Mental suffering in family daily life: a temporal journey according to Merleau-Ponty

OBJECTIVES: to describe the family’s experience in relation to daily life with a family member experiencing mental suffering. METHODS: a qualitative, descriptive, phenomenological study grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of experience was conducted in ten households in a city in the state of Bahia, Brazil, where 24 participants of the Intersubjectivity Wheels reside. The descriptions produced were subjected to the Ambiguity Analytics technique. RESULTS: the descriptions were categorized into: absence as a creative power of the sense of “being” and “not being a family”; and exclusion and acceptance as expressions of mental suffering in the family context. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: the experience of mental suffering in the family’s daily life is marked by ambiguous feelings, such as joy and sadness, disappointment and satisfaction, lack of love and love. However, experiencing these feelings can mobilize the desire to “become” a family, increase the sense of autonomy and independence, and drive the formation of new family configurations.