Family Therapy - Advice and Commentary Wanted

okay i love you and normally you are great for validation, but i am in a situation where two groups of people i love (you, briar, oso vs my family) are in heated debate about whether or not i'm abusive, and i would really really like outside commentary on this

 

i feel like therapy is a situation where it's appropriate, probably, maybe, but i always feel that it's really inappropriate and immature to be stuck on countering the lies all of the time. not in the least because tbh unless a person already doesn't believe for some reason, they don't usually care and it's just wasted effort

 

The way I see it, it might be manipulative, but it wasn't abusive, but I don't think it was either this time. I think it was born of desperation while being abused by your parents. Was it perhaps not the best way to respond? Perhaps. I'm not in a position to say at this point, because I don't know your parents or their behavior enough to come up with better strategies. And even if it was a single abusive incident, it still does not compare to the constant emotional abuse your parents put you through: isolation, neglect, straight out gaslighting whether intentional or not, demeaning, etc. It's like this: when someone comes at you with a knife, you're allowed to do violence to defend yourself. I might be wrong. It's really uncomfortable for me to say in any way that it's ok to bring up suicide as a consequence to try and convince someone to do something, or not do something in this case, I understand where you are coming from, it straight up is often used and has been used abusively against people. But I do think that you have mitigating circumstances. I think that anyone suffering as much as you have and are is understandably going to do extreme things. Anyone who hears that has a right to be upset, so your mother has a right to be upset too, but I wouldn't worry that means your mom is right about even half of anything she says, not even an eight or a tenth. It just means that you were both in a difficult situation.

Not quite related to that, but I wanted to point out something: nowhere, absolutely nowhere in your descriptions, have I seen your mother trying to reach you and understand you and do anything but defend herself and infantilize you and demean and belittle your point of view. She's not treating family therapy as an opportunity to mend a bridge with you, to listen and see how she can make this work, but to try and beat you emotionally until you comply with her. And that really worries me. It seems to me that you are opening yourself up for a lot of pain in something that won't work without your mother deeply, carefully re evaluating her life choices and how she has treated you. I'm not saying you should stop doing family therapy - your therapist after all is in a better position than I am to see whether this will help you or not - but that you should change your expectations based on that, perhaps reevaluate what you want out of this family therapy and what you expect, and what you really need to be healthy. That might be something to bring up with the therapist.

 

Already been said but yeah I’m sure, thats not abusive. You may have hurt their feelings but that’s not the same thing as abuse. And honestly, if their kid tells them that they’re suicidal, their first consideration should be making sure you have the support you need no matter where it comes from, not trying to minimize their own hurt feelings. Like honestly what the hell.

 

okay but telling anyone ever that you are suicidal is? bad?

and like it is really hard for me to disentangle what is bad telling someone you're suicidal and what is okay or even good because like

my parents, honestly, 100% believe that the only reason people say they're suicidal is because they want to force others to comply with their demands. that the only reason someone would ever try to kill themselves it to force someone else to comply with their demands. that actually killing yourself is only ever an accident, never the goal, because the goal is forcing someone to do what you want; if killing yourself really was the goal, you only did it to be cruel and punish other people. the only reason people write suicide notes is be cruel and hurt people.

like. at least two high profile for my region suicides happened while i was in high school and. that was all my parents talked about. "what a horrible person that kid was." "good riddance. the world needs fewer abusers."

and the point of this is, i am really really sorry to keep belaboring this point and i think, yes, this is something i need to bring up in therapy, esp because the last time we discussed this topic made me swing all the way back to "i can never tell anyone that i'm struggling like this ever," but. the mere act of saying "i am suicidal" feels abusive to me. so it is really fucking with my head, after i took so much care to 1) not tell them anything because they already have told me that they think i am only suicidal at them, and 2) to not phrase me killing myself as a direct consequence of things happening, that my parents are going around and telling anybody who gets drawn into this conflict that i threatened them with killing myself and that i'm using my depression to abuse them.

i don't know what non abusive telling someone you're suicidal looks like. i have no scripts for this! all i have is my fiancee who miraculously didn't dump me when i fucking tried to kill myself a month into our relationship forcing me into a situation where i felt that i had to either tell them i was suicidal every time i felt suicidal or break up with them! and as much as they insist that i'm not doing it wrong and that i need to tell them every time i! am terrified! that i'm doing it wrong!

