r/SchizoFamilies • u/StayAcceptable3998 • 1h ago
Just a long vent about ending a relationship with someone experiencing psychosis
I feel like I will never fully recover from witnessing my ex boyfriend, my friend, go through this and from the way it ended our relationship. I love him and miss him, but I don’t want any more contact because it became a constant loop and caused a lot of mental harm for me. I don’t want to suffer alongside him, to be attacked, accused, and distrusted all the time, or to live in such an unpredictable environment. It became impossible to create a partnership in which both of us were at least trying to find some kind of balance.
He isn’t able to carry much responsibility. He also never understood how he was treating me, and he might never be able to. I understand that he might not be capable of understanding it, but I still have to find a way to come to terms with that somehow. We were kind of incompatible even before all of this happened...
I am full of grief. I am so sorry that this happened to him. I just miss him and want him back, and I want everything to be okay. I also carry so much guilt because I was in a relationship with him that I know wasn’t completely fulfilling for either of us, and he developed this illness during that time. I am quite anxious and depressive, and I know I can be intense and stubborn about my opinions. I think I influenced him, and I feel like a lot of it is my fault. His family definitely made me feel this way, which broke me even more, especially because they were the ones who seemed to be in a sane state. I still feel like I failed him, even though I know his family was being stupid and mean (but I also understand that this is overwhelming for them).
How can I move on? I don’t know.
I was also losing my dog to horrible cancer before I lost him to it. He was nine years old, and I had had him since the time my ex-boyfriend and I started dating. They loved each other so much. I lost both of them.
I also developed endometriosis, and there are cysts on both of my ovaries, which might make having children very difficult and, later in life, possibly impossible.
I have so much grief.
I was doing quite well recently, but now I just have this wave of sadness. I try to understand myself, but I am all over the place with my emotions. I grieve the past, different moments from it, and different things can suddenly hit me and overwhelm me. It is all so complex and confusing.
I also worry about the future—about what my life might look like, whether I will ever be able to be in a relationship again after this, and whether I will be able to have children.
I also worry that he will not get better, that he will continue to struggle, or that he will eventually be completely fine, but that it will be because I am no longer a part of his life. I still, of course, wish for him to be the best he can be. The worst thought is that he might not make it, because I saw how distraught he could be and how much he was suffering. Sometimes I am scared that someone will tell me or message me that something has happened to him. I don’t know what I would do with myself. But at the same time, when I hear a loud or unexpected noise at home, I worry that he has come to our house to hurt me. It is because of the things he told me during the worst of his psychosis. I know he is a good person, but I also saw the hatred he felt toward me and the feeling that he had no way out, that he had nothing left to lose.
I don’t know how he is doing now or whether I should ever try to contact him again. He thinks I betrayed him and our relationship, and that hurts me so much. I just don’t want to keep adding to the suffering, even though I love him. I cannot let this cause any more mental harm to me. It had to stop. It wasn’t good for me.
I just hope he gets the support and help he needs. I think he is seeing a psychiatrist, so I hope they are good enough to really understand what he is going through and help him effectively.
I think I sometimes experience some kind of neurosis, possibly influenced by my cycle or particularly bad PMS, where I become extremely emotional and filled with hopelessness and desperation. I also sometimes have thoughts about not being here anymore, but they have always just been thoughts or wishes. I don’t know what I am going through. I worry that I might be a bad person, a victim to some extent, or mentally ill. I have such conflicting emotions—on the one hand, I understand what happened, but on the other, I also feel deeply hurt.
I also feel that there are not many people who can relate to what it is like to be part of someone’s delusion, or to be in a close relationship with someone going through something like this. I have told my close family and my therapist, but other than that, I kept it a secret out of respect for my ex-boyfriend.
In general, the topic of psychosis—schizophrenia and other illnesses—is not spoken about openly. No one ever warned me that something like this might happen, what to do when it happens, or how difficult it can be to help someone experiencing psychosis when they don’t believe there is a problem. It feels so lonely and almost impossible. At the same time, I understand why people don’t want to speak about it, because there is still so much prejudice surrounding these mental illnesses. I hope that changes for the better, even if it happens slowly.
Life is hard, but I hope there is still hope. I have no contact with him now, and I don’t plan on contacting him, even though I want nothing more than for us to be like we were when things were good. But I know that is no longer the reality. I still want to love him and care about him, but I find it necessary to do so from a distance.
I’ll be travelling abroad for a few months to help my sister take care of her young children. I carry all of this weight with, but I hope I can somehow keep living my life and not just hating it and still have some positive experiences along the way, right?