Growing up with a Parent with Bipolar Disorder
It is not easy growing up with a parent with Bipolar Disorder. As far back as my memory goes I remember the shouting and arguing. When I was about 7 years old we moved into a house in which my bedroom shared a wall with my parents’ bedroom. I would hear the shouting and arguing through the wall. Sometimes it seemed like it would never end. (For what it’s worth, I don’t remember hearing…ahem…evidence of other activities. But I certainly heard all the arguing).
I vividly remember the time my parent with Bipolar slammed the front door so hard all the glass fell out. They were never physically violent with me, ever. (Nor did they ever inappropriately touch me – except that they like affectionate hugs more than I do, which is ok). Nevertheless, witnessing violence around me was very scary even if my physical person was not literally ever violated.
Manic people don’t sleep enough. It’s like they are on an adrenaline high that keeps them going. If they sit down and relax a bit they are very liable to fall asleep. I remember sitting in the front seat next to my parent on long drives – as a teenager or young adult – holding a flask of coffee and giving it to them periodically so they could take sips to help them stay awake. I remember seeing their eyelids slowly drooping. I probably intervened, tapping their arm, to help them stay awake. I remember being aware that it was absolutely critical for the driver to stay awake. And seeing that it was very unclear whether they would. It was very scary. I was hoping against hope they would stay awake. I kept giving them the flask, hoping, maybe tapping them on the arm when their eyelids started to droop again.
I am here today – somehow they stayed awake and didn’t have an accident and we made it through. We were presumably going somewhere I wanted to go and I was not yet able to drive, so, I had a vested interest in this trip going ahead even though my parent wasn’t really awake enough to make driving as safe as it should have been.
Although there was a happy ending, since we never got into an accident on those drives, it was very scary when they were happening. It wasn’t my parent’s fault that they had a horrible illness. Even so it had a significantly negative effect on my life. I don’t expect anyone else I knew of my age was having to do things like literally keep their parent awake on car journeys to make sure neither of them died in a car accident.
If I was more serious than other teenagers; if I was annoyingly cautious, say, compared to them, well I can see why that could have been the case. If not as a teenager, the certainly by young adulthood I was put in the position of fending off real disasters that probably would have never occurred to other teenagers to worry about. I don’t expect they worried about their parent falling asleep on the motorway while driving them somewhere. At least, I hope they didn’t have to worry about that. Or, that if they did, in their case it was a fear based on no data, and there a fear that could perhaps have rationally have been dismissed, I on the other hand had a rational fear based on literally seeing a parent almost fall asleep repeatedly, while driving, right next to me.
By sometime in my adolescent years I’d been told my parent had an illness causing periodic mania. So I knew what was going on when they got into the prolonged state of being very impulsive and very determined. In that state they easily lost their temper, and that invariably would happen if anyone tried to reason with them and/or interrupt their plans. It was tricky since those plans often were at least partly based on the impaired judgment of mania. It would have been helpful if there had been a way to reason with the parent – maybe to help them keep a less manic version of their plan? But their mood state seemed to rule out that option.
Having the information that one of my parents had an illness they couldn’t control both helped and didn’t help. It helped to know it was periodic and that there was a reason for it and that my parent literally couldn’t help it, since it was an illness. However, it didn’t stop me being scared of them when manic. It didn’t stop me wanting to somewhat keep my distance, emotionally at least.
As well as the difficult parts of having a parent with Bipolar there was definitely an upside. My parent with Bipolar Disorder is a good, kind, thoughtful and responsible adult, when they are not ill. When they are a little hypomanic, they are quite delightful – definitely the life and soul of the party! Ok some of their jokes are not to everyone’s tastes but, well, seriously, if no-one had ever laughed they would have stopped saying them. Or if someone had complained vociferously. It’s not really fair to be upset with someone for doing something that society has indicated is appropriate, when we’ve never said otherwise. So yeah, they’re fun, kind, generous, giving, etc. It is very tragic when the illness takes all those qualities away.. I hate to say it but – at those times it makes them look more like a Scary Evil Monster than the awesome person they really are.
Of course, when I was young, I didn’t know about the illness. So the conclusion I came to from the endless arguing was that one person was primarily to blame. Obviously it had to be the one with the hair-trigger temper who didn’t listen to reason. I felt sorry for the other parent and angry with the parent with Bipolar Disorder on their behalf. In my mind, I definitely sided with the other parent.
