The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
Living with bipolar disorder sucks! Each week Michelle Reittinger and her guests explore tools and resources that help you learn how to live well with your bipolar. If you are tired of suffering and want to live a healthy, balanced, productive life with your bipolar, this podcast was designed with you in mind.
The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
EP 65: When You Choose Joy Over Suffering
Michelle shares why she took a hiatus from her podcast to fully experience planning her daughter's wedding and supporting her son through his senior year of high school.
• Decided to pause her podcast, blog, and social media when life became overwhelming with a job change, moves, planning a wedding, and senior year activities.
• Realized the purpose of healing from bipolar was to be present for these family milestones
• Planning her daughter's wedding became a beautiful healing experience for their relationship
• Practiced mindfulness throughout the wedding day to fully experience every moment
• Used the Mood Cycle Survival Guide tools automatically to manage stress
• Set an aggressive goal to unpack their new home in two weeks while listening to audiobooks instead of binge watching shows
• Discovered that homeschooling her youngest daughter was the right choice for their family
If you're struggling and feeling hopeless, check out Michelle's other podcast episodes, read her blog, or read her book "The Upside of Bipolar: 7 Steps to Heal Your Disorder." Until next time, Upsiders!
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I had a day when I had this realization. This is why you healed. I love sharing what I've learned. I love helping other people, but the reason that I healed, the reason that I focused so hard and worked so diligently for so long, was for my family. I wanted to be alive for these events for my family. I wanted to be there and be whole and be present for my daughter's wedding and my son's you know senior year of high school and his graduation.
Speaker 1:Hey, welcome to the Upside of Bipolar conversations on the road to wellness. I am so excited that you decided to join me today. We're a community learning how to live well with bipolar disorder and we reject that. The best we can expect is learning how to suffer well with it. I'm your host, michelle Reitinger of myupsideOfDowncom, where I help people with bipolar disorder use the map to wellness to live healthy, balanced, productive lives. Welcome to the conversation. Hey, welcome to the Upside of Bipolar. I am your host, michelle Reitinger, and it has been a minute. For those of you who are regular listeners, you have noticed that I have been on hiatus for the past several months and I'm really excited to be back and especially excited to share with you why I put a pause on my podcast so in order to talk about the last few months, it's important to talk about what's been going on over the last year.
Speaker 1:Little over a year ago, our family moved. My husband had been out of work for a little while and was looking for employment, and it necessitated a move for our family. And I actually did a podcast episode after that move because I was excited. It was the first time I had moved without getting manic and without getting depressed afterwards, and so it was a really incredible learning experience. But we were in kind of a temporary living situation for a little while and things were starting to get. We were starting to get settled in and starting to get into a rhythm with things. And then in December we got a big surprise when our oldest daughter got engaged. And it was exciting, a little bit surprising, not surprising in a bad way. We love our now son-in-law, her fiance at the time, but we didn't realize how serious they were. You know they were young adults and weren't spending a lot of time with us and so we didn't see them very often and didn't realize how serious things had gotten, and so we were a little caught off guard when they got engaged but really excited at the same time. And then in January, my husband, up to that point, had been working some consulting jobs, but in January he got a new job and it necessitated a move for him. I couldn't go at the time. He needed to move to the town in a different part of our state where he was going to be working, because it was too far for him to be driving back and forth every day. He tried it for a little bit and after about a week he was like, yeah, I can't do this. And so we moved him into an apartment close to where he was going to be working.
Speaker 1:And that made things really challenging right away, because I was now a single parent, making sure I was holding down the fort, taking care of our family and all of the things that that entailed, plus trying to do my podcast and my blog and all the social media that was associated with that and the Upsiders tribe, which was, of all of my work, things that's the highest priority and I started to get a little bit overwhelmed. I was planning my daughter's wedding and I understand now why people hire wedding planners. I will not make that mistake again, but I was trying to manage all of the preparations for the wedding. I have a son who just graduated from high school and so he was in his senior year. Having his senior year, he was, you know, captain the volleyball team and had a lot of things going on with volleyball and I didn't want to miss any of those things because it was our last time through that stuff and we wanted to make sure we were there for him and planning the wedding and trying to manage all the day to day things that were going on. And I just started realizing, if I keep up at this pace, this experience is going to be wasted, and I had a day when I had this realization. This is why you healed. I love sharing what I've learned, I love helping other people, but the reason that I healed, the reason that I focus so hard and work so diligently for so long, was for my family. I wanted to be alive for these events for my family. I wanted to be there and be whole and be present for my daughter's wedding and my son's, you know, senior year of high school and his graduation.
