This is the second post by Anna on being a caregiver. Click here for the first post, The Depression Dialog.
Know the enemy. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But I’m talking about the illness, not the person who is sick. When that dawned on me, that the illness is the enemy, I started to have more control over my anger and resentment. Why? Because I had something I could fight, and yet still love my husband James. I’m not saying that he isn’t responsible for his behavior; but I could now explain it, or most of it, by his illness.
Our third child was born in 2003 just as things were at their worst. James had left another job, he had a go at crashing his car, and our other kids were showing signs of distress. I had to think about leaving him for a while to protect myself and the kids emotionally. I felt alone, scared for our future and worried sick.
It was at about that time that he was diagnosed with bipolar, which prompted me to thoroughly research depression and bipolar. There is an awful lot of junk out there, so I sifted through until I found some great sources. Then I learned as much as I could. The best thing about this learning process was a much better understanding of the illness, so I was less frightened and more assertive in handling his behavior.
The resources that I relied on most are:
Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder by Julie Fast
This book helped me more than any other. It is written for caregivers and has great, practical solutions, especially in the area of talking to each other. James was on board with the idea of trying the suggestions in the book so that helped. Most of the content is readily applicable to depression.
It’s a love it or hate it book. I love it. I’ll write a review as the last post in this series.
Dealing with Depression by Gordon Parker
I continue to rely on this book for my medical understanding of mood disorders. James reviewed the book in an earlier post.
Black Dog Institute
I use this website for finding all kinds of reliable information on mood disorders. The Black Dog Institute is headed by Gordon Parker (above).
The next break through was keeping a diary of James’ moods and things that happened each day. I did this every night for almost 2 years. It sounds a bit keen I know, but it was also therapeutic. After only 3 months or so, I was able to see patterns of behavior emerging. His illness was looking somewhat predictable! The progress over those 2 years was very slow, but just having some noticeable improvements gave me hope. I could stop living from day to day, wondering what would hit next. Also, and even better, I was able to see what was triggering his mood swings. Things like certain foods, certain people, and certain social situations.
Armed with this knowledge we started changing our lives to avoid triggers. This is an ongoing process, but James continues to get better. We completely removed some problem triggers so they no longer have an impact, and he also copes better with the triggers that remain. I hope that we don’t sound perfect. The process is ongoing, and there are still many times when bipolar ruins things. But now that I know my enemy I can “attack” it, and get on with being James’ wife.
Click here for the third post in this series, Trigger Unhappy.
Chris 7 May 2008 @ 7:58 am
I have known my wife since she was six years old. She has had a traumatic childhood, but seemed to begin to prosper as a young adult. After I finished law school we began to date. Our relationship moved quickly and we were married a few months later. She was ultraorganized and a neat freak. Although she had been told by her gyno that she would never have chldren we conceived with the help of in vitro fertilzation. After Matthew was born my wife seemed like “complete.” She was a wonderful wife and a dedicated and attentive mother. She was anxious to try and have another child. After several more in vitro attempts, she became pregnant with twins. Kyle and Mallory were born nine weeks early and were in the NICU for a month. My wife would spend all day at the NICU and I would spend all night at the NICU. It was a very trying itme. Immediately after they were discharged from the hospital I noticed that my wife was not the same mother. She tried very hard to escape the children. We put Matthew, who was three at the time, in half day preschool five days a week, and my wife, Kimberly, had her mother care for the twins during the day. My wife usually went shopping and ran up our credit cards. After about a year I took over the bills and discovered that we were behind in all of our bills by a month. I managed to catch up and have kept the bills. My wife’s behavior became worse. She continued to spend money and often did it secretly. She began to smoke (an old habit), drink during the day (although not excessively), and began to act out sexually. She told me she always wanted to experiment with another woman, but never had. She asked for my permission. Although hesitant, I initially agreed. However, a day or two later, I retracted my consent and told her that I believed it would do damage to our marriage. As far as I know, she has not pursued that fantasy. She contantly is on an emotional roller coaster. There are a few days a month where she seems like the Kimberly that I married and the mother that she was when Matthew was born. However, on most days, all I hear about is how she can’t “take it.” She yells at the kids, especially Matthew. She doesn’t clean the house and leaves the chores to me and her mother. She was diagosed with bipolar and has been seeing a psychiatrist. We are scheduled to go to couples counseling today with her therapist. My wife is obsessed with knowing whether I will divorce her if her behavior gets worse, or does not get better. I keep telling her that I don’t want to think about that. She persists in knowing the answer. It makes me feel that she doesn’t truly want to try and get better, and wants to put me on notice that things will get worse. Was your husband obsessed with the “divorce” question?