In reality I think I had a go at that too, or at least at trying to remonstrate with the parent with Bipolar about something when they were manic. That led to family members remonstrating with me, basically trying to shut me down., which was somewhat frustrating. They were pleading with me not to do it, because it would only make the parent angrier and so that would not go well for me. I think it was at least one of my younger brothers who said that rather than my other parent. It was very frustrating at the time because it felt very unfair that my unreasonable parent having a voice basically took my voice away. In retrospect I can see that what actually was happening was that the illness was hurting both of us. It meant my parent couldn’t be helped in the way they needed because they were too manic to be able to listen and be helped. It was hurting them as well as me.
I highly regret how the illness led to me growing up somewhat angry with my parent with Bipolar. And definitely scared of them. Keeping my distance emotionally. Making plans to visit them in advance but always somewhat dreading the possibility that they might be highly manic at the time of the visit. In my life I’ve found that better information can help with understanding but information alone doesn’t heal the emotional wounds.
Hidden Emotional Wounds
Those wounds still need to be grieved appropriately, I believe, in order to heal. Which necessitates being willing and brave enough to feel the pain and sadness instead of self-medicating it away. That’s what I was trying to say in The Power of AA. Did I self-medicate? Definitely! At the age of 8 it was suggested I go on a diet because I was a little above my ideal weight (maybe like 7lbs over, it wasn’t a huge deal). Anyway I did and was successful at that time. Although I still struggle to this day with emotional eating: I won one battle but the war is not over. Anyway what I can see from my experience at age 8 was that I was already eating for emotional reasons as well as physical hunger. Otherwise I would not have gained more weight than seemed appropriate for me, at that time. In other words, by the time I was 8 I was already self-medicating – with food.
In Checking the Mail and Being Selfish and Sadly Freud was Right I wrote about discovering I had at least one wound so deep that i literally had no idea it was there. I denied it when it was first pointed out to me, because i couldn’t feel it myself, although I could see that it was rational of them to deduce it was there, based on their evidence. But shortly after that I did feel it – I remembered that being coerced into saying “I want” (coercion I went along with) felt so so wrong – “no no I mustn’t say that, I’m not allowed to say that, bad things happen when I say that!!!” I literally had words I was not allowed to say but I had no idea that I was not allowed to say them; that I carefully avoided saying them which made me annoyingly indirect.
It wasn’t that I was deliberately playing some weird game that allowed me to be annoying. Well, yes, I was playing a weird game, but completely unintentionally. Because as a child, I had concluded that I had to play that game in order to survive emotionally. Long after the game was not needed, I was still faithfully and obediently playing it and I couldn’t stop because I didn’t know I was doing it. It’s not possible to stop doing something you don’t know you are doing. When other people say “Stop!” all it does is confuse you, because you don’t know what you’re supposed to stop. It’s like birds that fly straight into glass windows at full speed (and tragically they often die from that injury). They literally don’t know the windows are there because they cannot see them.
Until I found myself saying ‘ow!’ due to one of them, I literally didn’t believe in these hidden wounds that can affect our lives on an ongoing basis. Which can also be thought of as ‘programming that got installed when we were young as a survival mechanism’. It carries over into our adult lives and causes us to speak and behave in bizarre, counter-productive ways and we’re totally unaware it’s there.
It seems that things going well in our adult lives actually activates this program and so we inevitably self-sabotage. In a way that mystifies us. Why? It’s almost like we want things to go badly, just like they did when we were growing up….ohhhhh….right. Perhaps we feel uncomfortable when things are going too well. Perhaps, even though we feel sad and scared and angry when they are not, we believe that is ‘what is normal’. And so we try to get back to that.
That’s a bit of a weird explanation, to be honest. I think a better one is that we self-medicate habitually so we don’t have to feel unresolved pain/grief. When we stop self-medicating, it hurts – there’s an emotional reality that is analogous to the physical withdrawal people go through who are trying to get off drugs or alcohol or caffeine. Not having something you’re used to having hurts until you learn to live without it (again). Not self-medicating hurts until we find another way to handle the unresolved grief – which may be as simple as letting ourselves grieve, feeling the loss, because grief is a process and peace is at the end of it.
Anyway I was aware I’d read about this sort of ‘hidden wound’ stuff. It’s called repression, denial, the power of the unconscious. It tends to be the after-effects and consequences of trauma/abuse/neglect (and/or simply a very chaotic and unstable environment) when we were young. Since discovering I had at least one of these wounds, I’ve been looking at the ACA laundry list to see what others I might have. I can see that ‘overresponsibility’ is definitely something I struggle with. Ie my self-worth gets too tied into being able to help others. I step in to help before I’m actually asked to help.
