The Holidays After You See the Masks: Family, Mental Health, and the Labels We Inherit

*updated 12/24* 

What happens when you finally see the emotional patterns you grew up inside?

In this episode, I reflect on family, holidays, and the quiet shift that happens once you gain the language to understand your own history. Through personal observation and late-life clarity, I explore how my parents’ generation understood mental health, how stigma shaped family narratives, and how certain diagnoses became convenient explanations rather than curious questions.

I talk about sibling dynamics, inherited assumptions, and what it felt like to be labeled instead of understood. This is not an accusation or a diagnosis of anyone else. It’s one person’s account of growing up, unlearning old stories, and finding peace without pretending everything was fine.

*This episode includes discussion of mental health stigma, misdiagnosis, involuntary psychiatric custody, substance use, overdose, and family conflict. Listener discretion is advised, especially for those with lived experience around mental health crises or family trauma. 

Transcript

George TenEyck: 0:00

Before we get started, I want to say something upfront. This episode is personal. It isn't an accusation, it isn't a diagnosis of anyone else, and it's not a demand for agreement. It's one person's account of growing up inside of a family system, gaining language later in life through therapy, and realizing that some of what once felt normal was really just familiar. This episode includes discussion of mental health stigma, misdiagnosis, involuntary psychiatric custody, substance use, overdose, and family conflict. If those topics are difficult for you, please take care of yourself as you listen to this episode. Everything you're about to hear is filtered through my experience and my perspective. I could be wrong, but this is what I see now looking back on my life with clearer eyes. Every year around Christmas, there's a moment. It usually happens early, before dessert, sometimes before the coffee is poured or the plates are cleared. The tree is lit, the house smells like whatever tradition we've decided to repeat this year. People are exchanging small talk, gifts, and polite smiles. Someone makes the same jokes they make every Christmas. From the outside, it looks fine, warm, familiar, like a family doing what families do at the holidays. But inside, something tightens. Because without consciously deciding to, I have already shifted. My voice softens, certain thoughts stop mid-sentence, topics quietly disappear before they ever reach my mouth. Not because anyone asked me to, but because over time I learned who I am allowed to be at Christmas. This is my perspective, my experience, and my interpretation. I'm not inside anyone else's head. I don't know what they feel privately, what they've worked through or what they've avoided. I don't know who's been to therapy and who hasn't. What I do know is what it felt like to grow up in this family, and what it feels like now sitting at the same holiday tables, but now with a very different level of awareness. In my parents' generation, mental health wasn't something that you explored. It was something that you endured, or ignored, or quietly judged in other people. There was a deep concern with appearances, with respectability, with not becoming that family. If something was hard, you pushed through it. If something felt uncomfortable, you kept it private and secret. And if someone struggled publicly, the struggle itself became the problem. There simply wasn't language for complexity. Autism was not understood the way it is now. ADHD was framed as laziness or a discipline problem. He's just hyperactive. Traumatic brain injury barely registered unless it happened on a football field or in a car crash. But bipolar disorder, manic depression, as they used to call it, that one had a name, a shape, a story. And once a family has a story, it tends to reuse it. In my family, mental illness already had a face. My mother's younger sister. Whatever one called manic depression in the old days, she struggled for most of her life. She was spoken about carefully, often in whispers, treated as an embarrassment and a burden at the same time. Someone my grandparents endlessly rescued. Cars, apartments, money, second chances that never seemed to run out. That created resentment, and resentment over time turns into a worldview. Mental illness in this family story meant chaos, dependency, and shame. That story mattered more than anyone realized. Then there was another example, one that hit way closer to home, one that terrified me as a young adult. My uncle, my mom's brother, and his son, my cousin. Right after we graduated from high school, my cousin had a mental breakdown. It was sudden, severe, and impossible to ignore. I watched my uncle panic. I watched him grasp for solutions, cycling through medication after medication, trying desperately to regain control. Nothing about it felt grounded