Speaker 1:And at the pace that I was going and all the things that I was trying to manage at the same time, it was making things super stressful. I could tell I was starting to get irritated really easily, and I didn't want that to be the experience that I had with my daughter. She's only going to get married once, and I didn't want the experience I had with her preparing and planning and hosting her wedding to be a negative one, and so I made a very conscious decision. I talked it over with my husband and I put everything on pause, except for the Upsiders tribe, my coaching group. They don't ever get a pause. I'm committed 100% to helping them, and so I made sure that we were still having our monthly success sessions with each individual person and then our group coaching sessions each week on Wednesday nights, and they were getting what they needed from me. But everything else the podcast, the blog, social media, everything else went on pause because I wanted to make sure that I was fully present and able to function in a healthy way for my family, and it was incredible.
Speaker 1:I had some really beautiful experiences with my daughter and it was actually a very healing process for for us as well. My daughter and I, over the years, have been working through the healing process because when she was young, she was. She was about four when I was hospitalized all those times, not about four. She was four when I was hospitalized a number of times and made multiple attempts on my life, and so she was aware as I went through the healing process. She was aware of things and it did a lot of harm to our relationship and over the past five years we've been doing a lot of work together with individual therapy and with therapy together a few times and I've been making conscientious effort to try and heal that relationship and be present for my daughter.
Speaker 1:And so the experience of planning her wedding was incredible. It was so beautiful, it was such a sweet experience for both of us and I've heard a lot of horror stories. I was actually quite nervous about planning her wedding because in the past we've had some challenging dynamics, sometimes between the two of us, and I thought I've heard all these people talk about how stressful weddings are and how stressful the planning experience is, and it wasn't like that, because I made the conscious choice to step back from other stressors so that I could focus and be there for my daughter and we had some really amazing experiences. Wedding dress shopping was such a sweet experience, it was just beautiful and one of my favorite experiences throughout this whole process was when she had her bridles taken. I don't know if everybody knows about bridals I didn't know about it until a few years ago because that wasn't a thing when I was getting married but bridals are usually do them about a month or a month and a half before you get married and the bride does the first look with the groom and they do pictures.
Speaker 1:We went to a beautiful garden, public garden that was doing a tulip festival at the time, and so we got to be there with the photographer while they took pictures of my daughter and her at that time fiance, and it was just amazing. And during that time I actually had several thoughts about how grateful I was to be alive and how grateful I was for all the work and effort that I put into healing, because I was able to be there, fully present for my daughter, healthy, whole, with a healthy relationship with her, and it just filled me with gratitude and I kept thinking like this is this is why I did it all. This is why I wanted to, wanted to heal was for these kinds of moments, these experiences with her and with my other family. And then the wedding itself was amazing. We had lots of support from family and friends and spent a lot of time decorating. I have a sister-in-law who is so incredibly talented with interior decorating. She's not professional, she just has a knack for it and loves it and she works so hard. I was there to support her, but she did a lot of work putting together pieces for the reception center that we held it at and we did a lot of work. We had, I think, like 14 hours of decorating the day before. I just wanted to look beautiful for my daughter and we had some incredible support as we went through the wedding day. And it's funny because I was really working hard to practice mindfulness while I was going through this whole experience.
