Family & Friends of Bipolar Support Group

Many of you out there are coping with the challenges of being with the BP (or BPD or otherwise mentally affected) people we love. When times are good, they can be fantastic....until they're suddenly not.

The emotional strain this wreaks on us is something we rarely have the time to truly address. Life is just too busy & there's too much going on. Me, I'm not a 'crier' & I don't 'emote' much. My mother says this is a trait I always had (My Dad's like this too). It's not that the feelings aren't there, they just don't 'show' on the surface the same way.

I do have Fibro, though & in retrospect, I'm discovering that Fibro flare-ups often follow my husband's 'episodes' where he rapidly goes from hyper-happy to enraged & remains enraged for up to an entire weekend. Do you find that you are being affected physically by your partner's illness? That perhaps after something untoward you are more vulnerable to colds, headaches, insomnia etc?

In my case, I think that, in the days leading up to fateful week 3 (the spacing of the episodes) I'm carrying myself differently: my neck, jaw & back muscles tense up. I don't sleep as well & I'm hypervigilant. I know that certain things; minor stuff like a little dust in a corner or something out of place has set him off in the past (or rather served as a convenient pretext for an explosion) so I rip though the house like a tornado trying to make sure none of his 'trigger' catalysts are present. This is, of course, both stressful & futile (but you should see how clean it is in here!). I wonder, if he were, by some miracle, to go 3 months w/o an 'episode', what the health impact of that would be for me.
Posted on 11/07/09, 11:11 pm