Christmas is the worst time of the year. I can only ever hope that the weather stays nice and warm for a long time in the fall, because this also means that the Christmas contexts are pushed further back in their development. For example, the Santa Clauses come into the stores later – at least I think I observed that once. But Christmas remains unstoppable and it strikes with full force every time, even if it knows how to approach subtly.

It’s those four weeks a year when everything comes together, because everyone comes together – except my family. These weeks make it cruelly clear what you don’t have and these facts are slapped in your face with tremendous force – but nobody means any harm! But that is precisely where the power lies, because no blows hurt as much as those that are dealt without thought and with a smile on their lips. But you can’t protect yourself either, the attacks are too varied. Admittedly, however, I have not yet tried the geographical escape to Cuba, so I don’t know whether it would be effective. In short: the “celebration of the family” becomes a debacle for anyone without a family.
Many may cry out at this point and point to their countless holidays that also end in debacle, but they always have the formal choice of whether to attend the family celebration. It is a matter of course for many people to visit their family and perhaps even give each other presents. This self-evident fact hits me in the stomach precisely because it is not questioned. The family is there – period. But I had no choice between no family celebration and a family celebration – whether good or bad – because my family no longer existed.
No family everywhere
After my father’s suicide and my grandmother’s death, only my brother, my grandfather and my mother were left at the table. But my mother was no longer recognizable in her role. She was still present as a human being, but at the same time far from being a sane mother, for example when, with four people at the table, the table was still set for six. The choice between family or not was not given in the sense of the existence of the family. My choice was different and it was between “no family at home” and “no family anywhere else”. This small difference is associated with great emotions for me.
It is easier to cope with blows if you know how to deal with them. This also includes knowing your vulnerable, perhaps already sore areas so that you can protect them better. Of course, this does not prevent the blows, but perhaps (or hopefully) reduces the pain.
A child of mentally ill parents reacts with a struggle to repress, which is close to the breaking point, when it is confronted with its situation and at the same time cannot yet accept and embrace it because it has not yet been able to grieve sufficiently.
So while the whole world seems to be shouting at me that they will (soon) be going to their families and buying presents, that they have families, the first thing that occurs to me is that this is not the case for me. But instead of accepting this as a fact, I feel like I’ve been caught out as “inferior” and fear suddenly passing as a “second-class person”. But this must not happen!
So I fight against the truth and thus also against factual inequality, as if I could do something about it. I just don’t want to accept that I’m being denied something and I tense up inside, as if I’m turning away from my own life. I’m actually afraid of the stigma and a kind of exclusion from the community, but these feelings can’t even make their way through because I try to suppress them in the bud.
The result is a kind of compensation in that I behave particularly actively and particularly loudly – and in turn react with exhaustion. During the Christmas holidays, I feel like I’ve been lifted off the ground. I was there, but never present, and instead I was completely excited and over-excited, but still tried to stay calm. However, I could hardly feel anything, my adrenaline level was so high, similar to exam situations where you are not always fully aware of yourself and feel cold and completely outward-looking, almost hyper-alert. In retrospect, it is often impossible to reconstruct exactly how the exam went, which questions were asked in which order, because the concentration was so high. You only switch to reaction and can no longer indulge in the individual moments.
The gift exchange
For several years now, I have been invited by a family friend to Christmas dinner on the first holiday. That’s a wonderful thing! And yet: I always had mixed feelings when I was there, I was never really happy about the invitation, even though there were people there that I liked and a lot of them. I immediately start to get excited again and feel like I’m being put on display, almost like a guinea pig that everyone is pointing at – even though I know that no one present has that in mind. At the same time, the situation is special because there is a reason why I am being invited. This is not (only) because I am a good friend of the family.
If this were the only reason, several more such people would be invited and present who are not relatives and a festive roast would probably not be enough. Or everyone would invite each other for Christmas. It’s also because I no longer have any relatives of my own and every gesture of friendship and solidarity, however well-intentioned, also makes me aware of my situation!
The worst thing is when everyone gives each other presents: ten people exchange gifts with each other, everyone with everyone else – and someone sits next to them and watches. That is my attitude to life. Something similar happens when a friend is picked up from the soccer field by his father. I, on the other hand, get on my bike (or later in my own car) and ride home alone.
But when it comes to exchanging gifts within the family, there is no alternative way out that could help me find inner peace. In terms of sheer numbers alone, the emotional associations just keep coming at me – I couldn’t escape them. And to make my emotional chaos even more perfect at this moment, the unbelievable happens and my last foothold is pulled out from under my feet: I receive a gift!