When Trying to Help is actually Abusive
One of the insidious things is that we rationalize our bad programming so we can keep doing it and pretend it’s entirely a good thing. (Many addictions/self-medications are a good thing taken too far which makes it surprisingly easy to rationalize them as normal and actually good behavior. So, I step in to help without being asked because I’m a helpful person! It’s good to be helpful, surely? Yes, it’s great, if you were asked to help. If not, you do not have consent. In other words you’re violating boundaries. In other words you’re being abusive.
OUCH. How can simply trying to be helpful, be abusive??? But, taking consent into consideration, yes, that must be true. Trying to help people in ways they have not expressly asked for can be abusive. Does that mean I should give up being helpful and never try to help? No! It means I should offer rather than presuming my help is wanted. I should tread carefully and check I have consent before going any further down the path of trying to help. And sometimes people say yes and it’s a win-win, I enjoy helping and they get helped. But consent is complicated and sometimes people say ‘yes’ when they don’ t mean ‘yes’ because they are not brave enough to say ‘no’. My self-medicating self would love to take advantage of that. Ah, of course it would because taking advantage of people is abusive!
YIKES. Let’s hope that’s covered and that I will try not to do it anymore. I apologize if I’d done it to you. I don’t want to rationalize it away by saying “Hey I was only trying to help! You should be happy that I’m a helpful person who wanted to hel you!” I don’t want to rationalize it away, because, abuse that is unintentional is just as real and abusive from the recipient’s point of view as anything intentionally done to them.
My Watershed Moment
Ok it’s time to talk about the watershed moment when the scales fell from my eyes, my fear of my parent with Bipolar vanished and was replaced with a special bond of understanding. It happened because the illness happened to me. The new relationship was a gift – and I am very appreciative of it! But the illness was not. It was a horrible curse I had hoped all my life would not fall on me.
I knew Bipolar Disorder was hereditary and that therefore I should be on the lookout in case I ever exhibited symptoms of it. But I thought it always showed up very early in adulthood. I assumed that I was out of the woods by the time I was 25. I was blindsided when it happened to me in the run up to my 32nd birthday.
My mania peaked ie there was an intervention just days before my birthday. It so happened that all of my family of origin who lived in England were coming to stay with us over my birthday that year. They all got front row seats. My other parent wasn’t originally going to be part of that gathering (because it was our understanding that our divorced parents preferred not to be around each other). However they flew in to help after I was diagnosed, so, they had front row seats too. All my family of origin, plus one partner and their aunt, got to see me and actually stay in my house when I was at my most manic.
Anyway you’re welcome to read more about that in My Personal Experience With Manic-Depression (Bipolar Disorder). written in 1997, about my experience with mania, the ER and the psychiatric unit in 1996.
The stunning thing that happened to me, through becoming manic and then being told I was manic, was that I found out what it feels like on the inside to be manic. I absolutely was stunned. I had totally felt like my parent acted like a Scary Evil Monster when they were manic. But it didn’t feel like that to me, when I was manic.
What I also discovered unexpectedly, when I was taken to the ER than agreed to be admitted to the psychiatric unit, is that, on the whole, when I am manic, I am going to be treated as if I am a Scary Evil Monster.
I think the medical establishment assumes having BipolarDisorder is hard because it’s frustrating to have a brain disease I can’t control. There an indignity about that and also about having to take medication for it. It’s scary to have a disease that will trick me into thinking I’m insanely happy and productive and while I’m enjoying that, cause me to wreak havoc in my life and the lives of those I care most about. That at the end of I’m likely to crash into a suicidal depression, Partly perhaps because I now see what I’ve done, that it was useless at best and destructive at worst. That I may have destroyed relationships with people I cared about beyond repair. And spent money I can never get back again. And more. And my prospects are that I will cycle through this for again and again for the rest of my life. That’s enough to make anyone depressed even if there was not an underlying chemical imbalance.
As I said I think the medical establishment assumes that’s why having Bipolar Disorder is hard. They are completely right about all of that. It totally sucks. But actually there’s something else and it’s their fault. It’s not just all those things. It also the reality that from now on, they can’t take it for granted that they will even be treated like a human adult any more. At times that are out of their control, with no notice, other people are likely to start treating them more like a wild animal than a human being. These people will think it’s justified because what they see in front of them is a Scary Evil Monster. A wild animal. These people are liable to control them and cage them and they will not have any say in the matter. They have no rights, none at all. Yes their physical needs will not be overlooked. But that’s about it.
