The Aftermath of a Bipolar Episode

        One of the challenges I faced when emerging from a manic episode was coming to terms with the devastation that was left in its wake. I felt like I was looking back on the path of a tornado that had smashed its way through the small town called “Oliver.” My world was uprooted, sucked into the eye of a storm, ripped to bits and spat out again. No part of it was left untouched by the havoc wreaked in my life and the lives of those close to me. As sanity slowly returned, it was then that I began to appreciate the damage that had been done. The episode was over, but the longer-term effects were just beginning.

Discovering what I had done was like waking up from a nightmare and promptly facing another. What made it worse was that I was responsible for this chaos, a chaos that left me full of guilt and regrets. It is one thing to suffer my own losses but quite another to have dragged those close to me into the drama of mental illness too. Cruel words and thoughtless actions didn’t do a lot of good for my relationships.

One of the hardest things for people to believe is that when I was manic or psychotic, I had no control over what I said or did.

I was gone.

I was in another world.

I was another person.

Yet, how can I expect other people to understand this? Before bipolar I certainly would not have done. I would never have thought that an illness could change someone so much. Then a time would come when I was well enough to face the consequences of my words and actions. Discovering I had been unkind to my wife, made life harder for my family, ruined friendships, put my parents through the mill or spent money I didn’t have was no fun at all. The worst of the episode was behind me, but feelings of shame and guilt came at me hard before retreating to the back of my mind to fester like boils that can’t be lanced. I used to dread their unfriendly visits and didn’t know what to do with them, so I stuffed guilt and shame away in some hidden part of myself. Some hidden depths of my unconscious.

To add confusion to chaos, I couldn’t tell how much of my emotional turmoil was due to bipolar and how much was my natural human reaction to what had happened. That was one of the most difficult things about mental illness, I didn’t really know who I was. I couldn’t separate what was me and what was bipolar. It was wierd. One thing I do know is that pushing feelings away is wearisome work. The guilt I suppress one day pops up the next day, or week, or month as an angry outburst or a hurtful comment. Guilt also made taking responsibility for what I had done harder and apologising more difficult too. That heavy, guilty burden in my stomach could convince me to hold back, to not move forward with dealing with the things I needed to deal with. To pull back from apologising and addressing the issues that needed to be addressed. This perpetuated the damage that began during the episode itself.

One thing that is not talked about a lot is the amount of time we lose recovering from an episode. My brain took a real battering from depression or mania. Although I could sometimes return to sanity fairly quickly, returning to full functioning could take months. Our brains are complex and it seems that a serious episode can really throw things out of kilter. It takes time and patience to recover. It takes a lot of patience to get through those days when I feel like I have been hit by a truck, or I can’t shake the feelings of regret or sadness about what has happened. Trying to get back to life too quickly can slow my recovery, but it can also distract me from the problems and pain that follow an episode. I am not sure there is a reliable method to recovering from mental illness. There is no "cookie cutter", one size fits all. None of it is an exact science. We are all different. Thinking I could do it perfectly just piled on the pressure. Yet, with support, love and the right help, it's possible to come back. It's possible to re-build our health. It's possible to reclaim ourself again. It’s possible to find peace with bipolar.

By Oliver Seligman (author of Befriending Bipolar: a patient's perspective). 

Oliver has a Youtube channel called: @livingbetterwithbipolar       

Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/@livingbetterwithbipolar