ps. no seriously when i asked for what are non abusive ways of saying i'm suicidal, i wanted actual scripts, not just "yeah that sounds fine"

 

i do want to clarify so no one thinks lebesgue integreat did anything bad, the "forcing" was pretty much entirely asking me literally a l l t h e t i m e if i was suicidal for the next like. year. of our relationship, and they get really really upset when people lie to them, and i knew if i lied about this i wouldn't be able to maintain our relationship/keep dating them

 

First I want to reiterate what everyone else has already said; it was in no way abuse for you to express to your family that you needed specific help they are unable/unwilling to provide in order to be able to go on living.
Second, I don’t even think it can be considered at all manipulative to tell you parents that you are suicidal and need a specific kind of help.
Third, anything along the lines of “I am very suicidal right now and need [fiancee’s] specific help in order to be sure I don’t kill myself before I am able to get professional help” is probably a good script.

 

If you’re looking for support from a friend/your fiancee, especially someone who has already expressed to you that they want you to tell them when you’re suicidal, simply saying something along the lines of “I’m really feeling suicidal right now” is just fine, and you can absolutely feel free to tack on any specific help requests such as “will you spend some time with me/help remind me of the reasons I don’t want to go through with it right now/distract me with something comforting and unrelated” can be helpful to the person you’re opening up to so if they’re available they already know how to be there for you.

 

I'm incredibly sure, yes. You were not threatening "if fiancee does not stay until X happens, I will try and act on my suicidal impulses", you were explaining that your fiancee needed to stay so that you would have a support who knows and understands what's going on and will be able to help you keep from acting on impulses you don't want to. And you were explaining that this needs to happen until you have a professional who can help.

Yep, absolutely. Explaining what you actually said is important.

I...can see the logic to that? But: countering lies is neither inappropriate nor immature. Exhausting and time-consuming, probably. But it is not inappropriate to go "no, that's not what I said, that's not what happened" when someone is saying things you know are false, and it isn't immature to go "no, that's not true" in that situation either.

That you would feel like it's always inappropriate and immature to be stuck countering lies is...worrying, honestly.

Um.

Okay, I'm sorry. I don't have any polite way to say this. I've tried to think of a way, and there's just. I'm not coming up with anything that works.

Your parents' reasoning here is fucked up at best, and straight-out abusive even at middling.

Is there a non-zero number of people who use threats of suicide to try and make people comply with their demands? Yes, of course there is. There's also a non-zero number of people who use threats of self-harm or harming others to try and make others comply with their demands. That does not mean that saying you are feeling suicidal or struggling with suicidal impulses makes you abusive!

The majority of people, when they tell someone they're struggling like this, are asking for help. This is what you were doing; you were stating that you're in a lot of pain, and you need help dealing with it and that part of that help needs to come in the form of someone you trust as your support staying until a professional is found. That your parents refuse to recognize this is - it's fucked up. It's deeply, deeply fucked up, and it makes me concerned for your safety because they have very clearly indicated that you cannot trust them or rely on them even when you're badly, badly hurting. And it...doesn't feel accidental, that they went on about how those kids were 'horrible' and 'abusive' for committing suicide.

The reason why it ever works when someone does use threats of suicide as abuse is because people are, normally, conditioned to try and help and want to keep the person from hurting themselves. If telling people "I'm feeling suicidal" were abusive, there would not be a whole industry around telling someone via phone or text so that you can get help. As much as "service industry workers get abused" is a thing, suicide hotlines aren't a form of abuse for the people manning the phones.

I think the reason most of us went with "no, the wording you used sounds perfectly fine" is because...it does not sound abusive to us. It isn't abusive to tell someone that you're in such pain that you're feeling like the only option is suicide, it's a cry for help.

 

I think you’ve kind of got it backwards. It’s not that most ways of saying you’re suicidal are abusive and you have to find the one acceptable way, it’s the opposite of that. Off the top of my head, the only way to abusively tell someone you’re suicidal is something like “if you don’t do what I say I’m going to kill myself”. Anything else is pretty much fine. Especially if you’re reaching out to people who should reasonably be expected to want to help you.

Edit: yeah, what @turtleDove said. You were asking for help, not making a threat, and the fact that your parents seem to think those are the same thing is deeply worrying.