Susan 19 May 2008 @ 7:24 am
I was married to a bipolar man for 24 years and was dealing with many different moods. I never knew what I was waking up to, our 2 children walked on pins and needles just waiting to hear the yelling and sceaming to come out of their dad’s mouth. I do not know how I did it, i was on auto pilot. My ex-husband was obsessed with the divorce question and I think that is why I took so long to finally go though with the divorce. My life was hell when I left him, he wanted to make it so bad and hard on me that I would be forced to come back to him. I am so glad I never did get back into the control of this man that would always say that he loved me and he was doing everthing out of love. I was afraid of him and what he was capable of doing. I know I am ranting but I realize what I have been living with and how hard it is when the person you love and marriaged will not seek help or realize there is a problem over and over with the family relationship.
Susan
cathi 26 May 2008 @ 6:33 pm
While I am both suffer from bipolar disorder (one of many labels placed on me over the past 30 years) I am also a carer. I have a VERy difficult time setting boundries for myself and tend to leave myself off the my “care for” list. This invariable leads to institutionalization and physical illnesses. I believe that many people suffering from mental illness, especially those who have been the “hero” in a dysfunctional family, have the problem of co-dependency as well as dependency. While I find myself helping others fairly constantly, I have a hard time receiving help in return, or at all. Please let me know if you have experienced this and if you know of, or have any resources that deal with this “doublt trouble” Thank you and ….hang in, hang on…and don’t hang.
cathi
anna 1 Jun 2008 @ 5:55 pm
Hi Cathi,
I ( Anna) experience this all the time. But I also make caring for myself on equal par with caring for others. Remember, you can’t help anyone else if you are sick. The book I learnt this best from is “Loving Someone With Bipolar” By Julie Fast. It’s worth a read.
Hope that helps
Anna
lisa verna 16 Nov 2010 @ 8:26 pm
I feel so hopeless at our situation. I have been married for 28 years and the percentage of time that I have been happy is so outweighed by unhappy periods, yet I have managed to gain the strength from those brief windows of happiness to carry on coping with a husband who has been verbally and emotionally abusive , due to his undiagnosed depression….undiagnosed because he is able to see our doctor and lie, and paint a completely different picture of him as a victim of life (very much how he sees himself permanently…..the fault for everything always lies elsewhere). Our children have borne witness to his mood swings throughout their lives and we too, recognise the signs, (almost as if a light goes off in his eyes, and he does indeed become a Jekyll and Hyde figure) and spend our lives walk permanently on eggshells. The problem is , it is becoming more and more of my own problem as the children grow up and leave home (very relieved and yet worried about me), and I feel dreadfully guilty at having continued to inflict, what is, an unpredictable monster on them , thoughout their lives, because I always end up feeling sorry for him because he manipulates. However, I can no longer love someone who has inflicted so many emotional wounds, that never have the time to heal before the next bout begins. BUT, we have no one to turn to….our local GP, as I said has no idea, and therapists cost money , and my husband does not believe he has a problem, …everyone else is “mad”, me in particular. I am 51, tired of trying to understand and cope with someone who seems to be so utterly self centred and incapable of considering anyone else (including his children and myself) in his life unless it is in relation to his own needs. I don’t know what to do, but I feel I have done over and above the call of duty and neglected my children’s happiness in pursuit of maintaining a certain quality of life and in my committment to my marriage.
alice 18 Feb 2011 @ 4:06 pm
Hi your husband sounds very much like mine .
Andrea 15 May 2012 @ 12:12 am
Hi, Ive just found your webpage and what I have read is both helpful and worrying. I have been with my partner two years and I love him very much, however he suffers bouts of depression. He is a self confessed control freak and when we were first together controlled and emotionally abused me most of the time, until I found the resolve to leave him. Once I left him I remembered the person I was and he fell apart and went to counselling, he managed to convince me we should try again that he knew exactly what he had done and he would get all the help he could and for the first few months he did and we went to counselling and it all helped, then the fitness started and he went fitness mad, running, dieting, loosing weight, recording everything he ate every day, he looked awful and everyone said he looked ill. This affected our sex life and his temper was terrible because he was exhausted and hungry all the time, he then acknowleged what had happened and started to try and find some balance again and that was working but now he has developed an anger that is almost constant and unpredictable, he again in lucid moments knows what he is doing and knows its a sign of depression and on the one hand I feel sorry for him but on the other im tired of the eggshells I live on and the horrible things he can say (although I have enough strength of charecter to not take them to heart), he has started taken St Johns wort and also he has started excercising again which I am worried will become excessive again as a form of control, then this morning he left me a note saying that he lets me down, sexually and that he is sorry for that and Im thinking god I didnt know we had a problem with our sexlife but apparently I want sex all the time!! God Im rambling, I just need a friendly ear and soome advice
Hagar the Horrendous 9 Jun 2012 @ 1:57 am
I’ve stumbled across your post while researching a way for my husband to better care/love me when I am manic and for a way for me to better understand and accept that care when I need it. Maybe even how to return that care. I have never been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but I’ve struggled with manic depression since my teens (mid 40′s now). As I am self aware of many of my triggers, I have developed my own coping and thwarting mechanisms during my career of living, and I am sure that in our 13+ years together, my husband has come up with his own methods in which to “deal” with me. By nature, he is a lover and an intellectual, not a fighter. Even prior to his realization of my condition he would never allow himself to be sucked into one of my pointless, belligerent episodes. Often the fact that he refused to engage me only fueled my mood and I would feel obliged to follow him around the house, demanding that he stand up and fight back. I know he secretly wanted to punch me in the face and maybe that’s what I secretly wished he would do too…make me hurt on the outside to make me (and him) forget about the hurt I was inflicting on the inside. It might be best to make mention here that we are a married gay couple. I don’t support wife/spousal abuse, but these are desperate thoughts and words borne from desperate times.