I know this because it happened to me in the psychiatric unit. I was caged and bullied. Then I was expected to accept my diagnosis with adult composure (!) Somehow, the day before, I had got my head around, “I must be locked in this room because I am being punished. I probably was disobedient. I had better be obedient”. So when they asked me some questions the next day “blah blah blah…?” I said yes meekly. (They did note in my records that I cried as I did so). And so they let me go home. Because of that and because there would be other adults with me. I’ll write about how that was in another post because there’s a lot to say.
A Scary Evil Monster? Or An Excited Child?
So, there’s this huge discrepancy between how a manic person presents and what is actually going on inside. My brother says “When our parent is manic I try to think of them as a five year old”.
I think I’d heard that before but when I heard it again a few months ago it hit me in a new way, how remarkably accurate that framing is. Also, by the way it is so much more humane than Scary Evil Monster! It evokes compassion rather than fear. It leads to patience-encouraged-by-compassion on the part of those trying to help, both family and friends and the medical establishment, rather than controlling-abusive-behavior-motivated by fear of a Monster. rather than abusive control.
What fascinates me though, is how startingly well this framing fits a manic person.
Manic people really are like excited out of control young children! They are happy and excited unless something is obviously wrong. They want what they want and they want it now. They can be very headstrong – like two year olds who just learned how to say ‘no’ and are trying it out at every opportunity.
In other words, they tenaciously pursue their goals and literally don’t know when to stop. This causes them to get overtired. Which makes them overly emotional and reactive. Weirdly, being overtired makes them extra wired. (Parents, you’ve observed this too, right? If a child is overtired it can be harder to get them to sleep than when they are just ‘tired’?). Anyway so, even when very tired, they keep going and they eventually go into an ‘overtired temper tantrum meltdown’ stage. Which is not working for them or anyone else. I don’t know whether kids get psychotic; but these are physically adults and tiredness has been proven to make even adults with no mental health disorders literally psychotic.
Mania, Dissociative states, Fragmented Personality and Ego States
Ok so, what if…manic people literally are young children who don’t know when to stop? There are branches of psychology and personality studies which talk about dissociation. And about personalities that get somewhat fragmented by trauma or abuse or neglect or simply a chaotic childhood environment. These personality fragments or ego states get stuck at young ages if the trauma or abuse or neglect or chaos happened at those ages
The child in pain and desperation, evidently was able to activate an emotional survival mechanism that sort of split their personality in order to shut off and contain the pain in one part. In order for the rest to survive. The rest can grow up but this one part, or parts are stuck as children with unresolved pain. The person ends up with a sort of ‘personality team’ but it doesn’t function especially well. Because it often is in conflict with itself. And sometimes the ones who get put in charge are not very old, so they are not very good at being an adult.
When the personality is so fragmented that the different parts literally have different memories and are unaware of each other, that’s referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder. It used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder. Some people don’t believe that’s a real thing. Some Christians equate it to the demon-possession described in the Bible. I believe it’s real because I do sense conflict inside sometimes, as if I have different parts. I do sometimes feel like somehow the wrong part is in charge and that’s why I feel anxious and overwhelmed. Some psychologists call these parts ‘ego states’.
So I wonder if mania is a prolonged state of dissociation in which a young child ego state that usually is kept hidden inside, accidentally gets out and gets to be in charge? I’ve noticed that unusual levels of validation probably were the primary trigger for my manic episodes. What do unusual levels of validation do? They make the world seem safer than usual. Maybe it got safe enough for a child to creep out. And try some stuff out. And it was amazing! But they didn’t know when to stop. They were a child raised in a violating environment in which they were encouraged to be overresponsible (take care of others but not themselves) and driven, because suriving required a lot of hard work. They could not let their guard down. They never learned to say ‘no’, even to themselves because it wasn’t safe to let their guard down enough to take care of themself.
I believe there are practitioners out there who are specialists in helpful people with fragmented personalities to reunite their personalities. I believe they have evidence that their treatments work and help these people to become happier and more relaxed and have more choices about when they want to work hard to achieve something important. I wonder if they’ve treated people with Bipolar I, because it would be interesting to know whether it helped. If it’s not being done, can we try it? Maybe it will help!
Ok so I understand the ego states stuff is all a little weird. Maybe it’s not even true. However, even if it isn’t, it would still be better if the medical establishment would treat manic people as excited children rather than Scary Evil Monsters. It would end the unintentional abuse of manic people. It might help them accept their diagnosis and accept more of the help they need in general. Help without abuse is much easier to accept than help plus abuse. Maybe it would even save lives.
