What is bipolar? In layman’s terms it is a short circuit in the brain, because the body does not make enough of a substance called serotonin. It’s also called manic depressive and it’s hard on those who have it and it is also hard on the spouses and other family members as well.
I know what the effects of bipolar can be; I was married (technically still am) to a man who has bipolar. He had it when we first got married, but he self medicated with booze and drugs among other things and he went undiagnosed for the first 14 years of our marriage.
This is very typical of those with bipolar, they have many ways of self medicating to make them selves feel better. These ways of self medicating can include drinking to excess, drugs, sexual addictions and verbal or physical abuse. They don’t mean to do it; they simply will do anything to make themselves feel better.
Yes they can be destructive to themselves and others around them. Suicide among people with this disorder is very high as is abuse in many forms. Although my ex never tried suicide in the true since, he did partake in actions that could have ended his life prematurely such as drinking to excess and taking pills to get high on but never enough to kill himself.
Since this article is from a personal point of view I do use names but my ex-spouse’s name has been changed for obvious reasons, he becomes Lucifer in this story as that’s how I feel.
Dealing with addictions
People with bipolar often have addictions were to all kinds of things big and little and everything under the sun. These addictions all produce some time of altered state for them, either it be a real one or just a perceived altered state. Whatever makes them feel good they do, and it does not matter if it’s dangerous or not. They must escape the pain inside at all cost. So they experiment with all types of things, drugs, alcohol, sex and more.
Alcohol
My ex husband would skip bills to buy his alcohol, when I was pregnant with our first child and was ill he took money my parents gave us for the prescription and used it to buy a bottle of whiskey. That was twenty one years ago, that type of behavior continued for the next 19 years and there was nothing I could say or do to change that fact. Near the end of our living together as man and wife he was drinking up to a case of beer a night.
He was drinking the day I met him in 1986 and very drunk the day I said enough is enough and ended our marriage in 2005. I gave him an ultimatum between the drinking and his family back in 2002 and he choose his family until it got to be too much for him in 2004 and he began drinking very heavily again. When he began drinking heavily again all the personality traits he was trying to stifle come raging back, he was always drunk and found a girlfriend. I could not deal with it, so I threw him out of our home in 2005. He has lost his license before due to a dui charge a few years back but he continues to drink and drive to this day.
Drugs
Lucifer was in the Army when I first met him and on that day they were also smoking pot, he said it helped mellow him out, so I dismissed it because I only seen random daily use, it was not everyday. While home on leave in 1987 I had seen him do LSD even while knowing it might end his army career. While he was stationed in Korea his friends back stateside would send him pot through the mail and that was 1989. As a non drug user I deplore the use of drugs, so when I knew he was doing them I’d go away. He knew better then to bring them in the house as I’d toss them out.
Over the counter medicines
He also had an addiction to over the counter pain pills as well as cold medicine. I would find empty cold medicine packs all over. They were in his pockets, in his dresser drawers, the glove box and several more areas of our house. Any where he could hide them he would. I remember once when I threw him out I found tons of empty cold tablet boxes in a dresser that was downstairs to store off season clothes in.
Sex
He had an addiction to sex, and that one was hard to deal with as well. I do not mean to imply that we were doing it necessarily a lot, most of the time it was self pleasure with the aide of magazines. However when he was stationed overseas without me during the early years of our marriage he had sexual relations to at least 5 ladies of the night, this he admitted in counseling in 2000 in our 14th year of marriage. An affair on his part in 2005 is what ended this marriage.
Spending money
Addictions to spending money, it felt good for him to spend money so he did it. It didn’t matter if the family went without things he just felt the need to spend money.
I remember he wrote out over 3,000 dollars worth of checks in just 6 weeks and he was just bringing home a little over 1,200 a month so there was no way we could cover that. The bulk of that money was spent he said gambling. As this occurred while he was in South Korea by himself I do not know what all the money was spent on. This was a mania phase and quite costly though but it was just the first of many within the marriage.
Paranoia
Every person with bipolar had paranoia to some degree. It was like an idea would occur in his mind and his brain would run with it and it would become the gospel in his head. I was very active within our local community helping a non profit organization build homes and Lucifer joked one day that I was having an affair with several of the volunteers, and in his mind that became his reality. He truly believed that I was having multiple affairs with men of this organization which included several older well known men who were very religious.
On his non cycling days he knew I was not having these affairs yet on his cycling days I was the worst person in the world. Once he began confronting these men in public with his paranoid thoughts I stopped all my volunteering with this very well known Christian housing ministry. He began that a few years later when I was in college, he said I was having affairs instead of going to classes, which was wrong and I have the grades which to prove that.
Some people in our society say that those paranoid delusions could be the guilty person’s way of confessing their own discretions, and in our case that could be true and he admitted to multiple affairs while we were married of course he admitted to them after we were separated. When I think back to all that he exposed me to I am horrified, but I have done the tests and everything seems fine.
This article while painful to share may help someone else who is going thru this nightmare to realize they are not alone. It has sat on my hard drive gathering ‘dust’ for almost since I began writing here; it never seemed the right time to put it up. Perhaps it was just too painful to finish, admit, or share.
If you choose to stay with a bipolar partner, you are in my prayers and have my sympathy.
