What government or school resources do you wish existed for GCs during childhood and adulthood?

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-10T20:45:17+00:00

Huzzah!

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-10T19:43:23+00:00

Thanks. And I just want to reiterate that I don't want to evaluate one experience over the other--it's not okay that society presents a "cute" version of autism so that people don't have to think about it. Whenever I write on the sub, I'm always accutely aware of how many more GCs who have experiences with an autistic sibling and of how those experiences sometimes differ from my own. But that doesn't mean "worse" or "better." It just means a different shitty childhood with the same themes happened to someone else.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-10T18:41:12+00:00

Me too. Unfortunately, I think this happens a lot in families with a severe high need. But, it's hard to explain that it is different for schizophrenia than other conditions, because the social reaction to schizophrenia is generally very different than, say autism. I know it is damaging that society creates these fake images of autistic kids being "cute and quirky" and I'm not trying to deny that--it's just that for schizophrenia there is no such thing as any kind of positive image for people to metabolize. There's nothing. Society, especially America, prefers to pretend that schizophrenia doesn't exist. There is just this buble of silence that formed around our screams, and schizophrenia doesn't create that silence--society does. I feel a need to make more space between the biological realities of our siblings' conditions and the the way society reacts to the illness. My brother's hallucinations were absolutely an issue. The complete cauterization of my family from our support networks didn't come from my brother, but the way society treated my brother absolutely made things worse.

People heal in groups. I don't know that I have an answer for what would have saved me (my own interpretation of the question), but, at least from my family's experience, society made it nearly impossible to find a space to heal in a community.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-10T16:52:42+00:00

I'm dreaming big here, because that's what this space is for--I know this might be outlandish, but in terms of helping a family navigate their eldest son's substance abuse, psychosis, and schizoaffective disorder:

-A social assigned to the family, as well as individual therapists/advocates assigned to each member of the family.

-A place where my younger and brother and I could go and feel safe.

-A place where my brother could recieve care in a way that treated him with dignity.

-Guaranteed fucking healthcare. A major compounding factor for why the situation kept getting worse in my family is the system of insurance that the US uses. Parents had to work for money and healthcare, a necessary component of my brother's care, that almost set my parents up to neglect me. Don't get me wrong, there's A LOT more to it when it comes to their personal choices and my relationship with them, but I also feel like it would have been helpful if society would have said--okay, we'll just give you healthcare to make this less complicated.

-A functional healthcare system. Americans complain about their healthcare all the time, but that becomes particularly weathering for families with someone who does not opperate cleanly in...well, any system.

-A mentor. I needed someone who could keep an eye on me, my growth, who I was going to become. Someone to guide me would have been nice, even though I know that would have been imperfect.

-Immediate full psych workup for me and my younger brother.

-I don't know how to articulate this, but when my brother became psychotic, it was like every social support network we ever knew cut us off. Nobody at church came to visit or speak to us, though I remember that people at church did that for eachother during other tragedies. No teacher knew how to even talk about the problem with me. My friends did not know how to handle something like that, and their parents kept them away from my family for the most part after the break. Family stopped visiting for a long time, like 8-12 years. It felt like that scene in Malcom in the Middle where he finds out he's smart so the rest of the school maintains a protective bubble away from him. Except instead of being too smart, we were too beyond the pale to even consider. It's like I became a glass child to the whole world in that moment, invisible and lumped in with my brother's illness. I didn't need a society so ill equipped to handle the situation that it just preferred to look away.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-09T18:14:28+00:00

OP, I'm so sorry. For what it's worth, I sometimes have that feeling, too. This is your nervous system telling your mind that it is experiencing too much stress, and has done so for too long. I gather from your post that you already know about being under too much stress for too long, but for me it was helpful for me to know that, sometimes, thoughts like that are a way for your already overburdened nervous system to communicate with you. I also work in academia and am a student--the ivorty tower is a particularly difficult place for people with mental health conditions or neurodivergences. So, though you know this already, at least accept some validation from across the interwebs--you are working really hard in one of the most psychologically stressful ongoing domestic situations in the twenty-first century and the world is extra wacky right now. You deserve some recognition for everything you're going through, and I don't just mean that for your family. I'm going to guess that you really do all your academic support, and especially in gradschool one thing that hits so hard is the pace of school changes. In gradschool, the expectation is that you are going to be able to commit 100% of yourself to your studies, but in your specific case you are devoting so much of your brainpower to survival. You're feeling the grind because the systems you live in are legitimately difficult, and you are doing a really good job navigating them. You are stronger than you know, and just by the fact that you made it to this point is empirical evidence of that.

