Tired of family acting as though I will be better

Finding it more and more irritating when family makes statements that make me feel as though they think I will suddenly be "ok" .. my pain never goes away and never will go away

I feel like that too. I feel like it's never going to get better and will only get worse. Then I just break down. They have no understanding and never will.

Oh yes, mine totally do that. I've just stopped telling them about it. What's the point? They just think I'm malingering or trying to get sympathy.

I have a bit of a theory on that attitude, not that theorizing helps anything, but - I think they just really want us to get better and people are so wrapped up in this 'think positive and it will all be okay' notion that they think we can just believe our way out of pain. Sounds lovely. Wish it worked. Don't get me wrong, positive thinking isn't all bad, unless you refuse to see the truth. Then it's just denial. And a lot of my family is in denial about my situation. They want me to be the exact same active, energetic person I was, but I'm not. They're not malicious, just hiding from reality. They want our conditions to be like a common cold. Get sick, take a pill, have some soup, get better. The end.

What they don't realize is that by doing this, they are invalidating us. They are not seeing us as we are. They don't recognize how hard we fight just to go to grocery store and look 'normal.' They are belittling us unintentionally. Diminishing us. They are blind. And when a person is fighting their own body every single day, we just want those we love to tell us that they're proud of us and that they see how hard we're fighting. And if they want to do the heavy lifting, that would be super. It's almost like they are afraid that if they recognize the conditions we have, then they're giving up on us or something. They're just afraid, is what I think.

I'm sorry your peeps are doing this to you. Unfortunately it's very common.

Our families have to go through the same grieving process that we do in order to finally accept that we have an incurable mental illness, and their grief is compounded by the disappointment of their expectations for the families and careers that we might have had were we not ill. When my parents finally figured out that I was damaged and not going to get better, they grieved as if I had died. It was a hoot.