What if the Medical Establishment is being Unintentionally Abusive?
Maybe this seems like a ‘straw man’ argument because, hey, why would I accuse medical professionals of being abusive? They obviously mean well. They obviously went into the profession because they want to help!
I get that. But I have my first-hand experience of being caged and bullied and patronized in the ER and psychiatric unit. And I have experience of sitting in a session with medical professionals and I have clearly sensed that hey were afraid of me. So, I do believe that in some sense they were seeing me as a Scary Evil Monster. Or, that, whatever they thought and felt, they believed that treating me as if I were one was entirely justified. It was cost-effective and it got me on meds. It worked out. Is it really that bad, since it works?
Yes it really is that bad if what the professionals are doing is re-abusing a person who is already in survival mode due to past abuse. It will cause the person to go deeper into survival mode. The professionals might appear to achieve some good benefit like getting them on meds. But if treatment feels like abuse, they will run away from it at the first possible opportunity. It is an entirely rational choice on the part of a person with a mental health disorder to decide to ‘go it alone’ and take the risks of being untreated rather than opt for certain abuse at the hands of medical professionals.
Ah there was something I forgot. If mania is a dissociated state but the ego states are not entirely walled off, then it is possible to get the attention of an adult ego state if it’s done the right way. Preferably with compassion, though, not with shock treatment. It was extremely difficult and humiliating in my ER and psychiatric unit experience that no-one told me key information I needed to know. In general I get told constantly that it’s obvious when a person is manic. In that case, what’s the harm in making the ER test for mania an open book test? Be respectful and tell the person what’s going on. If they are truly manic they will mess up the test anyway, right? I was so confused in the ER and I felt like no-one showed me compassion nor did they try to help me understand. I suppose they thought I couldn’t understand.
But they were wrong. If I really couldn’t understand, why did I get upset when they violated the rights written on my patient’s right sheet (my right to refuse medication). Why did I get upset everytime they didn’t answer my questions?
They could have treated me more like a human being than they did.
In my most recent visit to a psychiatrist (last month) they were extremely controlling. I wouldn’t say they were abusive exactly but they were very disappointingly invalidating. Being controlling definitely could be a fear-based reaction and that could mean they were afraidd of my illness. But it could just be the way they treat all patients. And my husband said he thinks a lot of people like to just be told what to do. By an expert. It works for them.
Towards a More Empathetic and Empowering Treatment of Bipolar I Disorder
On the whole I expect people with Bipolar are not like that because they tend to be smart and creative and driven and like to figure things out for themselves. They like to be treated with respect and hopefully even a bit of compassion. Is that really too much to ask?
Ok, so if we could establish the right framing metaphor for people with Bipolar disorder it could help a lot. It would open up the possibility that we could empower them again, healing the effects of their illness, instead of disempowering them further by implying the thought of having much control at all is an impossibility. What if we could help them be so empowered that they could channel their creativity, insight, intellect and perseverance into helping themselves and healing themselves? What if
I feel like this is what I’ve been trying to do for myself for the last 25 or so years. I think I have had some measure of success. Otherwise how did I manage to be off meds now for 18 1/2 years with no manic episodes? I enrolled in my own clinical trial with one person in it and I was my own research project. I had no control arm, unfortunately, so I cannot prove am better than if I’d taken meds and not actively fought for my wellness for the last 25 years. On the other hand there is also no control arm to show me that my meds worked better than no meds, when I was on them. If they worked, it was not a night and day difference and it still took me several months to get better from each episode. Frankly I would not call that stunningly effective. I had to take them for a while to prove I was not treatment-resistant. Taking meds and accepting one’s diagnosis of Bipolar I should be two separate issues. But in the world I live in, they generally are equated.
(Caveat about medication: I truly do not believe meds or no meds is the issue. I wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone from starting or continuing on meds. I think it’s complicated because if abusive people prescribe meds then the meds become equated with the instrument of abuse. They become the chains to throw off in order to be free. No wonder people with Bipolar resist medication so strongly. Why has it not occurred to us that the medical professionals may be fueling the very resistance by equating being on medication with being abused?
Ok that’s it. That’s what I have to say. This is important because lives are literally at stake. Maybe I misunderstood what I read; but I thought I read yesterday that 25% of people with Bipolar attempt suicide?
If you care, please listen. If you’re in a position to do anything, please do it. If I’m wrong please tell me. I would love to hear that what I’m worried about has already been taken care of.
Also possibly related: When Normal Happiness Is Not An Option