Now it’s all over for me. Just a moment ago, I was completely lost in my assumption that I was only serving as an object of contemplation here; that you can be all the happier when others are even worse off; I had the impression that I was more tolerated than wanted, that I was more endured than desired. I was already feeling resentful, I was already settling into the role of the silent sufferer – and now this!
Of course I would also like to be invited in the future and I also like to receive gifts. Nobody should leave me out of concern for my feelings, because at Christmas I would rather have the feelings of a parentless child than (in addition) those of an abandoned and lonely person.
Wishes and needs
But what was Christmas like at home? Because I was only invited later on the first holiday. For a long time, Christmas only consisted of December 24th. During the holidays, I tended to meet up with friends sporadically. In the USA, I started hanging around on certain websites for a long time, where you could register for free and write to the world. Among other things, there was also a kind of bulletin board that was dominated by a different topic every day. One day this topic was “How do you spend Christmas?” – and my contribution was, in the style of the time without capitalization, the following:
“so i’m going home sometime in the afternoon. with my car. my mother will be there. and nobody else.
meanwhile, my brother is somewhere in south-east asia – i don’t know where exactly.
there won’t be any cookies because my mother hasn’t baked any for a long time, but there will still be plenty to eat. to be precise, as much as for 6 people. as if my father, my brother, my grandpa and my grandma were still there. so that means that for the next two weeks we will be eating the same food for the next three days.
(my mother at Christmas around 2002)but i couldn’t bear that, so for the next four weeks my mother will eat the same thing for the next three days.
i bought her a present and i know she won’t have one for me – at least that’s what i assume. We’ll eat and then I’ll give her my present.
maybe later, when i’ve had my first bailey’s, i’ll try to play a song or two on my guitar and maybe she’ll sing along. christmas songs, of course. i’m not good at playing the guitar because i’m actually a drummer. i’d love to play my drums, which are still at home in the basement, but i don’t dare because of the holidays and i don’t feel like suddenly greeting the cops at the front door because some stupid neighbor got upset.
then i sit in front of the tv and wait. i’m waiting for a call from a friend who shares my fate, only in a mirror image way: she lost her mother.
we will meet and say things to each other for the first time that we should have said long ago. we will recognize each other and understand each other and that’s why we won’t go to the meeting of the old school friends who always meet on the 24th in the evening at a friend’s house, because the mood there doesn’t match our mood at all – it never has, only now we will act accordingly for the first time.
i’m going to drink more bailey’s and then drive home half-drunk, by car – to my home, because i can’t sleep at my mother’s, in my old home…
and then comes the first christmas day…”
Because I hadn’t been invited to the family friend’s house at the time, I didn’t know what would happen over the holidays, and although I was expecting to meet up with the friend in question, this didn’t happen either because she had met up with another friend and their conversations were never-ending. But at that time there was a tradition of going to a school friend’s house on Christmas Eve, where many friends would gather late at night.
There they would sit by the fire in the conservatory and living room and talk about the past year, in which they had generally only seen each other a little later, and let the alcohol level rise a little further. So I was in a correspondingly bad, even depressed mood, because now I had a long time to wait after I had already finished eating with my mother at eight o’clock and she had gone back to her bedroom, where she spent most of the day.
She didn’t want to sing either when I started playing the guitar. I thought it would be a nice try and would be in keeping with her almost pedantic urge to follow supposed family tradition. We used to sing songs all the time, my grandma and my mother insisted on it. I never really liked these things, they seemed artificial and even more so with the increase in my mother’s illness.
I and my wishes were not recognized, it was more important to maintain the appearance of a functioning petty bourgeois family. Of course, children can also take a step back for a few minutes to sing at Christmas and wait until this point of the event has been ticked off, but as a disregard for my wishes and needs, this moment also hit a sore spot. I didn’t have the impression that my mother even understood how I felt and why I didn’t like the singing even before my father died.
The incomprehensibility of the illness was then superimposed on this context, such as the superfluous setting of place settings for people who were either not even there or were no longer alive. Or the turning of her head towards the patio door after a few minutes, when her mouth moved as if she was talking to someone. But what does “as” mean here? She was actually talking to someone, in her mind and in her impression she was communicating with other people, other powers that would not leave her alone.
