How Does Schizophrenia Affect Our Relationship?

do you have notes for this not really cool so are you introducing this or i don't know we haven't really talked about anything that's good it'll be fresh yeah yeah authentic hi everyone so you may notice that our set looks a little bit different today and that is because i have my partner rob here with me today we've decided to do a series that we're hoping to do where we talk more about how schizophrenia has affected our relationship or continues to affect our relationship um so maybe a bit of a background on the progress of our relationship so we met in 2018 and dated for a year before we got engaged we got married in the summer of 2020 pandemic wedding so that was fun um and then we had a child together in april of 2021 and we also had two kids from your previous relationship as well who we also parent um so that's kind of the quick synopsis of the progression of our relationship um so i don't know do you want to dive right into it how do you think schizophrenia has affected our relationship so it must have been like what like the third date where you kind of like took me for a cookie and coffee and were like buttered him up with a cookie yeah you know you approached it delicately and told me that you had schizophrenia and that he managed it with medication and i like i think he was pretty open to it like at the time and i was curious and did a bunch of research and um you know i think to be honest like we kind of joke about this a little bit but like how we like catfished each other don't share that why not so you know yeah you can manage it with medication but it's it's not like you can manage everything with medication it does affect your life in our relationship and then the other side of the like catfishing thing was just like my kids acted like really cute and like angels and then you know as soon as you moved in it was kind of like the glazer off and they're still sweet but they're real children you know they're not like these angelic little chicks they did a really great job of like stealing the deal you know they did yeah yeah they really made me fall in love quickly um but in terms of the schizophrenia i may have downplayed it a little bit by being like oh yeah i completely manage it with medication that i think it's hard to actually convey what it's like to live with and manage an illness like schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia to someone on a third date and i'm also terrified of sharing this and so i'm wanting to present it as nice and with a ribbon on top as possible kind of as a discreet thing not like oh this is actually an ongoing conversation this dictates my life you buckle up like you know that's not really what you want to convey on a third date right i understand that so sure maybe i catfished a little bit in that regard but how do you think it has affected our relationship hmm i mean i think that it's affected our relationship in a ton of different ways like um and i think often it's difficult to like separate our relationship from the illness it's just kind of like part of it in terms of like i mean we talk about when we deal with conflict and i feel like it's very much like present when when we're when we're dealing with conflict in terms of like like when symptoms happen and or like if we're if we're in conflict a relationship conflict then symptoms flare up and you know kind of vice versa i think that's something that that's kind of tricky is that i don't like outwardly show that i'm symptomatic very often or like it's kind of hard for other people to know if i'm symptomatic and sometimes it's hard for me to know if i'm symptomatic because it just is so entwined into how i process the world and so trying to like separate that is almost an impossible feat in terms of separating what part of my thought process is me and what part of my thought process is affected by my schizoaffective disorder that's kind of impossible to do and so then again i was saying like it's hard for you to see when i'm symptomatic and so it's even more difficult to separate those things and know this is this is a presentation of her illness as opposed to i don't understand it like it kind of is more like i don't understand what she's doing i can't make sense of this and it's like it's very much stuck in the it's hard to like take account of the fact that my illnesses sometimes i remember like especially early on um in our relationship kind of taking things personally yeah like if you like i think that i would feel like you were mad at me for something or whatever if you were having like flat affect or you know that kind of thing and it took a quite a while to kind of break out of that that feeling like you were mad at me for something and that's why you were kind of brushing me off or like that kind of thing i think you still have a hard time with you like when i'm experiencing flat affect i i like i sense it more from rob than i do for myself like i don't pick up on the fact that i have flat affect until i sense that he's behaving differently around me and he's kind of like thinking something's wrong and you often ask that you're like what's wrong what's going on and then i have to be like oh no i'm like i just have flat affect but i still think that you think that like something's up and it's hard to understand that no that's just a part of what my experience of this illness is yeah i think that kind of brings up like a bunch of different points like the fact that we are very codependent i think with