u/AdvancedSyrup186

I fell apart really hard after a couple of weeks of keeping it together better. My husband has been bad to worse, up and down as usual, but I fell apart after the first four good days he's had in a long while.

I don't know why I fell apart. Maybe that time of the month. Maybe I got triggered by some hard questions my trauma therapist asked. But I fell apart hard. I'm a total mess. And now he's in another episode after a few days' break and he's blaming me, which I do know is ridiculous, he's been in non-stop back to back episodes forever, he was just in the depths of depression last Sunday when I was at the top of my game and I know this is isn't my fault if he fell into another one on Friday, but it feels cruel and scary that he is blaming me, like the nail in the coffin his bipolar narrative has created about me and our relationship.

When I started to fall apart I so desperately wanted validation from him, for him to hold me and tell me I've been through a lot, that it's okay to be hurt, that he wants to help me, that he cares, but instead he only got angry and agitated and it's so disorienting. Even if I'm sobbing on the floor he just ignores me, and I can't seem to stop, my mind just goes blank, I can't believe there isn't some compassion and tenderness and recognition in there if I just a dig a little further, but I just keep getting anger and blame.

The lack of empathy just feels like gasoline on the fire of healing for me and for our marriage. I want his empathy. I want him to treat me like I was hurt by someone else, but he just feels my pain as blame and shame and guilt and I feel his anger and disappointment the same way back, reinforcing all the really horrible things he said to me and about me when he was in a more manic state.

How do we get out of this cycle?

What does rapid cycling look like for your partner? Can it be really relentless, almost constant?

My husband has been completely unstable for two years. The first nine months were the worst, almost unbroken mixed episode or dysphoric mania type of stuff. Not sleeping, unable to work, barely eating, extreme anxiety and I think a kind of paranoia, out of his mind delusions about our relationship and religious doubts, extreme physical symptoms including severe pain, loss of balance and tics ... just really really bad.

Once it started to break up it began to look like roughly a few good, almost normal days out of a month, a break from prison, with the bad days being all over the map as far as how bad, some more heavy depression, others more agitated and irritable with constant intrusive thoughts and twitching. I have kept a diary off and on but not consistently, and I keep nudging him but I can't get him to keep his own mood app. Anyway, I don't think there is a clear pattern, but more or less one episode follows another and a string of better days always ends with a crash or a spike of symptoms.

I have read some who theorize that rapid cycling and mixed episodes are the same thing. I don't know if that's true, but the idea I think is just that the depression, anxiety, paranoia, delusion, irritability, all of it, starts to happen so fast that it happens all at once or at least all in the same day or week so it looks like all one episode, but really it's still cyclical. But I don' know if that's accurate, or if it matters.

Just trying to make sense of what I am seeing while praying we find a medication that brings relief. I do love this man so and it's devastating to see him like this.

Does waking up with dread/doom/racing intrusive thoughts get better with the right treatment? And if so, what right treatment helped you?

Several months on Seroquel 300 doesn't seem to have done much for my husband. The sedation is excessive no matter how late he sleeps but the anxiety and doom still breaks through as often as not. He is on Valproate now but I think it's a lowish dose still (750 mg.)

Anyone have a spouse who didn't actually have an affair, but was mentally obsessed with someone else?

Limerence, he calls it. He almost certainly has OCD and maybe ADHD as well as bipolar; the diagnosis merry-go-round just keeps spinning and the medication adjustments are slow and painfully inadequate.

This emotional obsession has been out in the open for almost two years and it's broken my heart into a million pieces and I don't know how to handle the fact that even if it gets better I will never feel like his one and only again, I will never be able to forget this dark time. It makes me scared of the rest of my life and rocks my identity. I was a very, very happy and secure wife until all of this began, loved him madly and never in a million years saw this coming: not my husband, not my marriage.

When he first confessed it to me I handled it okay because I knew he couldn't help it, but not when I realized he was actively cultivating it, and when I heard him comparing her to me, or when he yelled at me again and again that he wished he'd broken up with me 20 years ago so he could have dated her.

The whole thing is stupid and utterly childish, it isn't going anywhere, he barely knows her and has barely spoken with her in 20 years, she is 10 hours away and very happily married with a huge pile of kids. I have very clear memories of her not particularly liking him back when we were in college; I think she found him a bit much. I think it is probable he associates her memory with euphoric hypomania feelings and associates me with a lifetime of depression. He swears he can't help this obsession and would cut off his right arm to stop it but he also keeps looking at her photos online and treats me very coldly and distantly because of it, constantly reminds me he has no warm feelings for me, etc.

Not sure what I'm asking, just dying inside and wondering who can relate.

Okay, I think I already know the answer, but:

Does an overwhelming feeling of boredom, with an urge to blow things up, sometimes feature in your hypomania or mixed episodes? Is this a very bipolar thing?

