Book excerpt: Mental Illness is real and goes undetected every day simply because we focus on the outside, not knowing the demons one may be wrestling with on the inside. It is my belief that the secrets I was carrying caused my mental illness. I also believe that the secrets other family members were carrying caused theirs as well, even landed a few of them in a mental institution. At one point in my life, I use to suffer from bipolar disorder, manic depression, and paranoid schizophrenic. Which caused me to be emotional detached from my children for fear that something terrible would happen. I was selfish and deliberately set out to harm people, but in the end it cost me and it's a price that I am still paying today. However, God had a master plan and He used what I thought at the time was an unjust; the death of my grandmother to killed me in order to heal me. Now I am a living testimony of His goodness and grace. So much good has come from her death, relationships that I would have never experience merely because I would have never learned how to forgive and that was the key to a life of abundance. "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worth to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us" (Romans 8:18)