Keeping each of our personal strengths and weaknesses can help relationships immensely. This is super important when it comes to relationships where one person has manic depression.
We with bipolar disorder are at an advantage because we’ve had periods of normal mood and energy. Someone who’s never experienced the ups and downs of a mood disorder can’t really know exactly what it’s like.
My mother for instance, for all that she’s known of and seen my mood problems for decades, and has a degree in psychology, just doesn’t always get it.
While I was hospitalized in 2007, she helped out by cleaning up my office for me, which was great. A few days after I got home, she tentatively said I should stop throwing trash on the floor, that it might attract bugs. She had thought that I was purposefully negligent and just tossing trash anywhere. Even though she knew I was having a crippling mixed mania episode and severe hallucinations, she couldn’t relate to the concept of being too ill to pick up trash if it fell on the floor.
After I pointed out that I was just too incapacitated to deal with trash if I missed the trash can and how it felt to be that incapacitated, she understood better. From there we worked out a deal where she cleaned my office for a time in trade for some web work.
By keeping each other in mind, and working around the problems bipolar disorder gives me, we were able to make lemonade out of the proverbial lemons. I was even able, in spite of my mood problems at the time, to contribute and that made me feel better. I highly recommend it.
~~Polly Toynbee
Babbled by Immi.
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Something to add… some people on the flipside are very adept at knowing how to redirect people in these states. They will recognize the dysphoria caused by something simple like cleaning up trash, and they’ll just redirect you away from it.
I don’t know if they “get it” — being clued in to the fact that the thought is causing stress — or if they’re just determined to find some topic that can be lightweight. But I definitely appreciate those people when it seems they’re doing whatever they can to keep me in a positive conversation rather than asking a lot of questions about why a little bitty conversational topic is sending me spiral.
Good point, Nathan.
The people around me who are good at it have a combo of “getting it” and just steering me towards lightweight thinking, from what I can tell. Even my mother finally gets it that if I can’t decide what to eat, that’s a sign of mood instability and she just picks something. That one took a while, though.