continued learning

The revelations continue and I so want to thank my friends who have offered support and encouragement as I move through this journey.
I have been reading the book, "Surviving Schizophrenia" by E. Fuller Torry and it has been enlightening and very painful. When it gets painful, I put it down and let the tears flow...
Sometimes it feels as if your breath is completely taken away...
I'm glad to have FINALLY become responsilbe as a sister and learn about how difficult life has been for my brother. It is so painful to come to terms with this reality of mine, of ours.
I found an article, that once I began to read, had me in tears... I could not believe how very true these words rang to describe my life up to this point...

Department of Public Health and Primary Health Care, Division for Nursing Science, Bergen, Norway. Kjell.Kristoffersen@isf.uib.no

The purpose of this study is to identify central aspects of feelings in relation to the experience of being a brother or sister of someone who suffers from schizophrenia. The study makes use of a hermeneutical method for the collection of data as well as for the systemizing and interpretation of data. The participants in the study were 16 siblings of persons with diagnosed schizophrenia. In total 80 interviews were done, with an average length of 50 min. A theory of interrupted feelings was developed within the tension between empirical data and preunderstanding.

Mixed feelings of grief, hope, anger, guilt and shame are interrupted by four interrelated factors: ambiguous loss, the fluctuating nature of the illness, an inner prohibition of feelings and the tendency of others to invalidate the feelings. The interruption may lead to a lonely and painful experience which is difficult both to process for oneself and to share with others.

This last part explains so much of what I began to feel in my teenage years and early 20's... I think it was so overwhleming that I gave up friendships and important relationships merely for the simple fact that I could not figure out how to tell people in my life that I felt like I was drowning... I also did not see a reason to bother folks with this... it was my issue and I should have figured it out... to be honest, I was also afraid of the judgments... sure you can judge me, but my brother, no way... wouldn't have it for anything...