Do You Take Good Care of Your Wounded Soul? | Guest Kirsten Panachyda

Are you pouring out tender loving care to someone in your life who needs your help? This is a noble act, and God wants you to care for those in need. However, do you pretend your pain doesn’t matter? It is imperative to take good care of your wounded soul while caring for someone else.

Today, I have the honor of welcoming Kirsten Panachyda as our guest on Embracing the Unexpected. She shares her thoughts on caring for our wounded souls while parenting a child with a mental illness. She eloquently points out how important it is to recognize the grief and trauma associated with our experiences. 

Kirsten recently wrote a book to tell her story. She included practical pointers, defense strategies, and more to help others maneuver down this unexpected road with mental illness. She takes you to the dark places others seldom venture. I highly recommend, Among Lions: Fighting for Faith and Finding Your Rest while Parenting a Child with Mental Illness. 

Before and After—Caring for Your Wounded Soul

By Kirsten Panachyda

Life before — It was the Fourth of July, one of our favorite holidays. We walked down the hill to our friends’ house, where we joined the uproar of talk and laughter. People squeezed around each other to help themselves to pancakes, bacon, orange juice, coffee, fruit. My tween sons, Alex and Nicholas, settled into a corner on the floor, pushing the dog away from their loaded plates. We greeted old friends who had been gathering together for our small-town Independence Day for years. Our hosts were the kids of some of these friends. Now they were all grown up and married and with kids of their own. Hard to believe they had been the teenaged babysitters our kids adored as toddlers. 

Walking from breakfast to the parade route, Dan and I held hands, watching our boys in front of us. They chattered and gave each other the occasional playful shove. “Look at them. They’re best friends.” A glow of well-being filled me.

That night the group reconvened at second base in the Little League field to spread out chairs and blankets and wait for the fireworks. We stood in line for ice cream, then made our way back to our spot, listening for the sound of a guitar and singing in the dark. When the fireworks started, we took turns holding the littles, reassuring them, holding a hand over the ear not pressed into a chest, until they relaxed into the spirit of the thing. Then they “oohed” and “ahhed” with the rest of us.

Life Before

 A few years later, I found myself alone on July fourth in Saratoga Springs, NY, a town famous for its celebration. I had not come to participate in the day-long party of food, live re-enactors, music, and other fun activities. Saratoga Springs is also the location of the psychiatric hospital where my fourteen-year-old son was a patient. I went to visit him for half an hour twice a day, and the rest of the time, I hung around my hotel room. I couldn’t bring myself to take part in the festivities alone. From the hotel balcony, I watched some fireworks with strangers. Homesick, not just for the home but for my family, I cried before bed. Even though Nicholas and I were going back to Manlius soon, the family I missed before would not be there.

Life After

My son, who was later diagnosed with bipolar II disorder, had been suffering suicidal depression for over a year. It took over three years for him to reach stability. He has had some setbacks and will always need to manage his illness. But those three crisis years divide my life into before and after. 

“‘Any event (or series of events) that leads you to view your life in terms of ‘before’ and ‘after’ can cause severe mental health effects,’ says Rachel Yehuda, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.” (How your Body Remembers Trauma, Meryl Davids Landau, Good Housekeeping, May 2021)

Our Wounded Soul

When parents need to devote much of their time and energy to caregiving, we can miss the fact that we are also grieving—the mourning over the kids who used to inhabit our lives aches in us. So much can be stolen away: laughter, silliness, moments of growth, flashes of new insight. The “awww” moments of peeking in on them while they sleep. The messy, chaotic, normal interactions with siblings full of play and squabbles. The way they enjoyed their hobbies or sports.

When Nicholas was really sick, he seemed gone from me. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the boy who was there. I did, fiercely. He was still mine. But the Nicholas from before seemed to be present only in briefly glimpsed shadows. Sometimes I spent long hours looking at photographs of him and other times could hardly bear to think about him, my boy from before. It wasn’t that he had grown up and moved away. He had not died and left this world. He was just gone.

But this grief is more than just missing someone. It is also trauma—a trauma of loss, of intense fear, sometimes of witnessing violence to a loved one either from self-harm or suicide attempts.

“Acute stress disorder can develop following a person’s exposure to one or more traumatic events. Symptoms may develop after an individual either experiences firsthand or witnessed a disturbing event involving a threat of or actual death, serious injury, or physical or sexual violation.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/acute-stress-disorder)

To Care for Our Wounded Soul

To properly care for our souls, it’s crucial to recognize our trauma. We learn about triggers for our kids, but we develop them too. As a small example, ever since bringing my son to the hospital during a crisis in the middle of a blizzard, I need to be wary when I drive in the snow. Sometimes the feelings of that blizzard day on the way to the hospital well back up. Physically, I’m tenser than the situation calls for. Emotionally, I experience helplessness and sadness all over again. The changes in me are a problem for someone who lives just outside the snowiest city in the country. Awareness and some relaxation techniques make all the difference.

Sally Lott Miller, LMFT, says, “Parents are clearly and validly distraught and have that hypervigilance and intrusive thoughts and replaying of events over and over again. It’s important to educate parents, so they understand if when they have a trauma response.”

Do you have before and after divisions in your life? Have you mourned well for what you’ve lost? Are you tuned in to how your responses may be shaped by all you’ve been through?

You have a precious soul that needs and deserves care and protection. God understands your pain and wants to bring healing.

Understanding God’s Heart

Being a parent helps us understand God’s heart toward us. The protective, do-anything-for-you, unquenchable love that I have for my kids echoes the love of God. My grief over my boy from before also mirrors this love. When Israel had turned away from their God, He yearned over them:

“When Israel was a child, I loved him,

and out of Egypt I called my son.

But the more they were called,

the more they went away from me.

They sacrificed to the Baals

and they burned incense to images.

It was I who taught Ephraim (Israel) to walk,

taking them by the arms;

but they did not realize it was I who healed them.

I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love.

To them I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek,

and I bent down to feed them.”

Hosea 11:1-4 NIV

God understands our hearts. He gives us a window into His. And He reaches out to the parents made in His image to hold us while we mourn.

Dear friends, maybe you are grieving your gone-but still-here kid. I pray God will comfort your sore heart. Perhaps you need to seek help for trauma responses that are interfering with your life. I pray God will lead you to counsel and healing. Maybe you need to process what it means to have before and after. I pray God will give you the space and quiet you need. Most of all, I want to tell you that there is still joy, peace, and meaning here in the after.

Meet Kirsten

Kirsten Panachyda writes and speaks to infuse courage into the soul-weary. Her book Among Lions: Fighting for Faith and Finding Your Rest while Parenting a Child with Mental Illness is available now. Kirsten blogs at kirstenp.com. She and her husband Dan have two sons, and they are a roller-coaster-riding, travel-loving, blue-hair-dying family.

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