 

okay, firstly:
scripts were helpful. i realize, looking at them, that they were all pretty much exactly what i've been doing! which feels really good! but it feels better to know that there was A Scripts out there that i was following more or less on my own. i realize that distinction probably is incoherent, and i'm sorry for that, but that was much more helpful. "i'm feeling really suicidal right now" has in fact been a script lebesgue and i have been working on (admitting that is. hard.) with moderate progress! (i am likely to say it before i have come up with an actionable plan now? that feels like progress?) adding requests has been a thing lebesgue has wanted (not in a pressure-y way, but in a trying to convince me that it would be like. appropriate for me to actually say so. which. i'm still not sold on.) with less success, but. it is nice to know from Other Sources that it is also desirable? v helpful, @Shades of Love, thank you very much.

yes. this. exactly this. i love my parents but they don't know the first thing about mental health (i showed them? an article? about 'how to help your depressed teenager' when i was trying to make a point of 'here are the things you messed up in high school that i wish you had done differently.' the point of the article was trying to empathize with your kid and make sure they knew that you were on their side, emphasizing that it wasn't that your kid hated it you, it was that mental illness goes out of its way to destroy their trust in the people around them. my parents somehow got that they should have taken the internet away from me???) and they just. cannot be my triage people. lebesgue is my triage person, in large part because lebesgue has been my triage person for the last two years. briar is trying to be a triage person, but the issue there is that we're long distance and i am really really badly as explained upthread about asking for help with this sort of thing. they are still doing a really good job, imo.

my parents :excalibur face:

would ... you mind explaining this?

idk i've just always had to be the better person and part of that is letting people tell their horrible stories and not being caught up in it. and like i try to be that but. i am known in my family as the one who holds the grudges. because, as has been said to me, i am "not willing to choose the relationship over being right." so. idk. i am really tired of always being the person who can't ever just choose the relationship in my family. especially because i really do love my parents (and the rest of my family who believe them) and i really do want us to make things better.

mrp. i mean. it is very validating to have someone outside going what the actual fuck, at least.

this whole thing is very. i don't know. reassuring, in part. but it also makes me like really mad on my own behalf because idk "it's deeply, deeply fucked up, and it makes me concerned for your safety" well yEAH. my parents get so pissy when it comes up that i don't trust them with this stuff, that i won't talk to them anymore without someone (generally lebesgue, but tbh i think it's telling that they won't say this shit in front of other family members) else being present, that, above all, i feel incredibly unsafe in my own home and i'm the bad guy, the way my parents tell it.

idk

 

it feels incredibly. i don't know the right word. scandalous comes to mind, but entirely wrong connotation. it feels incredibly transgressive to read this and be like, yeah.

the thing i mostly want is i want to be able to spend more than three hours with my family without becoming stuck in a suicidal loop. and that's not even three consecutive hours, that is like in 10-20 minute increments. everything about interacting with my family as a whole and my parents especially is panic inducing. and i realize a lot of that is on me, but like.

it took me developing an actual fucking eating disorder that i don't talk about (because, ah, memorable quote of my mother's: "you can't love people with eating disorders; you just can't." this quote is within the last six months) and going on a campaign of talking about how, yes, mother, i know you think i'm fat, for a year and a half for her to stop grabbing my abdomen and pinching it to show how fat it was every fucking time i was either in the kitchen or wearing something that somehow drew her eye to my stomach. now she feels bad? and talks about how she doesn't think i'm fat at all? (no, she's just worried about me becoming fat, can we talk about that? ffs)

i do not have the energy for dancing through whatever fucking hoops i need to to get my parents to stop doing x harmful thing, especially because they just like to trade it in for something new but equally harmful. if we are actually going to have a relationship, things that i think need to tabled indefinitely and not brought up without literal moderators: my weight; my gender; my chosen relationship and family style; politics, politics, can we please stop talking about how the angry cheeto is literally trying to kill me; college.

like i would love to explain to them the complicated emotions that went into choosing to drop out of college for a year (something i was very proud of getting into and very much want to complete) but that would have to start with like. explaining that depression is a real thing and that you can be suicidal without abusing other people. and then we'd have to talk about i only picked my major because it was something they approved of and maybe i want to go to college for something i want to go for me? and then we'd have to talk about my horrible self esteem and how literally any grade below a solid A results in me thinking i need to die, and anything below a B+ results in me actually making plans right now. and then we'd have to talk about hey, even with all that dealt and accounted for, it turns out my major is really bad for my mental health? example: i had a class on genocides. fascinating, horrible, not in a i'm a genocidial maniac way but i liked it and the professor - but also it was really really horrible and our term paper was "are there any modern trends in the us that look genocidial?" wow hoo boy do i really want to think about how my government is gearing up to kill me, factually looking at this progression in history, on multiple axes. thanks. that's great for me.

and like. that's in order of what i think would be easiest to hardest to explain, and i don't even know how i'd get through explaining that depression is real??

