"The Loneliest Kind of Love: Bipolar, Blunted Emotions & the Partner Left Behind"

0:00 Hi everyone, I'm going to talk today about loneliness loneliness with a bipolar partner. I I'm only going to speak from my experience of my 10 years with my bipolar one wife with psychosis. But now I'm realizing the loneliness and the narcissistic tendencies that tend to crop up in these relationships. I don't know if you can relate but my mind was my wife could be incredibly kind at some time but she was almost never affectionate. And if you read over and over, which I have, there's so many partners of 10/15/20 years, 30 years that feel incredibly lonely because they feel like their partners just self-centered.

0:46 Not all of them are that way by far. In fact, I want to illustrate something that maybe you should look up on your own as well. And that is there's a drastic difference between how bipolar one people treat their spouses and bipolar 1 spouses with narcissistic tendencies treat their partners. Because if you look it up, bipolar one with psychosis does not involved calculated decisive moves to destroy you. Or they're extreme. They can be extremely self-centered of course during mania, but when they come out they're apologetic and say I'm sorry and try to change mine. As of for instance, over the 10 years I knew her, apologized once.

1:34 Literally once. I look back, there were many, many years of literally not touching other than maybe handing off something. But affection didn't exist. We had. She even went so far I always called it making love right between spouses. She called it sex. Now I understand why she couldn't go to the depths of emotional security to have or do making love. Sex is not as a transaction. Does that word ring a bell with you? Is your relationship transactional? Because mine certainly was shoot over the last four or five years. And then if you try to hold them accountable and say, for instance, you're hurting me, you're hurting me, they'll either discard you or just gaslight the crap out of you to make you think there's something wrong with you when all you're doing is asking for normal human affection between spouses. Be aware of all these things, like I said, because when you're in it, you don't realize it.

2:46 But if you step back emotionally or talk to people that are not enablers to say this is the way my relationship is right now, what do you think? You're probably going to get somebody saying, why the hell are you in that thing? Now? If you got kids or finances, I understand why you have to stay. I was part that way for a couple of years. The minute I got my finances up and running, I took off. I've been gone for a year, and for a year I've been trying to figure out logically what happens and forget it. You'll never figure it out logically because it has no logic. But there is a clear correlation between narcissistic tendencies or narcissists and bipolar. And for my reasoning at least, the reason they're narcissistic is because there's so much pain underneath there. They can't approach it.

3:36 They can't even deal with it. So the best way to not deal with their own emotional vulnerabilities is to be highly controlling and never sorry and they're always right and you're always wrong. Let that hit you up for a while. If you're in a bipolar one or bipolar relationship and they're not self aware, what I just said, it's going to hit you right between the eyes because it's the freaking truth. These people, yes, it's sad, but it's not your job to save them. It's their job to manage their illness. And if they're putting you to hell or Oh my God, if you're looking at just getting into a relationship over your one or two years into it, wondering if it'll ever get better, it will not unless they go to psychiatry.

4:25 You're involved with everything, which I've talked to another podcast. I'm not going to get into it unless they are working actively. You're in for a life of pain and I cannot tell you enough about that. I was in it for 10 years. I tried to figure out why in the hell did I stay. It's called trauma bonding, which I'm sure you've heard of, which nobody really understands until you've been through it. But when you're loved at the beginning and love bombed and then they whack you and throw you out or burn you to the ground as far as emotionally and then love you back a while, that could be done within months if you get a trauma bond. Mine happened that way. 10 years later, I'm still dealing with this. There's people 20-30, thirty years still dealing with this. Don't be one of us, stand up for yourself. You do have self esteem.

5:18 I've had to rebuild myself and my own self esteem because it was destroyed because I would see things that were normal in a relationship, talk to her about it and I was always wrong. Why the hell are you saying that? Oh my wife of 10 years for instance an idea 10 years all of a sudden start hiding your phone and got angry at me when I picked it up and physically assaulted me to get it back. Then after that I told her I looked right at her. I said you're cheating something's going on and you're cheating because that's a normal response. Her response to me was she called her best friend said that I was toxic and that call the police if I'm not there in 10 minutes. Then I find out she called my son and my ex-wife threatening them saying I was toxic.

6:07 If you think this is extreme, this happens a lot. Don't get me wrong, there are people that are physically assaulted too. I mean, yeah, OK, She hit me a couple of times to get her phone back. But that's the first time in 10 years when I held her accountable. That's when even though she quote UN quote, I don't know, she kicked me out of the house. Then she took off her wedding rings and she was awful to me. And in my opinion, and after researching it and talking to therapist, she did those things at the end because she knew I was right. And they can never be. They can never think to themselves that they're wrong. It's too much emotional damage to think they're wrong.

6:50 So they're going to make you responsible for everything and people, that's the way to destroy yourself. I barely got out with my mind, to be honest with you. Holy crap that was the most destructive thing I've ever been through. Don't be one of us understand narcissist. Everybody in this day and age are saying narcissist this and narcissist that. They actually do exist. Whether she was a true narcissist or not, it's irrelevant. What she treated me like was like a narcissist even when she was baseline. One thing I heard to differentiate too, if they're in a bipolar 1 manic or whatever episode, they're not really able to organized thoughts and carry out detailed plans. OK, that's a big one.

7:39 They're too disorganized for that. A narcissist will think of systematically ways to destroy you. My wife actually eight years ago, I'm sorry to admit it, eight years ago, we had a massive fight. She sat down, she thought about it, ways to hurt me. She got in her car, went to our storage unit, pulled, got in the storage unit, pulled out paperwork and sent it in to the company I was working for to try to get my businesses shut down. Now, do I know that happened? Yeah. She admitted it later. And two, I saw the video of her going into the, the, the place the storage unit. Now that's a calculated, systematic, organized response to an emotional fight.

8:29 That's narcissistic or narcissistic tendencies, period. Those are two strategies for you to think about very clearly when they're manic. Are they trying to destroy you through definite acts, or are they just sitting there saying, oh, you're a piece of shit, I don't love you anymore, blah blah blah. And then two or three days later, they feel horrible and they apologize and they come back to you or and during that emotional fight, are they systematically organizing a way to destroy you, either calling the cops on you or that they call and try to say that your domestic violence, That happens a lot too.

9:13 And the poor people are put in jail because of some bullshit like this. It's either or folks. I wish you the best. I love you all. Please leave me a review. Just one. I mean 70 to 80% of the people that listen to me listen to the entire podcast. Do me a favor. Just leave me a review would be very helpful. Thank you.