In the latest piece of the Keep Talking series on B&T, Kathleen Gunther reflects on her and her family’s experience with mental health challenges. It follows pieces by the likes of Aimee Buchanan, Cam Luby, Al Crawford and Ian Perrin, the man behind the series.
As the anniversary of my brother’s death approaches every July, I start to go deep.
I think about him almost every day of course, but as anyone that has lost a loved one to suicide will tell you, it’s a porous type of grief that embodies you. Each year is a reminder of a bereavement like no other, followed by a consuming series of questions that have no answers.
This year marked seven years since my brother, Stephen, took his life. He was a father of four and a Navy veteran, and his was one of the many suicides that sparked the Royal Commission.
But it’s not his story I want to tell. It’s mine. It’s a story of post-traumatic growth and that of resilience.
I’ve been surrounded by mental health struggles my entire life. From my mother’s and my sister’s ongoing battles through to a dark depression that dimmed my brother’s light. Intergenerational trauma has played a starring role in our family.
Something you may not know, is that when someone does take their own life by suicide, it’s usually not the time they have tried. The first attempt for Steve was when he was 21, and I was 10 years old. I found him, and ran to get my parents at our neighbours house. While my father rushed him to hospital, my mother just screamed and cleaned the whole house, top to bottom.
Obviously in complete shock, and unable to cope herself let alone comfort me, I sat and watched.
Needless to say, this event has shaped the person I am and the masks I wear to make sense of the world today.
There’s a lot of talk about normalising mental health challenges, and rightly so. Conversations can save lives. But when they can’t, the impact on loved ones of someone who eventually makes the decision to take their own life is profound. And even before something so devastating, there are usually (not always) months, years, and decades of stepping on eggshells while navigating the ongoing mental health rollercoaster of people you care for. Often at the sacrifice of your own needs.
For anyone lucky enough to always see light, even a glimmer, at the end of the tunnel like me, the post-traumatic growth through these tragedies can be transformative. But the journey isn’t easy as you learn to put yourself first, and also seek help.
After my brother’s death, I joined a suicide bereavement support group. Sitting in a circle, listening to strangers share their pain while you share yours, teaches you a lot about the human condition.
Talk therapy came next, then a ‘Self Partnership’ course which some might call woo woo but it gave me usable tools to address the ways in which we abandon ourselves for others.
I’ve since embarked in a transformative course called ‘Shadow Work Made Simple’. It’s out of New Zealand by the PlayColab crew and based on Carl Jung’s theory of the shadow and the self.
This work pushes you to understand where your own self limiting beliefs come from and recognise the masks you’ve built to hide or adapt to the shadow part of yourself.
My mask was that I was invisible. That I wasn’t seen or heard.
That didn’t come from one incident, significant as it was. It came from years of having my ideas dismissed by my mother as an effort to protect me from her own trauma and fear.
So at 18 I left home and have been fiercely independent ever since. That was the first mask I recognised for what it was.
The second one is the energy I put out. I’m a charmer. I aim to disarm every room and make everyone in it feel seen and heard. I wonder where that came from.
But those same masks have also served me extraordinarily well. They’ve taken me around the world, working and living in multiple cities. They’ve drawn me to roles I could build from scratch, to championing others like with Melbourne Confidential. What the course gave me wasn’t a reason to dismantle them. It was an understanding of what sits underneath, and which parts of myself I’d packed away to stay safe.
So my ‘positive energy’ is not a ‘tone of voice’. It’s who I am. It’s also a mask I started building at ten years old, and it has taken me until now to accept that both of those things can be true at once.
As life continues to throw me challenges, I keep going deep. More recently I took part in a Beyond Blue coaching program for small business owners and solo operators to help manage the anxiety that comes with a life of uncertainty. I highly recommend it.
At 51, I’ve watched this industry reinvent itself more times than I can count. But the pace is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and almost everyone I meet is holding something together for someone else while quietly wondering about their own future.
So if you’re one of the carers, or someone who always appears to be lifting everybody else up, you probably need to go deep within sometimes too.
As Carl Jung said, the gold is in the dark. Go find it. But don’t be afraid to ask for help on the journey.
If you or someone you know needs support, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, and Open Arms, for veterans and their families, on 1800 011 046. StandBy Support After Suicide is on 1300 727 247.