“Great disputants”
At the time when my brother was present and at least our grandpa was still alive, Christmas was one of the few times when we were together at the same table for a longer period of time. Conversations always developed that quickly became technical again because they were mainly about things that were somehow related to our mother’s illness, even if it was only because someone else had to do, think about or pay attention to something that would have been her responsibility if she had been healthy.
The bad relationship with my brother naturally contributed to the fact that these conversations quickly developed into heated debates. But that wasn’t allowed because it wasn’t proper. It was possible to observe a kind of continuity in upbringing over the generations: not only my grandfather (formerly together with our grandmother), but also my mother were immediately on hand to stop these discussions.
At Christmas it was said that you wouldn’t do that at Christmas and on ordinary days it was argued that it wasn’t good table manners. Don’t family arguments tend to be the order of the day at Christmas and are therefore among the majority of events that most families have to contend with as pent-up conflicts are unleashed in the cauldron of family members brought together by Christmas? That may be.
But what matters to me is my family’s inability to deal with conflict. You could almost get the impression that the fear of a breakdown in family ties was hiding behind this. There was only any sign of a ‘culture of discussion’ when our grandfather, as an outside observer, commented on the verbal exchanges between me and my brother or between the two of us as ‘great disputants’.
So even when people spoke to him, either the argument was stifled or he distanced himself from the discussion as such by commenting on the talk, almost in a way that was perhaps not intended to ridicule the whole thing, but at least ridiculed it. Behind this was a pure inability to deal with discussions or conflicts.
I imagine my grandfather’s upbringing as a child was more authoritarian than inclusive. My mother was exposed to similar methods and was probably not exactly a woman of the spoken word. We were a working-class family from the lower middle class.
I once saw a video recording made by a mother and child ward for mentally ill mothers. It showed a comparison of the same mother and child before and a few weeks after the treatment. Before the treatment, a woman was seen standing almost completely apathetic in front of her child. She tried to engage with the baby, or so it seemed, but was unable to establish any empathic contact. The child almost seemed like something meaningless to the mother.
In comparison, the later interaction was much more active and, above all, one had the impression that the mother was also enjoying her newborn. This comparison initially does my mother an injustice, if only because she had somehow managed to look after my brother and me to the extent that we didn’t become psychotic too. So there must have been love, even if it later dried up completely or at least could not develop adequate manners during our puberty. But the image of the apathetic mother illustrates approximately how I felt in retrospect in terms of interpersonal communication, including the actual discussions in our family.
No parental corrective
The almost mechanical stifling of conversation at the Christmas table created a distance between our mother on the one hand and my brother and me on the other. By discussing things in front of a parent, we were looking for a framework in which we could argue and in which, if the worst came to the worst, there was always reliable regulation, but at the same time we were allowed to do so. By arguing, my brother and I actually wanted to get in touch with our mother. We wanted to try out whether we were understood, not necessarily in terms of content, but above all in our need for a granting but also benevolently regulating referee.
Instead, our expectations were disappointed, or rather my expectations, because I can’t speak for my brother. However, I knew from the outset that I would be disappointed. And yet we tried again and again. There was certainly a need and an interest in communicative exchange, but we were also always children looking to satisfy their needs.
Due to our mother’s distance, however, we were left to our own devices, which inevitably led to arguments. Not only did I feel like I was in a vacuum due to the lack of a meaningful and understandable boundary or guideline from an orientation person, but I also had to vent my frustration about this lack of security and the supposed opponent was – unfortunately – already there.
Even good acquaintances are overwhelmed
As the planned meeting with my school friend didn’t take place, I was on my own. I left the house and now had to kill time. I arranged to meet up later in a pub with a friend I knew from primary school. He didn’t want to spend too long with his parents at the 24th, as it will only be possible for him to return to work with the arrival of his brother on 25th would be really festive. This meeting was to be repeated in the following years and it saved me from comparable evenings of being alone until ten o’clock, which I couldn’t wait for.
I had another late-night date with other school friends that year, so I said goodbye to him and wandered through the deserted alleyways of the old town. It was quite warm for the time of year and the wish for a white Christmas had not been fulfilled for years. I walked past my old school and felt like a stranger who had never really been there. At some point, I couldn’t stand it any longer and decided to finally make my way to the parents’ house of the friend where the late meetings took place.
I really wanted to come later, no one ever got there before eleven in the evening, and I was also looking forward to seeing the friend I hadn’t been able to meet up with before. I stood on the doorstep at eleven o’clock sharp, my friend greeted me and as I walked up the stairs to the living room, I realized that I was the first. None of the others had arrived yet.
