body talk. I wouldn’t even let my daughters play with Barbies because they promoted unrealistic body image stereotypes. When Ellie was in elementary school, I worried about her eating habits (she was an extremely picky eater, later diagnosed with ARFID). So I asked a therapist friend to coach me on how to feed Ellie wisely. But despite my best efforts, Ellie developed an eating disorder.

Shame closely followed. Our society loves to promote Instagram-worthy family moments: the poised portrait, the grinning teen at the awards ceremony, the gleeful family vacation with the Eiffel Tower in the background. In our despairing moments, I compared our family to those images and wondered, what’s wrong with us?

Isolation added to our shame. For a while, I believed no one could understand what we were going through. When other moms chattered about her son winning a musical competition or the whims of a soccer coach, I couldn’t articulate our alternate reality of school refusal, bed bound depression, and food battles. My daughter was so ashamed that she didn’t even want me to tell Grandma about her struggles. I avoided the topic with everyone except my inner circle.

If Only

My husband and I spent too much time wondering what we could have done differently to prevent our daughter’s mental health crisis. You could call this the bargaining stage - when we try to rewrite history with a different outcome. We criticized ourselves. I blamed him when I wasn’t blaming myself. It was easier to be angry at ourselves than to express anger at our daughter, who was already so fragile.

We also bargained with God: please heal her! If I pray on my knees for her every morning, will you please help her? While I believe in God’s goodness and the necessity of prayer, I don’t think you can solve a mental health struggle with a plea-bargain with God. Healing is more mysterious and more nuanced than that. Sometimes I also yelled at God: How could you allow this to happen to our daughter? Where are you?

Weeping in the Forest Preserve

Entering into the genuine sadness around my daughter’s condition felt like deep, guttural devastation. When I was away from my daughter, I felt despondent.

Once, I took a walk on a freezing wintry afternoon on a forest preserve path, overwhelmed with despair. I couldn’t imagine one more day of fighting to feed her according to her nutritionist’s food plan, which she resisted with the stubbornness of a determined mosquito. This beautiful, talented, creative teen, whom we had always adored, wanted to kill herself.

Photo by Choi Chulho on Unsplash

So I ignored my frozen fingers and kept walking, without a soul in sight. The winter forest itself was like a metaphor: all the leaves had died, the trees were brown and barren, the lake hard and frozen. I screamed again and again until my throat felt hoarse. I stomped the ice into slivers as tears gushed down my face. I felt such despair that I almost wanted to join Ellie in self-destruction. Thankfully, a dear friend called at just the right time. Her comfort brought me back from the edge.

Those devastating, weeping moments sometimes emerged when I least expected them. They often left me exhausted and tender.

What I Know Now

Eventually, our family therapist helped us move into the final stage of grief: acceptance. She helped us reframe the questions away from self-blame and analysis of the past. Instead, we reoriented to the present and the future: how could we help our daughter heal, day by day?

When I released the stigma of mental health issues, I also let go of shame. Education through therapists and books normalized mental health issues for me. About 9% of Americans will struggle with an eating disorder in their lifetime.² Apparently, one in five adults struggle with mental health issues each year.³ We aren’t alone. The more I’ve shared our story, the more I’ve found companions on the journey - some who’ve offered us hope with their stories of healing and some who needed our arms to carry them.

Over time, I accepted that an eating disorder is part of Ellie’s story and a part of who she is, in the same way that she has beautiful wavy hair and a brilliant mind (super proud of how she’s currently acing college science classes at a well-respected university). She may always be more sensitive to mental health struggles, but she’s also beautifully sensitive to the needs of the marginalized and oppressed.

Another part of acceptance includes the realization that mental health struggles often linger. Recovery looks circular rather than linear, like a rollercoaster rather than a straight train ride. Lapses, even relapse, are part of the process and don’t necessarily mean backward movement. Sometimes progress is two steps forward, one step back. Relapse can be a moment for learning and growth, even though it’s painful and discouraging. It’s countercultural to embrace stories without an immediate or clear happy ending. But that doesn’t mean the recovery story is wrong. Instead, we may need to revise our expectations of what “good” recovery stories look like.

Reach Out

If you’re grieving, whether for a newly discovered mental health issue or for the child who has struggled for years, my heart goes out to you. You’re not alone - I see you. I encourage you to reach out for connection.

Later in the podcast, Tracie asked how I found support. Eventually, I found companions who walked with me in grief. Beyond my inner circle girlfriends, I found others who had walked the journey themselves: moms whose daughters were also struggling with eating disorders, a therapist who had walked with his son through drug addiction. Companions couldn’t heal my daughter or lift my grief, but they made it less lonely.

I’d love to hear from you. What has helped you navigate grief in the parenting journey?

If you’d like to listen to the podcast episode, I was recently a guest on Single Christian Women Speak with Tracie Lobstein — you can listen to the full conversation here.

Grateful for your companionship on the journey,

P.S. If something here resonates with you, please tap the little ♡. It offers “social proof” and lets others know there’s something useful here. Thanks!

1. https://umaine.edu/news/2023/02/umaine-study-illuminates-grief-of-parents-of-children-with-serious-mental-illness/

2. https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/statistics/

3. https://www.nami.org/mental-health-by-the-numbers/