My darling mum Barbara looked like an old-fashioned movie star. With her dramatic eye make-up and perfectly coiffed dark hair, she bore more than a passing resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor.
Wickedly funny, sparklingly effervescent and fiercely loyal, her entire life revolved around her family.
To her, though, being a good mother meant doing everything practical for me and my older sister, Vikki – and I mean everything. Friends would come over and chuckle at the way Mum set out my toothbrush with toothpaste already neatly squeezed onto it.
Our home, too, was run like a military operation. Every day, Mum would manically scrub the house where we lived in London from top to bottom.
Everything was immaculate. Even the bin couldn’t have rubbish in it. If we ever went away for a weekend, Mum would wrap everything in cling film – from shelves to chandelier lights to sofas – so on her return she could just lift the cling film away, and any dust along with it.
It was as if she was trying to clean away her muddled feelings. Mum also had a restless spirit. So intensely was she focused on maintaining her high standards at home, that she never sat down or ever relaxed.
She found it hard to have a conversation within our four walls, and seemed to channel her impulsivity through marching endlessly around the house.
Today, Mum might be diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But she always refused to see there was a problem.
Sophie, aged eight, with her sister Vikki, 21. Both now work as therapists
When Vikki suggested Mum speak to a counsellor after becoming concerned about her, she was chastised.
My father, Stuart, was obsessional, too, and lived in a make-believe world. A gifted composer, he wrote a musical about Italian history that was his life’s work. For 60 years, until he passed away aged 80 in 2022, he relentlessly pursued this one project, unable to think or talk of anything else.
A solicitor by day, but an artist to his bones, he existed on a different plane from the rest of us – he heard musical notes literally everywhere, and was constantly dictating song ideas into his beloved dictaphone. The practicalities of daily life rarely entered his head.
I loved both my parents with every fibre of my being, and still do, but they weren’t emotionally available. They barely functioned in the big, bad world. Little wonder Vikki, 14 years older than me, always felt like the adult in our house.
Considering our parents’ unspoken challenges, perhaps you won’t be surprised to hear that Vikki and I both later experienced mental health issues.
After Mum died of stage 4 breast cancer aged 52 in 2000, when I was just 14, Vikki also became obsessional. Then aged 28, she started to experience something we’d now call pure O, which is a subtype of OCD that involves mental compulsions rather than visible ones (like continually checking a door is locked, or Mum’s obsessive cleaning).
Overwhelmed by an intense survivor’s guilt, her mind was utterly invaded by anxious, intrusive thoughts, about being a bad person for not being able to save Mum. I found myself having to reassure her that she was an amazing person.
Here I was, just a teenager, faced again with someone I adored who couldn’t get past their fixations.
While on the exterior I was resilient, high-performing, self-contained and calm, my inner landscape felt very different. I was highly fearful, full of self-doubt, melancholic and resentful. Anxiety pervaded my mind.
I wanted to save Vikki, just as she had wanted to save our mother. Given that both of our parents were anxious – albeit exhibited in different ways – I had always been convinced Vikki and I must have inherited an anxious gene of some sort.
Indeed, in 2015 researchers from King’s College London found that the RBFOX1 gene may make someone more likely to develop generalised anxiety disorder, while other studies have found that panic attacks are linked to specific genes.
Sophie and Vikki’s beloved – but complicated – parents Stuart and Barbara
Sophie and Vikki’s mental health challenges – rather than being hardwired into their DNA – were born out of their traumatic experiences, loss and learned behaviour
Yet when both Vikki and I did a 23andMe genetic test in 2022 – which works by examining samples of your saliva, and analyses around 7,000 genetic markers to estimate your likelihood of being diagnosed with certain conditions – we were surprised to find that we had only a ‘typical’ likelihood of developing anxiety.
So despite what we may have thought, our mental health challenges – rather than being hardwired into our DNA – were born out of our traumatic experiences, loss and learned behaviour.
Mine and Vikki’s experiences in childhood and early adulthood didn’t just set us on a path to experiencing emotional turmoil, however. They also – unusually, you might think – led to us both becoming mental health therapists, and today we both run our own private practices in London.
Eventually, our training, and the self-help strategies we adopted, helped us understand our own psychological landscape, as well as that of our patients.
Today, Vikki and I are as close as ever – but our co-dependent relationship (i.e. our overreliance on each other) has morphed into a healthy, balanced one. We have coping mechanisms for dealing with life’s ups and downs.
But knowing what I know now, I believe trauma is behind so much of modern society’s anguish.
Yes, genetics can play a part – as can substance use, lack of exercise and other lifestyle factors – but studies, such as one by the University of Liverpool in 2013, show that stressful events far more heavily impact one’s propensity to develop anxiety and depression.
And as I can testify, seeing a loved one struggle with mental health problems certainly ranks highly among life’s most stressful scenarios.
Through our work, Vikki and I have witnessed how many people seek support because someone close to them is struggling with their mental health and they’re deeply affected, especially if their loved one refuses to get help.
Whether it’s worrying intensely over a partner battling depression and suicidal thoughts, or a parent agonising over their son or daughter’s impulsive behaviour, these experiences can create ‘secondary trauma’, which is when you feel someone else’s trauma as though it’s your own. Indeed, such problems account for around 60 per cent of our respective practices.
And this casebook is seen more widely, too. A recent report found that 55 per cent of Britons who find themselves in a caregiving role were experiencing depression and 78 per cent anxious thoughts.
Given the rise in mental health issues – claims for mental health benefits in the UK have surged to 400 cases per day, tripling since before the pandemic – concerningly, these cases of secondary trauma look only set to rise.
This type of trauma occurs, quite simply because, as humans, we naturally mirror the behaviours, emotions and stress of those around us – particularly when caring for someone struggling with their mental health.