in understanding. It felt urgent, fear-driven, and reactive. Between 1993 and 1998, I watched my cousin unravel in real time. In 1998, he overdosed on heroin. That loss was devastating. It was the worst trauma and the worst grief I had ever felt at that time, and it affected me for a decade afterwards. But that loss was also clarifying in the moment. Because by then I had already understood something, that this is how my family responds when someone breaks. By that point, the pattern felt established. An aunt, a cousin, and then later a sister struggling with her own mental issues. So when I started to show cracks years later, the conclusion came quickly. It wasn't what's happening with George. It was more like, uh oh, we've seen this before. It's the old family curse. He must be bipolar. My parents' generation didn't have the language for neurodivergence. They didn't have a framework for autism or ADHD or the long-term effects of early head injuries, which I definitely did have. But bipolar disorder felt familiar, comforting in a strange way. It explained everything without requiring curiosity. It's genetic. It runs in the family. You must be just like them. End of discussion. Take your label and move on. That label carried expectations. Instability, volatility, eventual failure. The problem was I didn't exactly check those boxes. I went to college, I built a career, I worked consistently, I held long tenures, I showed up for my life. That evidence didn't challenge the label. That evidence was just ignored. Because the label wasn't about accuracy, it was about certainty. There are four of us siblings. We had the same parents, we experienced the same holidays, but we have very different adaptations. And I've spent most of my life trying to understand why we all came out of the same house with such different survival strategies. For a long time I looked up to my oldest sister, but not for the reasons people might assume. What I admired was not the PhD or the credentials, that part came way later. What I admired was the version of her that felt fearless to me when I was younger. She was rebellious, she was adventurous, she traveled, she lived in Hawaii, she sent me t-shirts from places that felt exotic and impossible from my vantage point. She dated a pro surfer. She lived on the north shore of Oahu. She lived a life that felt like a postcard and a dare at the same time. She wasn't the family script, she was the exception. Later she returned to school and earned a PhD in psychology. That's a real achievement, and no one can take that away from her. But she does not practice clinical psychology. She doesn't sit across from people and help them sort out their lives. She works in the corporate world with data, trends, actuarial tables, models, probabilities, numbers, forecasts, risk. And here's the thing: even if she did practice clinically, she has an insurmountable bias when it comes to me. She never told me she was proud of me, not once. And that matters more than people realize, because in a family like this, praise doesn't happen accidentally. Someone has to choose it. She also never said sorry, not for the way she intervened in my life, not for the way my mental health situation was handled, not for the coldness of it. There was never an explicit conversation that sounded like care. There was never a moment she sat down and looked at me in the face and said, Hey, I'm worried about you. We think you should consider checking into a hospital. Here's why. That's not how it went. What I remember is urgency, efficiency, secondhand information. Decisions were made without me. Then a car ride to Dallas that felt less like help and more like containment. Here you go. Now stop talking about our parents on Facebook. Hope it works out for you. Bye. And then the next year it escalated. She helped my mother say the right things to the right people. Judges, authorities, county mental health officials. The result was police and mental health officials coming to my house to try to take me away. And that was extremely traumatic. The worst thing I ever did to my older sister was tell her to her face that she was wrong about something. For that, I got cut off. Now we smile at Christmas and we do polite choreography. Good to see you, you too. Merry Christmas. Drive safe. All for the sake of appearances for my mom. It looks fine, it looks normal, it looks like family, but it's not a relationship. Not really. And it never really was. Beyond nostalgia for a few moments that felt warm when we were younger, like going to concerts. There's nothing there. With my other sister, the feeling I have isn't anger as much as it is sadness. I got to see her up close when her son graduated from college around 2014, and it was like seeing her world from the inside. She was anxious, sheltered, closed in. Afraid to drive on the freeways, afraid to break routine, afraid of her own shadow, honestly. So medicated that it felt like life had narrowed down to managing symptoms and maintaining control. That's