each other like we live together we work as partners um we obviously like parent together like we're always with each other you know kind of like 24 7. um and so like just given that like relationship i mean if you remove like mental illness from that that sort of situation it still is like a difficult situation where you're like with somebody all the time you know like um you get in each other's hair sometimes it's kind of ripe for maybe not conflict but yeah friction friction yeah and then you add in the mental illness component and we go to therapy together a lot i think like if you just work with somebody that you're a partner with um [Music] and you're around them all the time you should just go to therapy i mean i think people need that kind of separation throughout the day um where they can go and they can be their own people and but we don't do that we don't do that so we'll probably do a whole other video on the topic of codependency think that that might actually be something that people who are living with a mental illness kind of experience more like i can understand why that would be the case in relationships in relationships and like anecdotally talking to other people who have mental illness in relationships codependency is something that has come up a lot and you know i kind of maybe get why and so maybe that's you know we'll explore that more in the codependency video but that's a thing we navigate so what do you think is the biggest way that schizophrenia has affected our relationship that's a big question i don't think i have a good answer in terms of something that sums it all up because like you were saying it is it shows up in a lot of different facets of our relationship but before this you know you had brought up the topic of capacity and i would agree that's kind of a big one this is something yeah i mean i guess that would be both of our answers then yeah just that has been a quite a large and difficult subject to like navigate like kind of from the beginning my perspective on this is very much that like i don't have a lot of acceptance around the fact that my capacity has changed from what it was or could have been pre slash without mental illness without navigating living with schizofector disorder and so i very much have it in my head that i have the capacity to go after everything that i want to do and to push myself to limits that deep down i know are not actually within my limits and so when new things that i want to do come up and i look to my partner for like you know what do you think or support i look to you for support and like to be my cheerleader and like yeah you can actually do this i will support you doing this yeah and then i don't get that because of what you were describing of like you wanting to kind of like protect me protect us protect our life because what inevitably happens when i go after things that are outside of my capacity i just kind of crumble and we end up in often a crisis state because my mental health has deteriorated to a point where my life is falling apart inevitably our life is falling apart and it's it's difficult and so yeah i can like explain that right now but when you're in it it's a lot more difficult to navigate i think like and i mean this is just an ongoing thing this isn't something that like we have solved you know but i i definitely like understand i think your perspective more in terms and it's difficult to navigate but the perspective of like feeling like i'm telling you you can't do something makes you feel like oh no i have to do it you know yeah it makes me even want to like prove harder that well no i can do it like and then also the like i understand that like you're sensitive to feeling like controlled and i yeah i don't want that to come across my paranoia seeps into this as well where it's like i get really paranoid that rob is trying to like keep me down control me by like bringing a realistic lens to these endeavors that i'm wanting to go off on so there's like a lot of layers of potential conflict inherent in the topic of dealing with my capacity so we're working on that in therapy so along the topic of capacity kind of another branch of that that i think has been difficult to navigate at times is my reduced capacity in terms of contributing to everyday things keeping up with life housework various keeping up with life tasks that i typically struggle with because of things like lower executive functioning and abolition and all these things that kind of go along with having a mental illness like schizophrenia or schizophrenic disorder it's it's hard to keep up with you and i described it in therapy the other day is like i always feel like i'm like two steps behind you and that that's difficult for me mostly because i think it's difficult for you and i think that i'm letting you down and that kind of thing yeah i mean i think i think that a lot of the time even though like we run this channel and like and it's schizophrenia is uh is it's present in our life like on a daily basis i still don't like look at you and that's what like i i don't think that you know i don't think about like reduced capacity i don't think about that kind of thing unless you're like very symptomatic and then it's like okay i know what's going on but you know especially like the negative symptoms it's hard to kind of like feel like identify that okay you're experiencing something and so you're it's you're not thinking about doing the dishes or like trying to keep up with housework or that kind of thing it's an invisible