My friend’s parents were sitting at the almost empty Christmas table and I sat down with them. This constellation inevitably led to a conversation that mainly consisted of answering questions about myself, because after all, I hadn’t seen either of my parents for a long time. But my supposed closeness to them proved to be deceptive, because at some point my father asked how I was and I answered with all openness, telling them about my terrible Christmas, my mother’s illness, the first Christmas without my deceased grandfather and generally about my circumstances, which I was sure they knew about. But they obviously knew nothing.
In any case, the reaction was rather halting, you could even say that the two parents seemed somewhat shocked. That’s understandable, said a friend, you can’t tell someone something like that and certainly not on Christmas Eve! But I thought, when, if not on Christmas Eve, can or may you tell something like that?
For me, my friend’s opinion was nothing more than a superficial attempt to keep his composure, to be tactful so as not to destroy the festive Christmas mood. I hated this attitude because this is exactly how Christmas celebrations always went at home: ceremonial activities were carried out that were out of all proportion to the real conditions.
I didn’t know whether the perceived disproportionality of my statement against the background of an obsessive mood maintenance also applied to those parents. But it was definitely disproportionate, perhaps not in the sense of tactlessness, but probably in the sense of the unexpected.
Perhaps the parents were simply looking for easy conversation and were simply not prepared for an answer of such an open nature. Who wouldn’t remain silent if they were caught on the wrong foot like that? An uncomfortable silence filled the room for a few seconds and I didn’t let it stop me from continuing on the path I had started. Now, I thought, I will no longer be able to back out.
At some point, the new guests released us and I was angry, because once again I felt misunderstood and left alone. This feeling of discomfort stayed with me the whole evening. The icing on the cake came when my boyfriend’s sister’s boyfriend asked me, in his usual cheerful mood, how I was doing. I replied: “Not so good right now” and I somehow knew that this answer would only lead to further disappointment on my part, that it was even a kind of provocation at that moment, because I would have been surprised if it had led to a conversation of an empathetic nature.
And so I was answered with a well-meaning tap on my shoulder: “Well, you’ll be fine, won’t you?” He could probably read it in my eyes, because after that he gave up. But I felt even more like a puppet in a bad puppet show. How should this continue? How was I ever going to be able to deal with my story if the reactions always ended in an overwhelmed withdrawal on the part of the other person? And how is that possible when the others obviously know far too little – less than I thought – about me and are therefore taken by surprise by my statements?
In the case of the parents, it was still surprising for me, because after all, I was here with a very good school friend! This situation certainly corresponded to my attitude to life: others are overwhelmed, can’t understand, perhaps try to help and still fail. This still happens to me today when I talk to close friends about my current situation. Naturally, you want to talk about what is currently on your mind the most. But you have very little idea about that, which is why it keeps you busy. The latest of the latest in my psychosocial problems, so to speak, “the cutting edge”. Who is supposed to keep up if I can’t see through it all myself?
Not a matter of course
Another incident that I experienced with a friend who complained about the inappropriateness of my comments “at Christmas of all times” proves that there are also other moments. At some point, I was able to briefly and concisely explain to him a fundamental connection between my life circumstances and the resulting consequences for my personality and illustrate it with a tangible example. He then replied that he had now understood a good part of my problem for the first time. That was a good feeling for me! But there was also a lot of work behind it in therapeutic sessions. A few years later, this same friend was able to understand much more when he experienced a mania himself. Direct contact with a mental illness opened up his understanding and perhaps also his willingness and interest in conversations with me.
Of course, a natural approach to certain topics can only be achieved through awareness of them. A topic also loses its inappropriateness as a result. Imagine what the conversation on Christmas Eve and the reaction to it would have been like if the background had not been schizophrenia and suicide, but cancer or kidney failure. When dealing with familiar topics as a matter of course, communication seems much easier to imagine.
If we want to approach a healthier approach to “mental illness” for everyone involved, efforts must be made to increase awareness of the topic. This can, one might think, only affect those who are involved, as everyone else does not belong to the group of stakeholders, so it is only a minority interest. But I can only warn against such an attitude, because the number of people affected is far higher than you might think. And what’s more, if you are confronted by someone like me on Christmas Eve, aren’t you also involved?
P.S.: This text is an excerpt from my autobiography “als sei nichts”. I have written a more detailed list of the #copmi figures in Germany in the online forum of the Seelenerbe e.V. association. In short: across all generations, there are around 12-16 million children with a temporarily or permanently mentally ill parent, as well as 9-12 million adult children.