Sutton Stracke’s Traumatic Past Shapes a Gut-Wrenching Episode of 'RHOBH'

Lately, reality television has been getting real. Some would say too real, with topics like substance abuse, divorce, sexual assault, and shame taking over shows that used to be about petty drama. Some of these stories have been more successful and handled with more tact than others, but the best recent example I’ve seen was on Tuesday night’s episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Sutton Stracke is a socialite and boutique owner from Beverly Hills by way of Augusta, Georgia. She spends her days hanging with the likes of Kathy Hilton and Jennifer Tilly and terrorizing her angel of an assistant, Avi Gabay. Until this season, we haven’t known much else about her, except that she did very well in her divorce settlement and was once a dancer with Merce Cunningham. Then, she went home to Georgia.

The trip to Sutton’s hometown was posed to her friends and cast mates Garcelle Beauvais and Kyle Richards as a bonding opportunity with her elderly mother, a quintessentially cold Southern woman, with whom she wants to work on her relationship before it’s too late. Reba Brown is, in her own words, “a working woman,” specifically, a therapist. Sutton credits this as the reason for her parenting style—unaffectionate, removed, intellectual. Her relationship with her father, John T. Brown, was much closer, but it was colored by his clinical, unchecked depression.

Sutton describes her father as a tender-hearted man who “didn’t talk much” but had a large presence. They loved to cook together, and whenever he walked by her while she was sitting on the couch, he would give her a high five or touch her in some way. But even though he was married to a therapist, he neglected the care of his own condition and rode the medication roller coaster throughout his life, letting his treatment lapse and then picking it up again and stabilizing before falling off again. Towards the end of his life, he was self-medicating with alcohol, and the effects of all that abuse of his brain started to take its toll. He wasn’t fully lucid all the time, sometimes completely “out of it,” and it got to the point that they had to “put him into the car” and take him to get treatment.

She recalls the last time she saw him when she was in her 20s. She’d stopped by the house to grab some wine for a party and passed her father in his study on her way out. He was sitting in his usual spot on the couch, out of it again, this time on the cocktail of meds from his hospital visit. Sutton said hello to him and “tugged his toe” before leaving, and the next day, he shot himself in the same spot. Reba was in the house at the time, and she found him.

Sutton knows how traumatic this was for her mother, but they “don’t talk about it.” When she goes back to visit the old house with her friends in the episode, Reba doesn’t come. “I’ll give you a full report,” Sutton tells her. “I don’t want one,” Reba says. She assumes it was hard for her mother to be married to a man so tortured by depression, but their relationship dictates that they don’t explore it.

Loving someone with depression, especially when it goes untreated, is like watching the person you love drown and knowing you can’t do anything about it. They’re swimming against a powerful current and you’re standing on the shore, shouting at them to just move three more inches to the left, just keep going a little more, because you can actually see where the current ends and the calm waters begin, it’s like a narrow funnel and your favorite person is stuck in it. You know that if you went in after them, you’d both get swept away, so all you can do is stand there, desperate, screaming.

Reba also doesn’t say much, and when she does, it sounds like a meme of a Southern woman: “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” and “What are you doing?” and “Who put spoons in the freezer, are we having caviar?” Most of what she says elicits eye-rolls and deep breaths from who she’s saying it to. “I love you” or “I’m proud of you” are rarely included.

Reba doesn’t say much, but she’s screaming. Reba knows what it is to watch your favorite person drown. She stood on that shore for years, screaming at her husband to just move a few more inches to the left, but he couldn’t hear her. She failed, and he drowned, but she projected the pain of that experience onto her daughter long before he drowned. That pain is Sutton’s inheritance—not the house they moved into after they couldn’t live in the old one anymore, not the fancy cars and the material gains of a life as a “working woman.” It explains why viewers are often confused by the contradictions of Sutton’s character; her bids for connection with her cast mates followed by sudden prickliness and stubbornness.

Sutton did get to bond with her mother a little bit on the trip; she got the “I love you and I’m proud of you” she so craved, even if she had to ask for it. She got a hug, albeit a half-assed one. For two generations of women traumatized by their love for a man they couldn’t help, that’s everything.