 

Okay, I don't know how good I'm going to be at explaining coherently because it's...2:30 in the morning and I really ought to go to bed already. But.

Basically? The whole 'choosing the relationship over being right' is...it can be a thing! Sometimes! It is not a thing for you, in this situation, no matter how much you have been made to believe otherwise. Your mom is choosing being able to believe that she's right over her relationship with you. Your dad is - I don't even fucking know, I don't have enough information, but I doubt he's choosing his relationship with you over his belief that he's right either.

This isn't you nitpicking and going "no, actually that happened when I was in seventh grade, not when I was in eighth grade, and it was a Tuesday, not a Thursday, and" - and so on, and correcting what are functionally minor details to the story. This is you going "no. no, we never lived on Mars. no, the sky is not green. no, the moon is not made out of cheese of any kind" and correcting things that would require the timeline to be majorly different from how it actually is. This is you having to do what a lot of people on Twitter do these days and go "no, that's not true, we know it's not true, here are sources proving it isn't true"...except you're having to do it with your family, in regards to what your childhood and your life was and is like, instead of with...any number of topics this happens for on Twitter.

And that you're being told that even attempting to do this sort of correction is immature and inappropriate is a warning sign for me? Because it means that whoever's telling you "no, correcting people when they're massively, factually wrong about what happened" is 1) probably one of the people who does this the most often to you, and 2) is trying to prevent you from being able to fight back against being gaslit. Because even if no one else but you and people who already know the truth believe you, when you go "no, that's not what happened"? It's still important for you to hear yourself saying what the truth is.

This is. Honestly, this is you being told that you're holding grudges and you need to let the petty things go, when you're going "um, no, it wasn't a minor injury caused by me being clumsy, you stabbed me. Repeatedly. There are witnesses and an ER report, and you never apologized or helped with the medical bills." If you were holding grudges, you would not be trying to repair your relationship with your family - especially when all the effort being put into the repairwork is being done on your side of things, with none being done on their side. If you were holding grudges, you would not still be in contact with them at all.
You'd be justified in holding a grudge, really. But I do not believe that you are holding any.

You shouldn't have to dance through any hoops to get them to stop doing things which harm you. And you should not have to follow up going through one hoop with going through another, unrelated hoop to get them to stop doing the new thing. There should be exactly 0 hoop-jumping, -dancing, or even -contemplating required in order for your needs to be met.

 

Ok. No. I know other people in this thread are already addressing this too, but this is. Majorly wrong and majorly upsetting. Your parent's view of the world is extremely skewed. There are many reasons and forms of suicide and the fact that they'd say good riddance to someone killing themself is. I don't have words for how cruel that is. I'm having a hard time being rational about this because apparently this is a trigger! My cousin didn't kill himself to hurt his girlfriend when she broke up with him. He never even said he was suicidal to anyone, never went "please stay with me I'm suicidal" to the girlfriend, never even gave a hint and that is something I've always found extremely upsetting because he never asked for help so we were never able to provide him with it! He was not being cruel! He was not a cruel person or abusive! He wasn't trying to manipulate anyone into doing as he wished! He was an awkward dude who wasn't particularly popular or had many friends, and then when he lost something he loved the world seemed unbearable. Ok I'm making this about myself, and my own pain, and this is probably not going to be helpful to you, so let me put it this way:

Your being suicidal is not you seeking to punish your parents for their actions. It might be a consequence of their actions, much the same way that letting go of something in the air means it falls down and sometimes that means falling down on your feet, but it isn't someone throwing a stone down to smash on someone's foot. You are not a terrible abuser for finding life hard. You are not abusive for needing help. The fact that your parents have such ass backwards views explains your actions, and doesn't condemn them. I'm sorry your own parents treat your pain like this. I'm now going to bow out for a few hours to calm down and concentrate on working on things.