Learned behaviour, as it’s known, is a huge contributory factor in the development of anxiety, right from our earliest days. Babies, for instance, can absorb stress from their caregiver. If a mother struggles to calm herself, it can leave a baby more vulnerable to stress.
This early exposure can rewire their tiny, developing mind to be more susceptible to anxiety.
Experiencing difficult feelings is an essential part of what makes us human, yet people seem to think that they need to ‘get rid’ of negative emotions, often with medication, writes Sophie
This process is rooted in neuroplasticity – the brain’s remarkable ability to change and adapt its structure and functions in response to internal or external stimuli.
Our brains are constantly evolving, and chronic stress, fear or anxiety can fundamentally reshape our neural pathways.
But back in the 1980s, when my mother was experiencing her issues, wider society just didn’t have this kind of language or knowledge to understand what she was going through.
Looking back though, now aged 39 and as a mother of one myself, I can’t help but feel Mum’s compulsions were ushered in by her breast cancer diagnosis when I was just five.
Although she went into remission for many years, the threat of illness lurked constantly.
I’ve often since thought that Mum’s endless cleaning was her mechanism to control her external world. After all, she certainly couldn’t control her internal one.
She tragically passed away from secondary cancer in her bones and her liver. Despite everything, she had been the ultimate matriarch, the glue that held our family together. When she died, everything changed. Dad’s grief was just too much for him. He retreated quickly into another relationship to escape.
Vikki, meanwhile, was overwhelmed by an intense guilt and grief. She endeavoured to be the best replacement mother she could be to me. She had moved out of the family home when I was five, and I moved in with her when I was 15. However, I found myself constantly having to reassure her that she was doing a good job at caring for me.
Little wonder, perhaps, that I then put myself under huge pressure to be the best I could be – a straight-A student, I never rebelled – and this was a habit that was to last into adulthood.
I became so adept at coping and keeping my pain, and everyone else’s, secret that I just kept piling more and more stressors onto my shoulders.
You Are Not Alone In This: Supporting A Loved One’s Mental Health Without Losing Your Own by Sophie Scott, is published by Watkins Publishing, £14.99
I took on the role of a ‘fixer’, and consistently sought people out both socially and romantically that needed saving. (My friends have darkly joked that my dating history is chequered with men who had every diagnosis going.)
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s that I burned out. I was so stressed out running my start-up company that it took a near breakdown for me to face my own limitations.
I needed to start to take better care of myself and put more boundaries in place. I had to stop pretending to be Superwoman. And it was then that therapy really came to my rescue.
Thankfully, Vikki had shipped me off to see a wonderful therapist just before Mum died – I remember arriving at her house with my GCSE coursework in my backpack. Extraordinarily, I still see her today, albeit not as often as I once did.
At my own therapist’s suggestion, I then started doing a foundation evening class in counselling and psychotherapy, as she thought it might benefit me.
Never once did I envisage completing five years of training and having my own practice – nor that Vikki would later follow me into becoming a therapist, too.
Undoubtedly, psychotherapy has changed the course of both mine and my sister’s lives. And we have gone on to apply the insights and tools we have learned along the way to help others.
Teaching others how to help themselves, and the importance of healthy detachment, is now my goal. It’s not about loving any less, but handing back responsibility and focusing on what you can control.
Vikki has learned that you can’t rescue someone (and that ambivalent feelings towards loved ones are normal). When I stepped away from playing the ‘fixer’, I had to face my own issues instead of hiding behind others.
As a therapist, I now remind my clients that real change begins with them. For however much you love someone, you simply can’t save them like some sort of Marvel comic book character.
But you can be a loving support as they figure it all out (I’ve channelled all I’ve learned into my new book, which is a practical guide to supporting a loved one’s mental health without losing your own).
I wish I had known all this when I was growing up and in early adulthood. It would have saved me a lot of pain. Because the fact is, each and every one of us exists on a spectrum of mental wellness.
Certain factors – whether it’s trauma, grief, stress or sadness – will tip us up or down this scale at various points, sometimes right to the extremes of each end. This is entirely normal.
Experiencing difficult feelings is an essential part of what makes us human, yet people seem to think that they need to ‘get rid’ of negative emotions, often with medication.
The modern need to have a clinical ‘diagnosis’ is a complex issue. That’s not to say that there aren’t many pros to following a medical approach to mental health issues. Of course there are – and I took the antidepressant, citalopram, for anxiety for a year, and it helped for that time.
But seeking a ‘label’ for emotional difficulties can be reductive. Human experience is wide and varied, and rarely can it easily be explained by a gene or a single factor, nor can it be quickly solved with a prescription.
I remind my clients that it’s who we are at our core that matters. This is what transpersonal integrative psychotherapy – the kind of therapy I practise – teaches us.
It says we all have an essence that can defy our genetics and even our upbringing. With the right guidance, we can all reclaim our stories.
It’s an approach that utilises body and breathwork practices, visualisation techniques, dream work and early life analysis in order to heal mind, body and soul. After all, mental wellbeing is just one component of who a person is. People are nuanced.
As I saw with my own parents, someone can be struggling in their mind, but still have the most tremendous dry wit, like my mother, or be incredibly creative, like my father.
While my sister and I couldn’t have full and proper conversations with our parents, we enjoyed a different kind of communication: Mum would play the piano and sing Dad’s songs, and we would join in.
Our relationship may have been constrained by their mental health challenges – but it wasn’t completely defined by them. And neither should any of us be.
You Are Not Alone In This: Supporting A Loved One’s Mental Health Without Losing Your Own by Sophie Scott, is published by Watkins Publishing, £14.99.
