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Our Loved Ones
by Storm
August 10, 2000
Living with a Bipolar person can be hard. It can be hell. My significant other has repeatedly brought this to my attention. Sometimes we do tend to focus on ourselves and we forget that our outbursts, moodiness, bizarre behavior, meds reactions, all of it does affect them one way or another.
They choose to be with us. And they choose knowing we're Bipolar. We can go off into a pit of depression, pushing the entire world away from us. We don't want to see anyone, let alone talk to anyone when we hit that depression hell. They
sometimes don't understand that it is the illness causing us to behave the way we do.
How do you explain something non-tangible to another person? We get blamed of using our illness as an excuse to be well, brats. Some BPers do this on purpose. But most of us do not. We don't want to walk around crying at everything in sight.
When we're up in a manic mode, we dont "want" to be mean or screaming or doing wild things. Well, maybe a little we want to do wild things. I've gone on spending sprees when manic, actually if I have access to money, I WILL go buy something. It isn't that I need it...I just NEED to spend. It's impossible to explain that one away. We just get that "women and spending" speech and that is not always the case.
My significant other has gotten to the point where he can see my changes coming before I do. Sometimes he can ward them off with word or two. Other times he just leaves me alone because he knows that's the best thing for me.
There are times we need to socialize with our own kind in a support group. Those people understand us. We're one of a kind, which only serves at times to alienate our loved ones. "Well why cant you just talk to me instead of a roomful of crazies." Because the roomful of crazies actually experience what we go through as opposed to just having read articles about it.
Another area that can cause a lot of problems for our loved ones is if we happen to have one of the forms of Dissociative Disorders. For you normals, that means basically, we can do things and not remember them. It's a damn scary even to have your loved one describe something you did and you have absolutely NO recall of the incident. It's not vaguely lurking in your memory, you honestly have no memory of it, blankness, nothing. I hate that because it means I've lost control of my thinking.
Our lives are not easy but they are Our lives. We need to do our best to make it easier for those involved in our lives be it family or friends. You know when you don't need to be around them...so dont.
That's one of the worst things about these disorders, they cause us to push away the very people we need in our lives. Let's take a hold of this element of the damned disorder and learn to control it. It's controlled us for way too
long.
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