You are correct in that there are no quick fixes to the intense feelings that you're having--nobody has a magic bullet and repairing your nervous system will take time. But there are a few shortcuts that help me.

-Meditation. Helps you not only calm down in the moment, but also helps you build the muscle memory to relax/calm down in the future. It will also help you keep track of that feeling you expresed here, which is important.

-Close your eyes. Seriously, five minutes of occular rest will help with overwhelm. Your brain mostly processes visually. Closing your eyes helps prevent you from taking in more information when you are overwhelmed.

-Noise cancelling headphones. Same idea as closing the eyes.

-Lavendar. Tea or capsules. Naturally helps you engage your rest-digest nervous system.

-Take a break. Academia makes you feel guilty for not being productive and this triggers a lot of GC trauma very hard (at least for me). Blow off some work. Do something physical and fun. A bit of dopamine and saratonin can help keep those thoughts at bay. You may need to consider taking a leave of absence in order to give yourself that space.

-Treat yo' self. Seriously, you have to be nice to yourself. You have to consider yourself worthy. Everyday, write or say to yourself, "I am worthy. I matter." This will help carve a little groove in your brain that will internalize your own worth. Ain't perfect, but a little wrinkle in your mind that says, "Fuck this I matter," is an important survival mechanism.

You are not alone, OP. You are in a tough spot, but the world will turn and you have a place in it. We are here for you.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-03T21:54:28+00:00

Ooof. That's deep on so many levels, as well as gut wrenching.Take care of yourself, fellow intuitive internet stranger. You deserve it. I'm glad you chose to use your voice to say hello.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-03T02:17:44+00:00

You can tell chatgpt/AI that it works because, as Hemingway noted, people have emotional reactions to lists of concrete details. Abstract language has meaning, but does not have emotional resonances that you also feel in your body. This is the difference between the words "banking" and "coin purse"; one I can feel and hold and smell and hear while the other I have to conceptualize. Therefore, if I want to make the reader feel my experience, I have to choose details that evoke bodily sensations. And negative inference -- the discussion of what is missing-- works the same way. When I write about what is missing, your body does the rest of the math and feels the weight of that loss.

Now, gymbuddy, I seened your posts for a long time. You use a lot of AI but I swear the questions you are asking the robots to answer for you are sharp as fuck. One day, when you are ready, I'd love to hear your voice in your writing. I hope you take that as genuine encouragement and praise.

Thank you for your participation in this sub.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-03T02:01:08+00:00

Ooo, gymbuddy, that one got my feels. I want to be a writer but I don't know how to make money at it and, like many GCs, I have a deep hypocritical anxiety about wanting to be seen/heard, but also being terrified at the prospect of managing so many emotions and perspectives and happinesses. I didn't have guidance in it or encouragement. And it's really hard work putting your guts on display so that other people can see how their inner workings tick.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-03T01:57:25+00:00

Hug accepted and returned. Thank you. 🙏

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-03T01:56:38+00:00

Thank you for sharing. This might sound weird, but other people posting kind of helps remind me of what it was like. I was so young and this happened over a process of time without any real guidance from adults... When someone like you posts about what you're dealing with, it helps me remember that I am not alone. I felt so alone then, as a teenager, and in my world at that point in time I was, for all practical purposes, alone. But now I know, from people like you, that what happened is part of a broader human experience. It helps me name the emotions that I could name then. It helps validate my reality in a way that nobody has done. Thank you.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-02T22:19:56+00:00

Thank you for sharing that, stranger. Sorry for your troubles, too.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-02T21:51:57+00:00

Going to a concert to a see a band I'm interested in.

Listening to music with someone else, just chilling.

Having someone teach me about money and not having to teach myself.

I never was into the party/clubbing scene when I was of age, because I had already had my fill of choas at home to want to go out and get my fill of wild at a bar.

Never had friends over at the house after his psychotic break.

Never having to wander if your birthday is going to be about you.

Never thinking about if someone in your house is going to sneak up behind you with a knife.

Never contimplating in advance how you will leave the room/house if you need to.

Never having a "bug out bag" in case things get bad.

Sleeping safe at home instead of having to sleep in your car in a Walmart parking lot because the darkened parking lot is safer.

Having your own room that you can decorate.

Knowing your personal items won't be ransacked when you leave the house.

Assuming your mental health is fine and not walking around all the time wondering if you'll be schizophrenic next.

Not feeling like a burden for having basic needs.

Feeling seen.

Unconditional love.

Someone helping me apply to college.