This week has been a doozie. Three out of five evenings ruined by my insecurities and the need to drag him down with me. We have an established policy in our marriage to never go to bed angry with one another, but boy, have we struggled with that rule this week. Last night’s event was the worst. Even though we pretended to make up before bedtime, we both went to bed with heavy hearts and minds. Pillow talk a short while later led to tears for him and a sudden realization for me. He admitted that when times get bad for me, though he does all he knows to diffuse and reset me, he often expects to come home from work and find that I’ve taken my life. The thought of it has been tearing at him for some time. Those words from him hit me like a Mack truck. Not only was he walking around on eggshells in fear of what may set me off, he was concerned for my life and maybe his life too. For the first time in over 13 years I heard outright fear and defeat in his words and tone. I visualized him at the end of his rope (no pun intended), the light at the end of his tunnel quickly fading. I realized that I was stealing his soul with the amount of effort he constantly has to exert just to maintain the illusion of stability. How tiring it must be to HAVE to dig inside your heart and find the love you have for another person and parlay that into the will to fight something so much bigger than either one of you. I couldn’t formulate any words right away to comfort him. All I managed was to wrap my arms around him and let him cry himself to sleep, something he has done with me too many times, something that he probably needed to do on more than one occasion himself. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but in those moments I became the carer and he became the cared for. All I could focus on was how much I didn’t deserve him, how horrible of a partner I’d been. I couldn’t think of anything I’d ever done to deserve such love from such a loving person. I thought of plenty of things that would make even my own mother question her love for me if she knew. That was my realization, that I was living on borrowed time. Eventually, anyone is his situation would have to leave to save themselves from drowning too, that I was contagious. Slowly but surely I was giving him my disease. I don’t want that. He doesn’t deserve that. If he loves me that much to have stayed and put up with the monster this long, either he’s the one that’s crazy or maybe, just maybe there’s enough of my old self in here knocking around loud enough for him to hear. I woke up this morning determined to be the change, determined to not sub-come to my demons. To stand up and fight this disease with all that I’ve got and look at my husband through different eyes. To look at him with a renewed respect that he has so long deserved from me.
Then I walked out the door and all those new declarations of love and healing felt like just useless words that I could not put into motion. But I made it to work and I found your post. I’m not really sure anything I’ve said here has much of a point or made a lot of sense, but I have no one else to share my feelings with on this. I guess I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with your James. Your situation gives me hope for myself. I’m going to take this one step at a time. I’ve got to beat this. I feel like it’s my only hope.
KK 17 Jul 2012 @ 1:11 am
Hello, I lived in another city and finally moved with my boyfriend in his city after 3 years of courtship. The day I was moving he had a life threatening motorcycle accident in another town and ended up in ICU for 33 days. He became totally dependent on me for all care after discharged and throughout rehabilitation. As he is gaining his independence back he has started to change or maybe it is just that I live with him now and am able to see him everyday. He has mood swings, is often agitated and I do feel like I have to walk on eggshells regularly. I have been thinking it is me all this time until a few weeks ago when he finally told me something is wrong with him and feels he is often in a cloud and cant explain it. He has detached himself emotionally in many ways and it is difficult to not take it personal. He cant love me when its hard for him to find peace and love withing himself. I have been researching on line and there is so much advice and information I realize I am not alone. He has agreed to get counseling and admits to wanting help to change his attitude, sort out all these built of emotions, and decrease his constant anger. It is taking everything in me to stay here, I left my family, friends, job, security in my hometown to be here with him and I feel very unhappy. I dont know if I am suppose to stay by his side and get help while feeling hurt and alone? Do I continue to put his needs first? Ive never been married and have no kids, he is divorced from a 17 year marriage with 3 grown children. I am at such a loss and love him very much and do want to be here, I just don’t know if I can. From his MC accident to this mental health state— I am honestly exhausted and am trying to stay hopeful and positive. What do I do?
Any advice please please share! Thank you.