Like, sure, in "regular" depression you feel loathing for all the things you normally enjoy and value, but in hypomania do you also sometimes feel intense urges to engage in activities you wouldn't normally engage in?

Say you're a depressed dad of a bunch of kids, the kind of guy who in healthier times wants to go fishing and dig gardens and read a bit of a poetry, but you are quite depressed so maybe you're kind of forcing yourself to do those things now most of the time ... but sometimes suddenly your depression has this ugly edge to it where you just hate everything because it's soooo boring, and your brain is screaming at you, and you want to blow things up, to watch porn or go clubbing or worse, something that's totally against your normal character and values? Can it feel kinda like ADHD on steroids?

(Full disclosure: I'm not asking about myself but about my husband. Still on the merry-go-round of seeking a diagnosis, but he does seem to have several very distinct kinds of mood episodes including the above, against a constant background of depression and intrusive thoughts. A lot of his symptoms fit under OCD but when he describes the above sort of stuff ... I ain't so sure that's OCD.)

So husband's temporary psychiatrist of the last few months (she's done now; now ex psychiatrist) told him the other day that she does not think he is bipolar, because he hasn't had any positive mania in the last two years. She suggested it is "just" anxious depression.

She wasn't seeing him when he barely slept for nine months, when he was pacing his room like a caged animal, his heart racing, researching religious miracles all night, calling every old friend for comfort, slurring his words, losing his balance constantly, twitching constantly, saying his body felt like it was on fire, there was electricity in all his limbs, his chest was full of psychic energy, his head was going to explode, rubbing his eyebrows out, sobbing every day, tormented by a "firehose" of dark, racing, intrusive thoughts. In unbelievable all-over muscular pain. He 100% should have been hospitalized by I'll skip the long story why we never got there (I dearly wish we had). He went away to a private clinic and was discharged because his symptoms were too bizarre and he couldn't bring himself to cooperate with group therapy.

This a man who had been super high functioning nine months before, albeit with lifelong depressive tendencies and mounting anxiety.

Sorry lady. All that ... that ain't anxious depression.

He started anti-depressants and "dysphoric mania" switched to mixed episodes or rapid cycling, whatever you would like. That phase I would say lasted almost another year, during which we thought of it as severe OCD, until we started to accumulate multiple bipolar diagnoses through one-time visit psychiatrists through the ER. No permanent psychiatrist yet. Over this last winter, since beginning the keto diet and Seroquel and weaning off the TCA and SSRI, he has finally seemed less mixed, or his mixed episodes have spaced out a lot, the depression has lessened, but he has been left in a state of profound irritability. That too seems to be lessening slightly now. This trajectory matches up cleanly with what I have read of recovery from dysphoric mania, without appropriate levels of medication to help.

I do think he might well have OCD and probably ADHD as well. But is there anything about this man that doesn't sound bipolar to anyone here???? But this psychiatrist who has seen him four or five times now "in recovery" says she doesn't think so, because he is never "up."

Before the last two years of crisis, for the 20 years I've known him he absolutely 100% was a down or up man, a hot and cold man, a brain and body barely work for weeks and then suddenly everything clicks and feels effortless and he gets a week's worth of work done in a day kind of man. We thought it was just him. Go ahead, shoot me.

He does have these random, positive, over-confident days now where he seems to me like maybe he is hypomanic. His energy on these days makes me uncomfortable; I can't not notice it. Maybe his psychiatrist hasn't seen them, maybe he can't tell, but his wife sees them. They are just so brief, and then usually he'll celebrate feeling good by drinking ("just this one time: special occasion"), and it doesn't last. So I'm not sure. But I definitely wouldn't agree that he doesn't still have positive upswings. They are just brief. Messy. Mixed.

Is it humanly possible not to take the resentment and irritability and negativity and emotional betrayal of a bipolar mixed episode personally? Has anyone gotten to that mythical place? Somebody? Anybody? Somewhat possible? Does it get better with practice?

We still haven't seen medication work. It seems like seeing medication work its magic would help somewhat. Yes?

I want to rise above it, but it feels like quicksand.

I used to feel beautiful and confident around him no matter what, even if I had days I didn't like what I saw in the mirror, like almost every woman does, I could always comfort myself: it doesn't matter, I am so lucky to have someone who loves me just as I am.

I had that for years and years, and it was such a gift. I thought I would always have that.

Now so often all I can see when I look in the mirror is the nose he says he can't stand, and the hurt in my eyes.

Thanks ROCD. Or bipolar, or whatever fresh hell this is. That's all.

My husband, unlike many of the worst case scenarios on here, has a lot of insight almost all the time. When he gets super "activated", especially if I break down and show emotion or try to name my feelings, his insight can seem to fly out the window and he can start raging.

