Thank you all for sharing and being part of this support group. This means more to me than I could have imagined.
I’ll try to share my experiences without sounding to “whiney”, but in my current state of mind I don’t know if I can accomplish this. I’ve had about 5 hours’ sleep in the last 48 hours. But I must share now while the thoughts are fresh.
Maybe others can relate and won’t feel alone; maybe not.
Maybe reading this will help someone who thinks they may have this disorder but is not convinced enough to look for help. As this group can attest to, moods don’t impact just the individual; everyone inside the person’s sphere of influence is involved.
My wife has bipolar disorder symptoms. She hasn’t been to the doctor yet to see if a diagnosis is warranted, so we can only call the shots as best we can. We are relatively uneducated participants, but she and I both know this best describes her condition.
Knowing the issue and living with it are two separate animals. I am so very tired of my wife’s mood swings. Not tired as in ‘impatient’ or ‘not willing to be bothered’ but tired as in a deep, heavy weariness. Christ I’m depressed by association it seems. My moods pretty much follow Newton’s 1st law of motion – once in motion they stay there until consciously acted upon by myself or by someone else’s passing strong emotion. So when she’s hit by a depressed mood my own feelings become dark and I must leave her be for awhile because I’m working on staying functional myself. Usually she rebounds fairly rapidly but I am left stewing in my own juices. Other times I’ll get off the phone with her while she’s very funny and chatty and witty and I’ll come home in a like mind but can’t predict her response if I refer back to the funny conversation we had. Sometimes she thinks I’m clever because I recalled a trivial bit of our earlier conversation, and sometimes this irritates her to no end.
When my her mood swings back and forth sometimes multiple times a day I am often a wreck by morning because I find myself spinning in circles, trying to play catch-up. I know that’s not a healthy approach but some days it’s all I know what to do to keep level. And I say “morning” because many times I’ve done something or said something or failed to do something which will trigger sometimes bizarre and uncharacteristic responses leading to a sleepless night of fussing or tossing and turning on both of our parts. She’s only hit me a couple of times in her sleep but that is enough to keep me sleeping lightly on nights when she’s extremely irritable or when I’ve done something particularly annoying. It’s not an abusive relationship, thank God, and I am thankful for that when I read some of the other postings.
I must confess I often wonder whether or not I am overreacting to her biting comments when the mood strikes her and she’s speaking “just honestly”. I think I am acting as “normal” as anyone else would but I can’t tell any more. This is one of those moments. I fear I am becoming damaged myself, unable to tell what is true and what is an imaginary truth. I know I must go through some counseling to find an emotional grounding point. We’ve gone to church and events to help socialize and to find a group of people to help with this but it always seems at some point that the demands of outside relationships trigger some kind of mood change and I’m left red in the face explaining to people why she won’t answer any more phone calls or emails or won’t take visitors on a given day, when the day before or the week before she’s been heavily involved in their lives.
Other times I’m left awake mentally dealing with her discards of activity. Overdrawn or not-paid-accounts, consistently near-zero bank balances, commitments made and abandoned, all take their toll as time progresses. Other times (thankfully most of the time) we go to bed quite nicely, like two newlyweds or comfortably funny friends snuggling and spooning together. Those nights I cherish.
I love her so much and we are wed for better or for worse. And the “better” is so good. She’s beautiful, charming, a cunning cook and a tiger in bed when things are great. She has a keen shopping and design instinct and can buy more high-quality stuff for a buck than anyone I know, so the money is usually spent very wisely. During those times I wonder what all my worry is about, and wonder “why do I sound so pathetic in my journals”? Then the pendulum swings and it can be hell going in the exact opposite direction for a few days. I know now that the “good times” are a symptom of the manic phases and the “hell” is the depression phase. I’ve often thought the “negative”, depressed state is the one to avoid but these days the manic state is hard to play with any more. But that may just be my tiredness talking at the moment.
I think the only mood that really is odd is the “neutral” or no-mood time when she has no emotional reaction to anything. You’d think living with someone with mood swings would find this to be perfect but this is really the time I get really anxious. I don’t know why yet but I’m trying to find out why this is a problem for me.
Before our joint internet research I thought I had hooked up with a multiple personality disorder, but knew this was extremely rare, and just attributed her behavior to things I did wrong or failed to do. Now it makes more sense and my self-worth is growing back to where I think it should be.
Yesterday I hit a very emotional realization that was both very funny and severely depressing. I love the Rubik’s cube. It’s a happy game for me. For Christmas my wife gave me a 5×5 cube, which is a step harder to solve than the traditional 3×3 cube. As I was fiddling with the cube my wife remarked how she was happy to give me a challenging puzzle. My response, which came completely from my subconscious (since I was actually focusing on the colored blocks), was “Yep it’s cool, most of it is solved and the trick is to figure out which moves I can do now which won’t break the stuff that’s already fixed.”
As soon as I said it I realized that was how I live my life every day in the shadow of someone with bipolar disorder symptoms. Some days the towels have to be folded just right; other days it doesn’t matter if we have clean towels or not. I can joke and tease her about behavior in a playful – never mean or sarcastic – way (just as I joke and tease about myself) but I find it’s safest to do some exploratory conversation before I do so. I find that the only thing I can really do consistently right is cleaning the kitchen – for some odd reason this room escapes her critique. Not that she asks for and gets a clean and tidy house from me and the kids; it’s just that if I venture into the other rooms to straighten up or arrange the furniture it’s tough to tell when the response is going to be extremely positive, negative, or ignored. The bathroom is an odd place, my things stacked tidy and in order (if I don’t have my stuff in order she does it for me) but her belongings have exploded throughout the room, overflowing the counters and on the floor… Unless she gets in a tidy mood and the bathroom sparkles for a few days. The kitchen is my safe harbor then – when I don’t know what else to do, I tidy up the dishes or wipe down the counters or clean the fridge. I must say we both got a laugh from a scene in “My Cousin Vinny” that echoes my domestic situation. There are other equally intricate layers of activity going on in the house that allow me some breathing room and help her maintain a sense of control. A finely-tuned dance that is fun and agonizing to watch I imagine.
Again, this is a perspective from someone who’s just recently gone through a swift and very dramatic mood swing with her. She’s fine now, but discussing these thoughts with her is inviting an accusation of me being hypersensitive. I may be. I guess it’s like when you burn yourself cooking and for awhile anytime you put your hand near any heat source it hurts like hell even if the source isn’t dangerously hot.
Where to go from here? Doctor’s I imagine for both of us. Our kids are getting older and can analyze situations enough to know things aren’t always right, but not yet old enough to keep from absorbing and echoing some of the energy pounding through the house. My work is starting to be impacted as well; I can’t always concentrate as I am frequently tired now or find myself thinking of this issue instead of the work at hand.
I need to help her help herself; we need a balanced home.
John