Using Personification to Cope
My mother is an author. She has written books about living with a chronic illness, Multiple Sclerosis. It’s her coping method that is somewhat unique and it could help people with various mental and physical illnesses. She personifies her illness by recognizing it as the living, breathing being that it actually is.
To personify means to give something nonhuman, human characteristics. Saying that a car groaned, the lightning danced, or the wind howled are all examples of personification. My mother could give one of my lifeless, childhood stuffed animals a complete personality, voice, and behavior traits. Oh, the shenanigans my silly stuffed animals would get into because of the way my mother brought them to life. She loved to do voice-overs for our family dog, just to make us laugh about what the poor dog was probably thinking about her humans. So, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when she did the same with an invisible illness that suddenly, and rudely, decided to invade our household.
Before her diagnosis, my mother was a healthy, happy, busy wife, mother, and elementary school teacher. Suddenly, she couldn’t walk, see, feel, or remember. Her MS diagnosis hit devastatingly hard. She struggled, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally with this new label. Over time, she began to regain her ability to walk. Her memory and vision somewhat improved. However, the burden of the MS diagnosis was mentally hard to recover from.
That was, until she recognized it as having a life, even a personality, of its own. She gave her MS the name of Missy. This one step is all it took for my mom to begin regaining some of her autonomy. It wasn’t my mom’s fault that she walked so slowly. It was Missy’s. It wasn’t my mom’s fault that she couldn’t remember how to turn on the stove. It was Missy’s. If we had made plans and my mom couldn’t attend, it was Missy’s choice, not my mom’s. Over time, we began to learn what Missy liked and disliked. For instance, Missy liked to rest and hated getting too warm. These are common MS symptoms, but by making the problems be Missy’s and not my mother’s, it helped us all learn to deal with it. We knew that my mom wanted to go to our games. She wanted to go on a hike with us. It was Missy who wouldn’t let her.
As we all began to learn more and more about Missy’s personality and how her living with us was going to work, we found a new normal. Missy wasn’t going to go away. She moved in without invitation and had no plans to move out and leave us alone. Therefore, we were forced to get to know her.
Although this idea is not a common coping method, I recently read an article about a girl who personified her brother’s mental illness, as a way for her to cope with what the illness did to her brother and to their lives. (Spendlove, 2021) https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/mentalillnessinthefamily/2021/9/personify-mental-illness-to-cope-with-it-better Our family became members of The Missy Haters Club. Along with my mom, we all took out our frustrations with Missy. I would get angry at the things Missy did to my mom. My dad would use profanity at Missy to lighten a mood. My brother would try to outsmart Missy if it meant he could do something with our mom that he wanted. All of this helped us cope and helped my mother to feel like she had a team, all united to fight Missy.
And believe it or not, we were actually able to discover some good things Missy brought to our lives. We cherished our times together as a family even more. We could even laugh at some of the things Missy would make my mom do. We got excited when Mom could walk further than she had the day before. We didn’t take for granted that my mom was able to dance with my dad at my wedding.
This idea of personifying an illness was paramount for my mother and our entire family. By separating the illness from herself, my mother was able to see it as an object to be dealt with. She regained her power and began evaluating this enemy. She learned when to listen and when to stand up and fight. She learned to allow those of us around her to help her fight, manipulate, and even trick Missy now and then. Most importantly, my mother was able to again find her identity. She was still a wife, mother, and friend. (Unfortunately, Missy wouldn’t allow her to keep working as a schoolteacher.) She was still Janelle Sims. Someone who loves to make people laugh, to help them, to spend time with them, and to live her best life. She just unfortunately, always had an unwanted companion with her.
My mother wrote a humorous, educational memoir called, “Getting Along with MiSsy.” It has entertained and inspired people all over the world. In fact, people began asking how they, too, could personify their various illnesses as a way to cope. So, she wrote another book, a workbook called, “The Making of Missy,” which is a step-by-step method for anyone to learn how to separate themselves from their illnesses and learn how to handle them objectively. This method has helped people with everything from grief and anxiety to diabetes and cancer. I know therapists who have used this idea to help with addictions and eating disorders.
The idea is to separate the illness from the person. And then, as the saying goes, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” By evaluating the depths of one’s illness, people can learn how to adapt, live with, and sometimes even conquer it.
There are many coping methods. This is merely one. Coping methods are designed to help us all get through another moment, another day, of living with a diagnosis, whether it’s our own or a loved one’s. We just have to find the one, or several, that work the best.
Kyndal Sims
Birch Psychology