After there is a diagnosis, people respond as they would to anyone with a medical condition, and sympathy becomes the more dominant emotion. I want caregivers to see from my book that the emotions that they think are so idiosyncratic are shared by lots of people, and that they are not inappropriate, not inexplicable, not wrong, not bad. When a child is having a lot of trouble, mothers get blamed a lot. And they blame themselves. Family caregivers learn quickly that wherever they try to draw that line, the unpredictable winds of mental illness come in and blow it away.
People have to keep redrawing the boundaries.
There is a kind of hierarchy of expectations about who owes what to whom. Sometimes people have to do the emotionally counterintuitive thing and withdraw from the loved person. It's very, very difficult for a parent to withdraw from a child, for example. It seems emotionally right to give yourself over completely to your child, to do everything you can to cure this illness, to have no boundaries. Unfortunately, although their motives are good, parents who do this, especially mothers, often find themselves in trouble.