A question but mostly a vent

I'm so damn relieved to have found this subreddit. It's been a real comfort lately, as my little brother (29yo) is slowly inching his way down from his current manic episode. It's just so validating to know my experiences aren't as isolatingly unique as they feel.

I'm still trying to come to terms with the realities of my brother's condition, and in general it just feels like I can't seem to feel educated enough on it. Maybe that's par for the course?

I'm trying though, because it pains me so much I can barely talk about him anymore. His first manic episode happened in 2019, and it's been the classic ride of serious depressive episodes and intensely destructive manias since then. I started seeing a therapist a few months ago and as I was describing my family for the first time to her beyond a surface level, I started crying. It took me until literally that session to realize just how much help I need on at least verbalizing my feelings; on handling how lonely it can feel to live with the helplessness; on the extent of how much I had been repressing for the sake of supporting my parents support him...

I'm working on it.

I've known I've needed to work on it; it took me until this past fall to even bother working on it.

Turns out, things can work a teeny tiny bit sometimes with a teeny tiny bit of effort. I'm finding therapy helpful. Shit still sucks, and I'm trying to figure out how to let shit suck and continue to live life without coping in unhealthy ways. And I mean, I'm not perfect and I don't aim to be.

...But, I'm begrudgingly... kinda...starting to feel like I have some better tools in my toolbox to handle my anxiety. Like...ooops, who'dve thought talking about your feelings would help you cope with the hard feelings your feeling eventually right? Ugh. It's the kind of thing that is so annoyingly obvious. But also, how do I convince my parents to do it too???

I'll admit I resisted therapy because I think I'm a butthole who procrastinates and runs away from personal accountability and I'm just inherently lazy. I also resisted for a while, because I'd already seen a therapist for a few years and felt I'd gotten what I could out of it. It's not like I didn't see the value therapy in general.

It kills me to see my aging parents take the full brunt of... Basically everything. It kills me to resent my brother for cyclically breaking their hearts (working on it); I think it kills me extra though, when they refuse to even consider seeking forms of support for themselves.

I know a portion of this is just a generational + cultural difference. They're immigrants, and I know they're from a country and time that demonised mental illness at worst and was grossly ignorant of it at best. Plus, theyre the type to "keep it in the family." I grew up with the impression they weren't like this to uphold an 'image' so much as just keep nearly everything private. Y'know those really quiet kids from class or work that you can know for years but know nothing about? That's them. They met, fell in love, and raised three millennials one of whom now doesn't know how to talk about her brother out loud because of all the damn internalized notions of privacy.

Even before my brother's condition started bringing chaos into our lives I've suggested therapy to them. For years they just respond with they don't understand how therapy of any sort could help them. I've talked to them together, separately, in different contexts, with different approaches, about how there are different ways to maintain your own mental health outside of just talking to your spouse and non bipolar kid, or occasionally going to church.

They don't want to talk about it with me in the context of family therapy or with a mediator or something, or a support group. They don't want to talk about it with me much period. That's fine for now (I guess). They certainly don't share it outside of venting to their own siblings/family. But yeah, the extended.family knows; we're all closer than I think most families of its size. So it just bothers me that myself, my sister, my aunts, even some of my cousins, have all told my parents to consider seeking therapy for themselves. It's one thing to accept advice from your own kid, I can see why they wouldn't want to listen to me on certain things. But so many other people in their lives have suggested it multiple times.

It just bothers me that they don't even recognize they need to work on it, and it bothers me to see them so attached to the idea that therapy is for "the unwell."