When Your Child Is Struggling With Their Mental Health: The Side Nobody Talks About

My daughter was 12 when everything changed. Until then, she had been a happy little girl. There had been no enormous warning sign telling me that something was terribly wrong. Nothing that prepared me for discovering that she had been self-harming.

I can still remember the shock. As a parent, your instinct is to help, to talk, to comfort. To find out what's wrong and somehow make it better but she wouldn't talk to me. Instead, she shut us all out and suddenly I found myself trying to help my own child while having absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do.

I arranged private counselling almost immediately. At the time, it felt like the only thing I could do. Then came another devastating revelation. The counsellor told us that our daughter had tried to take her own life and needed more specialist professional help.

There are some pieces of news that seem to divide your life into before and after. For me, that was one of them and alongside the fear came something else that I suspect many parents experience but don't necessarily say aloud:

Where did I go wrong?

I loved her. I'd been there for her. I'd tried to give her a happy home and the best life I could, so how could my child be hurting this badly without me knowing?

Logically, I now understand that a child's mental health crisis isn't evidence that their mother or father has failed them. But when you're standing in the middle of it, logic doesn't always get much of a say, but the guilt certainly does.

Then more of the story began to emerge

Over time, we began to understand more about what our daughter had been carrying. There had been emotional abuse from her biological father, whom I had divorced some years earlier but whom she continued to see. Then she disclosed that something serious had happened at school involving a so-called school friend. That is not something that I am going to divulge here. Suddenly there were reasons for some of what we were seeing.

But knowing why your child is hurting doesn't magically give you the ability to take that hurt away. If anything, I found myself struggling with another question:

How did I not know?

I went over things in my head. Conversations, behaviour, things I might have missed, things I might have interpreted differently if I'd known then what I knew now. And all the while I was supposed to be the grown-up; the strong one, the person helping her through it, except I was frightened, confused and increasingly overwhelmed myself.

When helping your child starts affecting you too

Our daughter eventually received intensive support through CAMHS. For around two years, things improved. She stopped self-harming, and for two years we began to believe that perhaps we were finally emerging from the worst of it. Then, about a year ago, the problems returned. There were more rounds of counselling, but this time it didn't seem to be helping in the way we'd hoped.

And so here we are. She is now in her GCSE year, and this isn't a story I'm writing from the comfortable position of knowing everything turned out perfectly. We're still living it and perhaps that's one of the reasons I wanted to write this. There are plenty of stories told once the storm has passed but It's harder to talk about what it's like when you're still standing in the rain.

Parents need somewhere to put it all too

When your child is struggling, naturally the attention is on them. You make appointments and you speak to professionals. You worry about school and you watch for changes in behaviour. You try to work out when to ask questions and when to give them space. You worry when they're quiet. Sometimes you worry when they're too happy!

You second-guess yourself constantly. Meanwhile, family life carries on around you and somewhere amongst all of that, you're having your own emotional response to what is happening. I certainly was and I still am. But this wasn't something I wanted to shout from the rooftops. My daughter's story belonged to her. I didn't want to discuss her private life with everyone I met simply because I desperately needed somewhere to process what was happening.

Looking back, I wish I'd written things down. Not just appointments and counselling sessions, but the bigger picture. What had happened that week and what I'd noticed. What seemed better and what seemed worse. Questions I wanted to remember to ask and how family life was being affected. And, importantly, how I was coping too.

That's why I created Loving Through the Storm

Eventually, I realised that the thing I wished I'd had was something I could create for another parent. Not another blank notebook and certainly not something full of cheerful little prompts telling you to list three things you're grateful for when you're terrified about your child. I wanted somewhere private to put the chaos. A place to record what was happening, notice patterns, prepare for appointments, organise thoughts and acknowledge your own feelings without making your child's struggle about you.

That became Loving Through the Storm.

I created it because I know what it feels like to love a child desperately and still feel completely powerless to fix what they're going through. I know what it's like to wonder whether you're saying the right thing and to question decisions you've made, to feel guilty because you didn't know. To desperately want them to talk to you when they simply can't and to discover that loving someone with everything you've got doesn't mean you'll always know how to help them.

If you're living through this too

I don't have a neat ending to give you. My daughter is still finding her way. And I'm still her mum, trying to find the balance between supporting her, trusting the professionals involved in her care, respecting her privacy and managing my own fears. But I have learned something I wish I'd understood much earlier.

Supporting your child doesn't require pretending that none of this affects you.

You are allowed to find it difficult and you are allowed to feel frightened, angry, confused or exhausted. You can love your child unconditionally while sometimes having absolutely no idea what to do next and perhaps you don't need to have all the answers. Sometimes you just need somewhere safe to put the questions.

That's what I wish I'd had when my daughter was 12.

And that's why Loving Through the Storm exists.

To learn more about our journal, ‘Loving Through the Storm, Click HERE