To follow the advice or NOT to follow it, now THAT is the question.
‘How could I avoid regretting all my hopes and dreams which had become so unrealistic?’ was the question I asked over and over again at the support group for parents of mentally ill children that I was attending; and here is some of the advice given me. All I had to do was to decide whether to follow it or not.
‘Don’t wait for your child to fulfill your former expectations. Alter them. Learn to forge new dreams,’ someone told me.
I learned one of life’s hardest lessons. It was not what happened to me that counted, but what I did about it.
The social worker running the group told us to get rid of any guilt that we might have felt because nobody could cause a mental illness no matter what they did. Nobody could cause schizophrenia. I kept repeating;
N O B O D Y C O U L D C A U S E S C H I Z O P H R E N I A
No matter how hard anyone tried, nobody could cause schizophrenia.
Nobody could cause schizophrenia.
‘Take one day at a time,’ was one of the most helpful of all the tips given so freely.