illness and so i think that that's probably something that a lot of couples who one partner is living with an illness like schizophrenia kind of struggle with is that it's impossible unless i'm constantly communicating my mental state and like what's going on with me which is personally impossible i don't think i could do that and i don't know a lot of people who could do that it's like impossible for you to know what's going on and why i'm not on top of laundry on top of the dishes on top of whatever because like if i had a broken arm you know the age-old comparison it would be like oh well you know she can't do the dishes because she can't get her arm you know wet or she can't do that with her arm but because it's invisible it's all internal in my mind that's kind of keeping me from having the capacity that i would like to have it's harder to recognize yeah and to empathize with and so i think that that creates a situation where conflict can come about because why aren't you keeping up with this stuff you know we're equal partners or we're supposed to be equal partners so come on but then that creates where i feel like i need to be an equal partner at all times or like um i feel like i sometimes try too much to keep up and kind of end up overextending myself and then i just kind of crumble and then there's a period where i have even more reduced capacity because i'm kind of like reeling from over exertion yeah i don't really know what to add there um i think that like this is again something that's kind of like ongoing and i think we're trying to figure out ways to kind of manage it in a better in a healthier way like um you know like i i understand i mean communication is another like huge topic that i think we're going to be like diving into but um trying to give you like gentle reminders about doing things but um i think we're also going to be trying to figure out like more like visible like reminders about how to like um like what to do that kind of thing and i guess it feels a little silly that we haven't figured this out yet like it feels like something that we should have figured out like kind of from the beginning but um there's just so many little things like that we're like outside of being in a partnership i think that this is something that people who are living with an illness like schizophrenia really struggle with like it's not something that you just quickly figure out how to do like i know a lot of people who are have you know are well into their adult life and have not figured out how to work within their capacity to keep up with the things that they need to keep up with and so then when you bring in another person and you're in a partnership it becomes even more difficult to figure out how all the pieces work together and how how to keep up with life so we don't want this video to get too long um but we just kind of wanted to give you a taste of how schizophrenia has affected our relationship and like we said we're going to be diving deeper into various topics around this in videos to come in this series i guess you could call it um but we would love to hear more from you guys too how schizophrenia affects your relationships if you want to share about that we would love to hear from you in the comments below i also just want to take this opportunity to remind you about our online peer support community you can gain access to this by becoming a patron on our patreon page the link is in the description below but through our online peer support community you get access to peer support in a variety of different mediums including weekly peer support groups so if you are interested in getting connected with people who are experiencing similar issues or struggles um as you are around schizophrenia living with schizophrenia spectrum illness make sure to check that out and we actually have like there's a text channel that's about like family and support people and relationships yeah so yeah make sure to check that out so thank you so much for watching and as always wishing you and your loved ones good health i'll see you in the next video bye bye hey are you cool i'm not i'm not cool this is this is awkward it's just like like where am i put my hands now people can see my crotch you know but now my hands are in my crotch although man spray now if we do this our legs are like our legs are like mirroring each other like you know and if i do this then my feet are in the shot there's no good way to sit in this chair okay oh close your legs this is the worst okay how about i get to do this and you get to do something i usually sit like this in this dress okay go ahead that's perfect i'm good like this rude you just took my stance but you said you usually sit like this i'm trying to give you options okay so i'm going to take this option take this option why can't i take this option you take that off like this i'm too big it looks awkward okay is this okay for me to do kind of like facing you like this does it look okay yeah totally i don't look awkward this is the best for me happy for you

Channel: Living Well with Schizophrenia

Views: 64,286

Keywords: schizophrenia, schizoaffective, schizoaffective disorder, mental health, mental illness, psychosis, relationship, relationships, relationships and mental illness, my partner has schizophrenia, my wife has schizophrenia, living with schizophrenia, living with mental illness, my partner has a mental illness, marriage

Id: ixOPuJmyCsU

Length: 20min 20sec (1220 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 10 2022