But most of the time he is just intensely irritable and cold and avoidant, and I know from his sharing that his brain is making up a story where I am the villain (along with others: the Church, religion in general, former colleagues, his dad, his boss, his kids for existing, etc.).

It's like most of the time he lives in this bizarre fog where his brain hates me, resents me, thinks I'm unattractive, etc, but he knows it's not true, he knows it's not what he really thinks ... but his brain is really loud and convincing, as he says. This is why for a long time we thought it was OCD, and maybe it is as well, but on top of a long list of mixed episode symptoms following months of severe dysphoric mania last year, the most debilitating SI depression, etc. So pretty sure he's bipolar, and that's what all the doctors have agreed on as well.

Just ... feeling lonely and wondering if this sounds like anyone else' experience, being the target of their resentment but them retaining insight that it's not entirely justified. He is a chronic oversharer. I think he thinks he has gotten a lot better at protecting me from his intrusive thoughts, but they still come out all the time. Just hearing all the time about his trauma and how little positive emotion he has and how little empathy is really exhausting, let alone the specifics about his intrusive thoughts and obsessions. And of course he has no bandwidth to help repair the damage he has done to our relationship; he'll apologize but not without a lot of excuses and so forth, and uses my hurt as more fuel against me that I don't know how to protect myself, am too sensitive, don't really understand him, etc.

I really don't want negativity or despair here. I know many have those on this sub have had to leave. But this is just for those who have actually managed to achieve a modicum of peace and contentment with a bipolar partner, what has helped the most, for you?

[I have the brand of spouse who was diagnosed very late in life, we never saw it coming, should have, but ya know. It's very heavy on the severe depression and the manic has been all very dysphoric. But he hasn't run away or done anything drastic, he's just ... wanted to, and talked about it enough to hurt me a lot. He knows it is his illness for the most part but also blames me because that what's the illness does I guess, but he doesn't want me to take it personally because he has some insight most of the time that it's his illness making him resent me. He is getting lots of therapy. Medication so far is not helping much, but he is more stable than he was a year ago, for sure.]

But for myself? What can help? Because I am not okay! This is hard and scary and lonely and profoundly disorienting. I was doing okay, and then less okay, and now two years in I am really, really not okay. Severely burned out. Where do I turn?

Therapy, sure, but what kind of therapy? What do I look for in a therapist? My therapist understands bipolar for sure but it just doesn't seem to be helping me, so far. I saw his OCD therapist several times back when we thought it was OCD, but she didn't help a lot either. Some, for sure, but it's still crazy hard.

What kind of self-care or acceptance rituals or mantras? What books, what websites. I'm craving a support group. Are there good support groups? How do you find them?

Would anxiety medication help me? I am terrified of emotional blunting for myself, and yet the right kind of emotional blunting might be nice. Seems like a gamble.

Do you open up to friends? I feel like I am the world's most private person, but also a bad actor. This is compromising my friendships. At first I leaned hard on my friends, but since the diagnosis I tend to avoid my friends because I can't tell them I'm okay, and I'm not sure I want to tell them why. This is not good. Should I just put my shoulder's back and whisper, "my husband is bipolar, and I'm so not okay"? Am I adding to the stigma by keeping it so secret, or protecting my husband's privacy? And at what cost to myself?

What books? What websites? Where to go?

What does help: hugging my kids hard when I feel despair coming on. Recognizing that I am still so lucky to have them in my life. Reaching out to his family for support. Asking myself if I would marry him again and realizing the answer is still yes so the good must still outweigh the bad. Occasionally asking AI platforms to explain to me what it's like to be bipolar and depressed or in a mixed episode so I don't take it personally (husband can explain it quite eloquently, but it helps to hear from a third party.) Getting outside and walking hard and fast for a long time. And of course, hubby having a random break and smiling at me and giving me a kiss like he means it. Him asking with concern how I am holding up. But that has to be on his terms, not mine.

I'm the spouse of someone diagnosed multiple times this year with bipolar, still waiting for the treatment plan to actually work it's magic, but he did go through something like a nine month dysphoric mania and now presents as someone stuck in a lot of mixed episodes/rapid cycling.

So can anyone help me understand something? He complains a lot when he is in a bad episode about how everything feels threatening, my face, my voice, my mannerisms feel threatening. He has a huge hang up about my nose, his kids' noses, everybody's noses. For a long time this led me to believe he has OCD, but the diagnosis we keep getting his bipolar (I realize he could have both.)

Just last night in Phelps' Bipolar Not so Much book I read something about how the hyperactivity of the amygdala in a bipolar episode makes loved ones' faces appear threatening or angry, and how this alone can be a primary driver of strain on relationships. This sounded very similar to the way my husband describes how he feels. When he first started saying my nose felt threatening I thought he was bonkers but Phelps makes it sound like it's a thing.

Anyone else?