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Your Get Out of Jail Free Card
Medication alone isn't enough. If your partner or loved one is living with bipolar disorder but still drinking, gambling, using THC, smoking, or putting themselves in overstimulating environments like cruise ships — environments that are well-known triggers for mood dysregulation — they are not doing their part. And when they're not doing their part, they're unstable. And when they're unstable, the person who pays that price is you.
This episode is my get out of jail free card — and maybe yours too.
When someone with bipolar refuses to address the lifestyle factors that destabilize them, the people closest to them absorb the fallout: the irritability, the anger, the emotional cruelty that comes out when the illness is running hot. That's not love. That's not something you're obligated to endure indefinitely.
I'm not here to villainize anyone living with bipolar. I know how hard this illness is. But I am here to say clearly what nobody else in this space seems willing to say: you cannot manage someone else's illness for them. You can love them, support them, advocate for them — and still recognize that their choices have consequences that land on you. Don't be the frog that slowly dies because they're in slowly increasing water temperature that eventually boils.
0:00 Hello everyone, this is kind of spur of the moment. I don't know how long it'll be but I wanted to tell you first like I always do. Bipolar is a spectrum. Some people have it worse, some people have it better. Something that really helped me get over this, I've been gone for 10 months now, is the fact that she really never took care of herself. And let me explain. I at least have always had tremendous guilt since I left. I've always believed marriage is marriage and you always stick it through, but I couldn't. As we all know. I'm in a wheelchair now trying to figure out how to learn to walk again. However, the reason I'm talking about that is because the guilt for me really caused me a lot of emotional pain for a long time because I know she's hurting.
0:49 I know she needs me or somebody stable in her life, but I can't be responsible for her anymore. And what I'm getting to is, is that you need to look through if you're a partner and your partner has bipolar and they're driving you nuts, which unfortunately is probably the case. Not all of them. There's many success stories too, is what's what are they doing to manage their illness? Excuse me, what are they doing to manage their illness? Mine, I now know. I was with her for 10 years. She loved to gamble, so we gambled all the time. She loved to drink and she loved to smoke, especially during gambling, OK. And when we weren't even gambling, she liked to drink at least two or three times a week.
1:39 And sometimes we would just get trashed. Well, for me, I'm 64 now, but yeah, I know, whatever. Don't judge me too much, but I can, I can do that once or twice a week and be just fine. I get hungover the next day and I say that's stupid and then I might do it the next week or whatever. Now that I'm in a wheelchair I don't drink at all. It's been 2 years so which is fine. What I'm getting to though is just taking medicine For a person without polar, bipolar is not enough. The medicine is strong medicine and it interacts with booze, smoking, gambling, cruise ships, and THC gummies. Let me give you one guess.
2:29 How many of those above things does my wife do? All of them. Because they're self medicating. They think they're doing OK by being medicated. All right, but she didn't go to a psychiatrist very often. That's another red flag for you. If they're just going to a therapist every once in a while. That doesn't cut the mustard people. That's not taking care of their illness because at the end of the day, they are responsible for their illness, not you and not me. Let that sink in because it's absolutely true gambling. It's a high high. I mean all the lights and the noises and the people and also the high activity area, which is the bad for a bipolar person. A cruise ship, same thing.
3:19 Tons of people gamblings on the ship, people around lights, action activities 24/7. That destabilizes them. And so my wife in particular, she never really changed her Med, their medicine regime. I don't I don't know when she ever did. At the very first she let me be in with her psychiatrist and people, but after that she didn't. What I'm getting to once again is if you're feeling guilty of not being able to be with this person because you can't hang with them, understand it's not your job to hang with them. And Jesus, I know, believe me, words are so easy to say, but it's so hard to do.
4:06 Don't get me wrong, I love everybody here, but I'm just telling you from my experience, One thing that let me out of my cage, if you want to call it that, of being codependent and thinking, oh, this poor woman is is suffering and there's nothing I can do or I failed as a man to help her. She didn't do that from the beginning. I've known her ten years. I didn't know this 10 years ago. I didn't know bipolar people had no business smoking, no business drinking, no business gambling, no business going on cruise ships. Unless they're medicated correctly and it has to be done correctly. Otherwise if they're not, guess who pays the price exactly.
4:52 You do. You pay the price because they're irritable, they're angry, you'll never be good enough. They don't have any empathy when they're hypomanic. But it feels so good. Remember, being hypomanic or manic is literally an addiction. They're addicted to that feeling. Just like heroin. People are addicted to heroin or cocaine to cocaine. They're addicted to that feeling and they love it. My wife, four or five years ago, it was wild. I didn't realize it at the time, but she was definitely hypomatic. Guess what? She was drinking two or three monsters a day. Did that for years. Well, I got on her butt constantly because it because, not because I didn't know. It wasn't good for bipolar because I didn't know. But I knew any human being in the early 60s has no business drinking two or three monsters a day. Just don't.
5:42 So but who paid the price for her not taking care of her illness? Me. Who's paying the price of your significant other not taking care of their bipolar? You. So at least for me, it let me out of jail a little bit to understand that even though she was taking her medicine, she went to a therapist every month or two. She never, hardly ever went to a psychiatrist and she did all those other things. She was not taking care of her illness, which makes them more irritable, more difficult to be around, less empathy, and it only makes the the progression of the illness worse. So I hope this helps everybody.
6:22 Please encourage people to, to, to listen to my podcast and please give me a comment or two on what you think, whether you think it's appropriate or not. All right, you can post anonymously, I believe, but give us a thought. Thank you very much. You take care. Bye.