How Bipolar Disorder Affects My Home Life

Posted on April 29, 2017 in Abuse Anxiety Bipolar Disorder

I feel sorry for my wife. She had good reasons to leave me, but she didn’t. No, I was never violent. I would say that I am very demonstrative, the kind of self-expression where I wave my arms about and talk wildly as if I were delivering a monologue in a stage play. Of course, I am the leading man when I have these outbursts, the subject of the play. There was a twelve step group that I heard about years ago whose first step was “We realized that we were addicted to drama.”

That’s me. But worse than this for Lynn was the way I weedled my way out of having children. Now if I had had the stability that I have now, if my therapists and my psychiatrists had caught on to the fact that my emotions were more than relics of a bad childhood, I might have had the strength to do it. I knew I was weak. There was a statistic out there — 35% of those who were abused abused their own children — and I knew the trail of tears and violence that I could trace down my paternal line could continue in me. So even as Lynn kept suggesting that I could be a stay-at-home father, I feared my chaos would make that impossible. I left Lynn crying some nights.