Mark Lukach
Mark Lukach, author of "My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward" speaks with Kimi about the profound impact of mental illness on his marriage and family life. He shares the harrowing journey he and his wife Julia have navigated through bipolar disorder, from the frightening onset of her psychosis to the unpredictable waves of recovery and relapse. Mark provides a candid account of the emotional strain, the learning curve of caregiving, and the strength it takes to stay committed to a loved one during their darkest times. The couple's love and resilience shine through as they confront the challenges of the American mental health care system and find ways to involve their children in managing the illness, all while trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy in their lives. Mark's perspective provides invaluable insights into the oft-hidden struggles many caregivers face and underscores the power of unwavering love and hope.
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In this episode:
Coping with Mental Health Challenges in Relationships
Relationship Dynamics After Trauma
Navigating Feelings As A Caregiver
Optimism While Facing Health Challenges
Accepting Support From Community
Children's Resilience in Family Health Crisis
LINKS & RESOURCES:
Website: www.marklukach.com
Book: "My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward"
Wise Words:
When you love someone, there is a tremendous amount of suffering that comes with it. There's the pain of the fear of loss, not to mention the actual loss, that can happen when you care that much about someone.
That was one of the worst things to have to do. Is this person who I'm deeply in love with and see the rest of my life with and have to carry her kicking and screaming into a car to bring her to an emergency room for psychiatric care. It was super, super traumatizing.
What's weird is you grieve this person as if they're gone because they're not the same in any way, but they are still very much alive. What you don't know is this is going to get better.
I'm thinking what's next, is this it? Is the future of my marriage, a person who's perpetually psychotic? I didn't know. Is she going to be better in a week? I stopped. The deeper we got the less hopeful I got about that. But I think I didn't expect Julia to ever fully come back. I didn't know what she was going to be like when she was “better”, you know?
Three days a week, Julia would go off to the outpatient program where she was in group therapy or individual therapy or seeing a psychiatrist to tweak the meds. But then the rest of the day, it was just the two of us. And, you know, when she's gone, it's the worst thing in the world because I miss her so much. And I just want her to come home. It's such a declaration of how abnormal things are that she's not home, but when she's home, it is so demanding and it is so exhausting.
It's really scary to hear someone say they want to kill themselves, but also I was in the room with her. There was no way she could actually act on killing herself. Like she was safe in that moment, despite how hard her feelings were. So I just shut up and listen. And after kind of talking herself out, that was the first time where she said, I feel better. Thanks for letting me talk.
I didn't learn until afterward how bad it is for marriage to be in such a dynamic of power imbalance where she was literally told to sit on the bed and wait and then forced to give her medicines by me.
And just like all the tweaking of the meds, it's such an up-and-down ride for the person who lives with it. and who has to actually put the medicine in her body. I was the one who had to be the face of giving it to her. In group she made some friends and they used to call me the medicine Nazi because I was the one insisting that she take her pills every morning and every night.
Julia had felt controlled by me and I was like, cut me a break. I was trying to keep you alive. I think I was going through a lot of post-traumatic processing that I had. Not done publicly in front of Julia, but now that she was better, I felt like, can you take on some of my emotional experience now? She did not particularly want to deal with that because she had just gone through the worst 10 months of her life, you know?
I don't think she had seen it at all. I think that what I needed most coming out of it was, “Hey, do you see me? Do you see what I went through as you went what you went through? Because I saw what you went through. And I tried to help you but I need to know that you saw me too.”
Knowing that Julia has bipolar and that it's bumpy and hard. I choose that over no Julia every day forever.
Love is suffering and I'm not afraid of that. I don't withhold love because I'm afraid that it might hurt, you know?
I do feel like a lot of what we do enables shallow relationships rather than deep ones. And it allows easy outs rather than hard commitments, you know? And I think there's so much more learning you get from sticking through your commitments to people.