 

on the topic of things i want out of therapy: i want my parents to understand that 1) bipolar is a real disorder that real people suffer from, and not a result of people choosing to be bad; and, 2) i have bipolar, even though i am "atypical."

because like. so when i'm manic, i'm really fucking impulsive. i mean i guess that's obvious but. i had a manic episode (my fault, i wasn't taking my medication properly) and i spent my entire emergency fund on ... i don't even know what. fish and fish related paraphernalia. stuff for my cat. just, stuff.

and it sucked and it was scary and i would like to talk to my parents about it because, like, when i was at college with lebesgue, we have ways of mitigating that? (lebesgue doesn't mind being like 85% of my self control when i'm manic, mostly) but i can't do any of those things here because my parents are incapable of looking at me being manic and doing impulsive things that i struggle to control and not go "you are being a bad, immature, irresponsible person."

like i have so much guilt already around saying things like "i don't have control when i'm manic" because that doesn't feel true, but. any time i try to change what happens by willpower alone, i lose. and it is really damaging to me, and maybe this is just me being oversensitive to criticism or something, but it really sucks to be told that i'm not good enough because i can't control my mania through willpower alone.

and i don't know how successful family therapy is going to be, because like. i need my parents to change, if not in reality at least in what they say to me, fundamental aspects of how they think people function.

like. my dad's response to "your standards are too high for me" was, and this is a quote, "what, you want to argue that you're r*******?" and they just. need to stop doing that. please.

i wanted to go through this piece by piece but couldn't, sorry. my dad is. i don't know. the last time we talked, he yelled at me, and i dissociated really horribly and tried to break up with all of my partners (.... because i'd decided that my dad was "right" about whatever he was arguing, and that the only moral course of action was to kill myself because i'm such a horrible, defective thing) and i can remember bits and pieces, but thinking too much about the fight still makes me dissociate!

and like. honestly. my relationship with my dad is loads better than with my mom.

honestly, the other thing is, i don't have receipts? it's all very my word against theirs. my parents think i'm a coward for not wanting to be alone with them, but. i don't know, i think it's really telling that they feel like they can't tell me off if i'm not alone, but i'm not sure why. because my parents say the reason we need to be alone is so that they can respect my privacy and not humiliate me publicly? and that sounds good in theory, but. i don't know. it feels sketchy that they think me wanting to have our conversations via text or with someone else present is cowardice.

but, yeah, i don't have receipts on anything i've claimed here. i mean, what happened in family therapy, i have lebesgue, but otherwise. it's all he said, she said. and on that topic, i really wish one of my parents was here to defend themselves because like. you're only getting my version of events? what if i'm really wrong? it's not fair that i've basically got an audience i'm complaining to here that is. i don't know, i think the words my mother would say is "primed to see abuse."

this is raire's quote, but i didn't want it to ping them (sorry i don't know your pronouns) because they said they needed to step away for a bit. emphasis mine.

all i can think of, the really fucking wild thing about this is: that bolded part? is how my parents feel about my suicide attempt two years ago. they didn't know anything was wrong. and i thought that was what i was supposed to do, that that was the only acceptable way to be suicidal, because if you're suicidal good fucking riddance, and i'd better not abuse anyone on my way down, right?

do you want to know the really fucking wild part

my parents? are mad at me? that i never said anything? apparently, they found it traumatic to be called down for no discernible reason because i was in the hospital for attempted suicide and my mother cried the entire fucking time. (please give this the emotional weight it deserves. as i think is obvious from what i said about my childhood, my mother hates crying. i have only seen her cry like three times that i can think of.)

and, gee, that was a little bit snarky and mocking about them being traumatized because like. in their own words, i am not allowed to be traumatized by what happened!!

it also really stands out to me that they were pretty enamored with lebesgue for the first like eight to ten months of our relationship. because lebesgue saved me and was watching over me (but then they started giving me ideas like maybe? my parents shouldn't call me retarded for wanting accommodations?) and now that it's been two years, they also love playing down the suicide attempt and how close i was dying and it wasn't a real suicide attempt, anyway, alcohol isn't a real method of killing yourself!

also, related to the bolded: i am really sorry for your loss, but it is comforting to know that there are people who would find someone they loved killing themselves without warning deeply upsetting.

