Hard but good

I spent the past weekend in St. Louis doing a training that will allow me to train other people to teach in NAMI's Family to Family program. I blogged about some of my experiences of teaching in this program before. I'll tell you what I've been telling folks for the past couple of days: it was a hard but good weekend. Spending a weekend with people who have a family member with a serious mental illness is never easy. Every family has its own story of unpredictable behavior, difficulty understanding what is going on, struggle to get a clear diagnosis, more struggle for treatment, and a hundred little dark moments along the way. And did I mention the suicide attempts? And, worse, in some cases those were successful. So much pain and loss and grief.

It is hard to hear story after story, and hard to tell your own. It is also incredibly good. I saw and experienced in sort of a compressed way what I have seen and experienced in my Family to Family classes. It is an amazing thing to watch families with these particular kinds of stories find one another, share their frustrations and their losses and somehow discover two very basic truths. (1) We are not alone. (2) There is hope.

Somehow, the goodness of the community and the hope seem to outweigh the pain and the tragedy. Our presence in the room and our commitment to the program testify to that. Everyone in that room was going to go home and keep telling their stories, keep teaching others, keep reaching out to try to give other families a few more resources, a few more skills to get them through. And, probably much more important, the reminder that they are not alone, that there is hope. It isn't easy, but it is good.

(If you want to donate to NAMI, one great way to do that is to support our team for NAMIwalks here.)