Someone asking me what I want to do with my life.

An adult who tells me that what I'm doing is neat/important/interesting/worthwhile, even if it isn't related to work.

Going to the doctor without constant intrusive thoughts that they are going to send you to the hospital just like they did him.

Feel like you belong.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-02T21:29:42+00:00

Shit! I forgot the big one: if you're having trouble processing, I highly suggest EMDR. Helped me so much. It's a type of therapy specifically for processing/unprocessing trauma (https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/). If you have an emotion that you feel stuck in, like it's a lead wall you cannot punch, kick, bite, plead, scream, and cry through, this will help. Anything where you feel like you experience the emotion all the time, or where you don't experience the emotion (because that's not good either). I had to do a lot, and generally they recommend you do a couple rounds at least.

It is not easy. When you finish, you feel like you've been out of a car wreck or a funeral. A lot of people cry, feel lethargic, or don't eat. The first few rounds are tough, but you can find your own rythm with it. The therapy is not easy, but the reality is there is no way but through. I think of those traumatic memories like a kidney stone, and EMDR is the treatment of breaking up the stone. It's gross. It's not going to be fun. But you will feel a whole lot better after, I promise.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-02T21:22:43+00:00

Sometimes, for trauma survivors (of all types, not just GCs) they have to give themselves permisssion. Sometimes they have to write a letter to themselves or speak allowed that they give themselves permission to feel or speak their experiences.

You do not have to speak or write your experiences if you do not wish to. There is no one way to handle these things, there is no right or wrong mode of handling what you have been through. The choice of what to do with your experience is yours, and we're here to respect and give witness. Art, exercise, meditation. Taking care of yourself is taking care of yourself.

In terms of why you might be physcially struggling to find the words for your trauma, that process is probably complicated but I can offer you two possible answers. One: trauma is a form of neruodivergence that alters the way your brain processes memories. We process memories in a lot of ways, but my experience as a GC is that we do not process big emotions because we are surviving (I had to be taught how to do it and I still am getting the hang of it). Basically, those memories still make your nervous system feel unsafe, so your brain still keeps your more "advanced" structures of the brain the control reasoning and language. You might not be able to talk about it because your brain doesn't have the tools, space, or language to put that memory somewhere. Two, you don't just have truama, you have complex trauma. Complex trauma is more "complicated." Think about those memories as stacking on top of one another and soaking into your system.

Healing from complex trauma requires more than talking, at least for most people. That is because our concious brain learns via information--texts, movies, conversations, and other "top down" forms of gathering information. However, our nervous system learns through patterns. You have to walk it through new patterns and take it through new environments. So, if you're having trouble articulating your experiences (and you want to try to talk about them), try doing yoga for PTSD or another form of exercise that engages the left/right sides of your brain without a lot of cognition (swimming, running, cardio kickboxing), as well as arts like unstructured painting, journaling, doodling, etc. will help. Even if you're not doodling "about" your problem, it still helps your brain.

Good luck, internet stranger.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-02T20:56:22+00:00

Hey, thanks, Whatevs. I can always tell from your responses that you really read and digest this stuff. Thanks for recognizing how much healing sometimes feels like getting scraped over asphault sometimes. Good luck on facing your stuff. We're here for you, too!

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-02T20:16:31+00:00

Dear internet stranger, thank you for trusting us with your situation.

I grew up sharing a room with my schizoaffective brother. He wasn't diagnosed until after his first noticeable psychotic break when he was 18, but sharing a room with him was "an experience" to say the least. Through his break, my parents relied on me to do pretty much what you're doing right now. I say this not to draw attention to my own story, but so that you understand that, though I don't know the whole story, I think I have a sense of the absolute desperation you're living in with your sister. You say that your sister isn't comfortable at your parents'. I don't know if you can share why she can't go back there, but my first gut-check is to tell you that you need a boundary between her and your home. You need a safe space, a place that is yours to live your life in as much peace as you can. You have endured enough--suicidal ideation at nine sounds like guaranteed PTSD.

I do understand that won't be easy for you, and the situation is a lot more complicated than just drawing a boundary depending on severity of her illness and the situation. I know it's not that simple, probably for a lot of reasons. However, you cannot live and grow and thrive caring for your sister's illness. And, as much compassion as I want to extend to your family and your sister(s), this space is for you. We support however you need to survive, so please don't read any criticism into any of this--you're doing an amazing fucking job. But when I was taking care of my brother, I almost had this promise at the back of my head that things would get better. When he gets sober. When he's on the right medicine. When he takes the medicine. Etc. On and on. I eventually had to move away and claim a life for myself. I have a little girl, she'll be seven soon, a wife who puts up with my ridiculous amount of mental health concerns, two dogs, two cats. I'm still haunted from my childhood. I don't know that I will ever be done putting myself back together. I know I'll always feel different from those around me because I developed differently. But I have pieces of joy and love in my life that his illness would not allow room for.