hard to witness because I remember a different version of her too. And I don't say that to judge her, I say it because it looks like a life built around fear. But there is a bright spot, a real one, my brother-in-law, her husband. The boy next door that she married, the one who stayed. They've been together for years. They raised two successful, well-adjusted kids. He was a great provider. He was steady, and he showed up through thick and thin, and he's still there today. My mom and my sisters think he's an asshole. They always say that sitting around the dinner table. That he'll never be good enough. I disagreed loudly every time. I think he's the best thing that ever happened to my sister. Because he stuck around. He didn't vanish when things got hard. He didn't make her life more chaotic, he made it more stable. And for someone living with that much anxiety, stability matters. When I think about the youngest of my sisters, I mostly feel sadness. She's self-absorbed in a way that looks like confidence from a distance, but up close it feels like a loop. There's another layer to it though. When things hurt, her solution isn't emotional literacy, it isn't therapy, it isn't slowing down and asking hard questions, it's stuff. Buying things, accumulating, replacing one feeling with another purchase. And that way she's actually very aligned with my parents' generation. If you don't have the language to process what you feel, you reach for something tangible instead. A bag, a receipt, a sense of control that you can hold in your hands. It looks like coping, but it's really just self-soothing with objects instead of understanding. It's also hard to watch her walk back into a relationship that already failed once. A man who's a known quantity, untherapized, a habitual liar, in my mom's own words. And the thing that makes it harder is the pretending. He fakes it. He pretends to like me. I know he hates my guts. So we do this holiday theater where everyone smiles, everyone plays their part, and nobody says what they know. It's like we're all standing on the altar again taking bets about how long this marriage will last. And the last time those bets were right. It failed because he is who he is. Now we're supposed to act like it's a fresh start. Like they didn't already live this chapter. If it makes her happy, fine. I'm not here to run her life. But watching someone you love walk back into the same wall is a special kind of helpless. And then there's me. I'm the one who took a long time to realize that I was waiting for something that I was never going to get. I wanted encouragement, validation, someone to say, I'm proud of you. Someone to say, we mishandled this and I'm sorry. That never came from my siblings. What I did get was a lot of reading between the lines, a lot of silence, and a lot of polite interaction that looks like closeness to outsiders. For a long time, I took that personally, like it meant I wasn't worth it. Now I see it differently. It wasn't about my worth, it was about their limits. When I started therapy and began writing publicly, things escalated. Instead of asking me how I was doing, my family watched from a distance. They read my Facebook posts, they interpreted my tone, they compared notes, not with me, but about me. What followed wasn't care, it was controlled. Cold, efficient, and transactional. I was driven to a mental hospital like an errand. Later, authorities were coached, judges were spoken to, and police came to my house. It was traumatic. And no one ever apologized, except one person. Later in my life, my mom did something extraordinary. She said, I was wrong. She said, I'm sorry this happened the way it did. Please forgive me. That matters. That's why I still spend time with her. Not just because she's in the twilight of her life, but because she had the courage to own it. I can't gloss over that. I won't. Because repair matters. Even late. Especially late. None of my siblings ever said they were proud of me. None of them ever said they were sorry. And at some point, I stopped waiting for all of that. I stopped wishing they were different people. I stopped trying to squeeze emotional water out of a stone. I accept them exactly as they are. And that acceptance gave me something I've never had before. Peace. Not because everything was resolved. Not because everyone changed, but because I stopped asking people to give me what they never had to give. I still care mostly. I still show up sometimes, and I still sorta value my family. But I no longer confuse control with care, silence with safety, or appearances with love. What I gained wasn't distance, it was choice. I can be present without performing, honest without provoking, and connected without disappearing. And that's what surviving Christmas looks like now. This is Confessions of a Gen X Mind. If you like what you've heard, please check out all of our episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. I'm George Tenike. Thanks for listening. We'll chat with you soon.