 

and also like

Spoiler: spoiler because this is very cruel and not something i'm proud of thinking

in all honestly, if the world was just, in a way that people who do bad things always get their thematically appropriate comeupance, my parents deserve a dead child. because, i love them, but they did literally everything wrong, in my memory. i tried so many times to tell them that i was struggling, that i needed help, to please just listen to me and they never listened. they never helped. their idea of helping now is to isolate me from my existing support network at every chance they have.

they have said horrible horrible, untrue things about people with mental illnesses and disabilities and when i hear them tell me i'm not trying hard enough, i wish i had never survived two years ago and all they fucking had was the dead daughter they'd rather have than their fucking son right in front of them.

that said, like. the world isn't just like that and honestly, i don't think they'd ever learn a single thing from it. i really do think, if i'd killed myself, that they would eventually look back and say "good riddance."

and anyway the world can be fair to me, and being fair to me i think means getting to be my own person without having to serve as moral symbolism on my parents' way to be being better people.

mostly this was just because everyone has repeatedly been like "you're not being suicidal to punish your parents!" and like. this is technically true, but wow, some days do i wish i was.

 

This whole thread kind of makes me want to cry. I've been trying to find responses, because you deserve all the kindness and support, but I honestly don't have words for how upset your parents make me. The layers of reality-denial and refusal to acknowledge your internal experiences just kind of. No. That's not how you be family. That's not how you have any kind of relationship with another person. I am pretty sure you are not actually a person to them.

I am so proud of you for the work you are putting in to taking care of yourself, though. Expressing your needs, acknowledging your struggles, and actively working to mitigate them and improve your quality of life is incredibly emotionally mature. On the maturity subject, it seems a lot like your parents are both parentalizing and infantilizing you? Like, they're making you responsible for their feelings and their relationship with you (by demanding that you not talk about your mental health struggles, by expecting you to "prioritize the relationship over reality," by expecting you to organize the family therapy and other reconciliation efforts), while at the same time telling you that you are not an adult -- except that by adult, they seem to mean person whose feelings should be respected.

Spoiler: Response to spoiler

yes, this! I think this is a really healthy perspective to have. You don't exist only in relation to your parents; you're deserving of a fulfilling, rewarding, happy life independent of whatever happens with your parents.

 

it is. really nice. to have some of you guys that i've seen around on the forum (who i think of having had Actually Horrible Experiences and Actual Trauma) being upset. :(

i am. really really emotional from this. and i think i need to go sit down and cry for a bit but like, i promise they're good tears, please don't feel bad about it.

Spoiler: Response to spoiler

i think a big part of that is like. i had this friend in high school. she was trans. i. handled it really fucking poorly. and looking back, it's part of how i realized i was trans myself. but i learned those things about me at her expense and i wish i hadn't; i wish there had been a way for me to learn about myself without it coming at anyone else's expense. and i'm starting to think that trying to fix my parents and our relationship is me letting them learn how to be better people at my expense. and. i don't think i owe them that. i love them. i really want them in my life. but i'm starting to think that i don't have to let them hurt me on their way to being better people.

i don't know if that made sense.

 

Spoiler: spoiler to spoiler

i think you’re right.

you don’t owe them that. parents are supposed to teach you to be a good person, not the other way around.

 

Spoiler: response to spoiler

Witnessed as fuck to this whole thread, but there was one thing I wanted to say in particular

this does not make you a bad person. thoughts like this are really, really fucking common in people with depression + other mental illnesses, and even sometimes outside it, and it doesn't make you inherently abusive. You have legitimate frustrations and anger and since depression permeates every single aspect of your thought process, that gets mixed up. thoughts alone cannot make you abusive or evil, and thoughts alone do not mean that they are right about suicide always being abuse. Even if someone is just seeking attention, is just trying to "get revenge"- if they are willing to harm themselves to do that, if they are willing to risk death to do that, then they still deserve help, because 99.99% of the time a healthy brain does not consider suicide as a solution to their problems. No matter what, them trying to downplay your attempt, them trying to gaslight you, all of this- its not acceptable.
Anyways sorry I kinda lost track of my train of thought but the point is that having thoughts like this doesn't mean that your suicidal feelings aren't legitimate and that you are just using them to get what you want out of your loved ones. It means that you are upset by your family, and suicidal, and these emotions/states/brain chemicals mix around in some fun ways. Depression is always going to try to convince you that you're a monster.