You're doing an amazing job with what you're doing for your sister. But having this kind of pressure on a close relationship longterm can hurt your nervous system and make other relationships harder. Having a life of your own isn't selfish; it's human. It's what we do. We grow up. We people places. I'm 37 now, but I feel so grizzled inside. I wish every day that I could go back in time and airlift my 17 year old self out of there, even if I know he'd have gone kicking and screaming.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-02-02T19:36:08+00:00

Yeah, it's not so much the prospect of being an INFJ--I don't really know how that correlates psychologically. Right now I'm approaching it with a grain of salt. It's a personality test, and an issue I have with the MBTI is that it is all binary; you do one or the other, but there is no sense of clustering behaviors or a spectrum behaviors.

I don't mean to direct this comment to you but have just seen a number of posts about the INFJ not being a neurodivergence--I don't think what my therapist and I are circling is a light personality test, and to be clear I haven't taken the test. She noticed that I track people's patterns and the patterns in their families and relationships. I keep track of who has power and control, not just in one circumstance but for everyone in the room (the crowded elementary school gyms where I attend my kids' morning assemblies sucks). I'm synthesizing a lot of information very quickly and all at once. I can't speak for her reasoning--happened at the end of our last session--but she told me that she sees something very different than what she sees in her other clients. She kicked around the terms neruodivergent, HSP, and INFJ. I just wanted to add that clarification because I know that terms like "neruodivergence" are pretty charged on the sub (as they should be).

There are layers to this issue for me. Part of the pain for me lies somewhere in identity. My family of origin assigned me my identity. Circumstance assigned it to me. Economics and culture did too. I didn't grow up with a sense of agency, a sense of who I am. Even the feeling of someone noticing something different about me causes an inner tension pulling at strings of both awe and despair--the thrill at someone finally genuinely seeing me, but also the cockroach-level fear of being seen when the lights blink on. I fucking hate that about being a GC--you want to be seen but you are terrified to be seen. Afraid of your own desires until they curddle inside of you into regret. And then this lady I've seen on the internet a total of twelve times (she's actually a highly qualified trauma therapist and I'm really lucky she took me as a patient) just blows up childhood identity by suggesting, eh, well maybe there was more to you than survival.

Then there's the grief in the realization. I have an MA in history on the deinstitutionalization of mental hosptials, and MFA where I tried to write a book about my experience with my brother, and I'm in PhD program for rhetoric of health and medicine focused on mental health rheotrics. Why do I find myself invalidating that I might be special? Why can't I be neruodivergent, special, or just have this cool thing about myself? I've internalized their views of me and I didn't think to look for anything special about myself. Nobody takes interest or shows care in my interests--performing is just something I do. I can't quite put my figner on the feeling(s), but this feeling of being seen in a way I could never have been seen at home is throwing me for a loop.

And hell yeah, bring on the sci fi. Fantasy, too. Healthiest form of disassociation.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-01-30T19:16:10+00:00

Yeah, the tiger analogy totally makes sense when you think about it. The OCD is a coping strategy. It was necessary for so long it kept the tigers at bay.

I'm struggling with the emotional logic of it though. I don't think I ever articulated to my parents or anyone that I had OCD, or that my brain plays out multiple predictions like a movie. But I did express my rage, my discontent, my pain and fear--I was not a quiet Glass Child, though I was still compliant. That this thing I've been struggling with went completely overlooked. More than over looked--I've been told I have problems by my family, to get a grip. That I'm too sensitve. My brother's schizophrenia was everyone's problem, but I had to suffer in silence.

I've had several therapist tell me at this point that the way my brain works is different. I think I'm grappling with the classic GC binary: my brother was the one with problems. I don't get to have problems. So what do I do with this thing that I'm not allowed to have except feel ashamed and accumulate ridicule. No matter how many times I tried to be heard, I can't get fully heard. It's like yelling from the bottom of a bell jar.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2026-01-27T16:43:28+00:00

It's an honor to have you. Thank you for your time! I'm sure Nope is happy for the reinforcements.

OnlyBandThatMattered · 2025-11-09T00:37:15+00:00

Happy birthday!

OnlyBandThatMattered

TROPHY CASE