When Love Isn't Enough: Facing the Reality of Mental Illness in the Family

 

Behind Black Eyes: Surviving Family Trauma and Mental Illness

Those black eyes. Nick Reiner’s black eyes. I have seen them before. Not on his face. First on my ex-husband’s face and then on my middle child’s face years later. I lived with the mentally ill and had to deal with their psychotic episodes. The danger is palpable.

Rob Reiner and Michelle Singer Reiner’s deaths have shaken me. It could have been me.

Breaking the Cycle: A Journey Through C-PTSD, Survival, and No Contact

Since the middle of December when the tragedy hit national news, it’s taken me back to 2007 when I was faced with the moment I became stuck in a C-PTSD loop in for a long time. Those black dead eyes staring me down. The visceral fell to my core, hair standing up on my arms. Picking up the phone in slow motion and dialing 911.

There had been warning signs. Chance after chance given for reprehensible behavior. Multiple stays in the psych ward. Self-medicating through alcohol and the misuse of street and prescription drugs. Criminal behavior. Relapse after relapse. Waking one night to him standing over me eyes black and dead to the world. I could no longer sleep at night.

As he travelled the path into his insanity, I was gripped in fear daily. As a devout person I clung to faith and believed that you don’t abandon family. I did everything I could to get help and to keep what was happening quiet. There comes a point that no matter how much you love nothing helps and it doesn’t stay quiet.

I get how the Reiner’s kept trying to help their son. As a parent one feels love to the center of our being – driven to protect and defend. I felt that as both a wife and mother. We want to believe them even when reason points in another direction.

My family was destroyed. But we are all still alive because I picked up the phone and finally got help. It was a paramount betrayal in his eyes. We are no longer in contact. That is the best thing that can happen.

The Cost of Compassion: Navigating Family, Mental Illness, and Accountability

These people blame their parents and/or partners in order to deflect accountability. They will make up lies and manipulate to suck people in. Maybe narcissism is at play, a misused buzz word I’ve come to despise when misapplied, but what is underneath is mental illness and self-medicating.

After I was married a few years, I found out that my difficult ex’s mother had been hospitalized for mental health issues multiple times before and after the end of her 44-year marriage. Of her three children, it was the son I married during a period of normalcy that inherited her disease. I found these things out when I was pregnant with our second child together.

Unfortunately, my middle child’s mental illness started in middle school. From knowing my ex’s history, that is about the age he started self-medicating and doing criminal things. And what we know from the news, this is about the age that Nick Reiner’s illness and descent began too.

My adult child blames other things than accept that she inherited a mental illness that can be traced to their paternal great grandparents, and that it will require lifelong medication. I wish it was different for them. They blamed me and wished that they weren’t born. They have had suicide attempts. They believe their spouse would not have married them if they knew they had a genetic illness. I don’t know about that. They love them the way I loved their father. I do feel for the road their spouse walks as their partner as much as the daily struggle they live with.

They all blame me for boundaries - for saying no. I had exhausted myself completely before seeing the light.

The thing is that one often feels caring and hopeful when there are glimpses that things may be finally getting better. It’s easy to get drawn back in. I did that over and over because it is a loop. I have been divorced from my ex since 2010. It took years after to heal because these master manipulators do not let you go easily and will convince you to act irrationally against your self-interest.

Even after all these years sucker punches can still land with the discovery of things not previously known. That happened to me in 2023. I wish I could have spared my children and myself from all of it. I hope they are living a life that is satisfying to them. I did my best in the circumstances that I had toward a trajectory of a better life. It's what we all hope for as parents.

The Danger We Normalize

This is not to blame the Reiner’s for their deaths. It is to acknowledge how dealing with a mentally ill, drug addicted person can be normalized and that loved ones can become blind to the danger that they are living in and thus act irrationally themselves and in their case resulting in their deaths. 

So, what should happen to Nick Reiner? Given that rehab’s and stays in psych wards do not help and there are no mental institutions anymore because of the severe abuse in those places requiring closure, it reasonably only points to two choices. The death penalty or life in prison. The criminal insanity defense could eventually end with him being let free once this master manipulator is deemed well. How well would you sleep if he was let out and in proximity to you?

There is no helping him. In my opinion, permanent no contact with the rest of us is the answer. What do you think?

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