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You aren't evil if you leave; you aren't crazy if you stay Being married to someone with a serious mental illness can be hard to explain to friends and family. Most of them will have a knee-jerk reaction to your situation and a firm belief about what is right. They don't know the whole truth--you have to make this decision yourself and you have to be strong enough to either defend the decision or ignore your critics.
If you’ve lived with this for any length of time, you have probably gone through the motions in your head, wondering if you should leave the relationship or continue to try to work it out. So far you must be leaning towards staying or you wouldn’t be looking for advice to cope with the disorder, but you need to start thinking about what your limits are and whether staying is really best for either of you.
There is no wrong answer to this question because every situation and every person is different, only you know what you can live with and what makes you miserable. There are some common lines that most people will agree are boundaries that can not be crossed, but spouses of people with bipolar may see these lines blur.
If a counselor or religious leader tells you that there is only one right answer, they are not being honest with you. There is no God who would want you to sacrifice yourself on the altar of insanity. There is no God who would want you to risk the safety and sanity of any children you might have to uphold the sanctity of marriage. You have every right to do what is right for your situation.
Whether you are at the breaking point, or just a bit annoyed, now is a good time to look at your boundaries and start thinking about what specific actions will make or break your relationship. If you know your boundaries now, you won’t have to struggle with them when they are crossed. Think these things through when you are feeling calm and safe and rational. You don’t want your spouse making important decisions while manic, don’t you make important decisions under stress.
What are your boundaries about cheating? Yes, hypersexuality is a common symptom of bipolar disorder, but it does not have to mean promiscuity. That is a choice and if your spouse makes that choice, you need to deal with it. Remember, there are diseases out there that penicillin won’t cure. Are you prepared to wait 6 months or more for AIDS tests to come back negative? Can you trust that there won’t be another incident in that six months?
What are your boundaries about treatment? If you know that being off medication means disappearing for days on end, finding that credit card that you save for emergencies and maxing it out, yelling, hitting, or being physically abusive to you or your children, you may want to set a boundary that you will only remain in the relationship while your spouse is treatment compliant. Of course, you will have to have a plan on where to go if you have to leave, but I’ve discovered that knowing that you have the ability to leave makes in a lot easier to stay. If you aren’t feeling trapped, you can relax a bit.
If you can see that your spouse is not thinking rationally when boundaries are broken and you are able to forgive, it doesn’t have to mean permanent separation or divorce—it could just mean that you take an unplanned vacation with the kids or that your partner takes an unplanned vacation at a hospital. It could mean that you take other steps to protect yourself—calling credit card companies and lowering your card limits, taking away his car keys, shipping his gun collection to storage away from the house, just walking away when there are tense moments.
The hardest part of staying in a marriage with a bipolar spouse may well be that no one around you understands and you get little or no support. Bipolar is a disorder of cycles and at some point in every cycle, you probably get a brief glimpse of the person you fell in love with and still love. At other points in the cycle you seem to be living in a bodysnatchers horror movie—“who are you and what did you do with my partner?”
If you have a tendency to cry to friends and family when things go wrong, they may not be able to see that other part of the cycle. Remember, people with bipolar can often fool everyone around them, including psychologists and psychiatrists, and making their close families (who actually live with some pretty bizarre behavior) doubt their own sanity. Your friends only know what they’ve seen (best behavior) and what you’ve told them (some pretty strange stuff, probably) and likely feel that the difference is intentionally designed to harm you. If your partner is so evil that he or she is living two lives to make you miserable, you need to get away.
When the people who love you hear all of the bad things, they assume that things are all bad. Even if you aren’t comfortable talking about mental illness with some of them, do talk about some of the good things. If they can see that there is still something positive in the relationship, they will have a better understanding of why you are staying. You do need to have at least one person who knows that you are living with someone with bipolar disorder to talk to—even if it is your own therapist or an online support group (where you can remain totally annonymous). Having someone who REALLY understands is incredibly freeing. If you don’t have someone now, find someone now! ***Link to list of online support groups for bipolar disorder***
If you are wondering if your partner is really just ill or if you are living with evil incarnate, I’d recommend that you read People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck. I found his discussion of the evil in people to be rather enlightening—and it really helped me to find the difference between someone who is really evil and someone who is acting out in a a sick and confused state. I like this book because I could actually see people that I know as “people of the lie” where I find that most books on mental health issues tend to make me think that there is some other species out there—I lived with a bipolar husband for 20 years before he went in for help because although I knew what bipolar was, he just didn’t seem that bad to me. Peck makes it real. I wish he’d wriitten a book about bipolar—I’m sure we’d have caught on a lot quicker. The textbooks that I had read make it seem bigger than life. It can take a long time and a lot of suffering for bipolar to get to that point. Don’t worry, without treatment it will, but it can be pretty miserable for a long time before anything obviously psychotic comes up.
| Books Read M, Scott Peck's People of the Lie for a good definition of evil. Too Good to Leave, too bad to stay | Cut Line You have to live your own life--there is no right answer--do what your own conscious and sense of self-preservation tell you and don't ignore those voices in your head. |
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