Speaker 1:One of the things that mindfulness taught me was how important it is to stay present when I was going through the healing process. One of the things I learned about myself was that I had intentionally and I've talked about this before, but I intentionally taught myself to daydream because I was so uncomfortable in my own head, and I also realized I was really incredibly uncomfortable with silence in the past because my brain was never silent, and so silence around me may be uncomfortable because it left me with only the intrusive thoughts that were in my head. And so I, over the years, had learned, you know, develop these coping mechanisms of listening to podcasts, listening to music, listening to I always had to have something playing, and when I, you know, a lot of times I would binge watch shows, you know, so that I was focused on something else, but I was, had been incredibly uncomfortable in my own head, and one of the beautiful things about the healing process was that I, especially when I learned how to practice mindfulness meditation, was that I learned how to be not only comfortable but embrace silence and embrace just being present in the moment. And so I intentionally practice mindfulness throughout this entire process, especially on my daughter's wedding day, and I didn't take a single picture the whole day because I just wanted so, so much to be able to experience that entire day fully and be fully present for all of it, and it was words fail me it was absolutely perfect. It was a perfect day. It could not have been better, so beautiful, to watch my sweet daughter and son-in-law get married and the joy that they felt and all of the joy of all of our family. My husband and I. We felt so in love with each other that day and we had so much fun.
Speaker 1:My daughter's in-laws hosted a wedding luncheon in their backyard. It was very beautiful. They had worked really hard on the yard to make sure it was ready for guests and they had tables set up and we just got to enjoy being with each other and sharing. You know why we loved our children and then at the reception, we had so much fun. My daughter loves to dance. She does country swing dancing all the time, she and her fiance and so we had really fun music and just danced the night away and had such a fun, fun, fun night.
Speaker 1:And I was filled filled with gratitude that night for everybody, and not just for that, you know, for the wedding reception and the wedding day itself. You know I was incredibly filled with gratitude for all the people that had put so much effort into helping it to be a beautiful day for for my daughter and for our family, but also for all the people that have supported me and our family along this healing path. You know I kept thinking about my mom and dad and about my mother and father in law. You know, about friends and family that have been so supportive of us as we've gone through all of the challenges we've experienced and through the healing process, and all of it culminated on that day. It was just amazing.
Speaker 1:And then, about a month after not even a month, I'm sorry, it was actually three weeks. I was trying to remember because it was a really quick turnover About three weeks after our daughter got married, our son graduated from high school and so we had all these last final things going on for him, and then, less than a month after that, we moved and so we've had all of these things happening over the past about eight months, eight, nine months that have been major life changing experiences, major shifts for our family, and one of the things that has that I was, as I was preparing for this episode, that I realized was how automatic the mood cycle survival guide tools are for me. Now I don't even think about them as the mood cycle survival guide. They're just part of the way that I manage my life. You know, when I, at the beginning of the year, when I started finding myself getting overwhelmed with my husband, you know, starting a new job in another sitting and moving out, moving away, and my son having all of these things happening for his senior year with volleyball and senior activities and my daughter especially my daughter getting married, and we had a few things happening with our youngest daughter that that we needed to work on that you know. So there's just a lot of stressors going on and instead of like introverting and not being able to handle things, my brain automatically went to those resources in the mood cycle survival guide. You know.
Speaker 1:The first one is who is your team? I'm very, I'm very good now at turning to the people that I that are support. You know people for help. I have very good relationships, you know, for example, with the my, my I call her my Wendy. I actually interviewed her on my podcast, I think like a year and a half ago, but she does all of my like marketing, managing, and that she's she and I work together very closely and and so I talked to her about you know what I needed from her and and what my bandwidth was for work you know I was able to talk with, have a close family members, that that we support each other and letting them know. You know I kind of have a low bandwidth right now and I'm these are the priorities and so these things are going to be have to take a backseat. And, and so it was that that team.
Speaker 1:You know, even when you go through the healing process, I think, just in life, life in general everybody needs support people. You provide support for others and others provide support for you. And when you establish healthy boundaries around that support, it helps us to support each other and to be there for each other, because we can't function entirely on our own. It really is difficult, and so I was able to automatically think of who are my support people and what, what do I need from them and how do I ask in a healthy way?
Speaker 1:And then, of course, you know, the step two of the mood cycle survival guide is what are my red flags and triggers? You know what are the things that make things difficult for me to stay in a healthy, balanced mindset. And it's not because I have quote unquote bipolar disorder anymore In fact, I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a minute but it's because there are triggers and stressors for every person. Every person that lives on this earth has things that cause stress for them, that that trigger anxiety, that trigger undesirable emotional responses, and so, being aware of those, you know, number one of them for me is just getting overwhelmed. If you have too many things going on, you start to get I started to get snappy with people and really impatient because I was. I was feeling overwhelmed, I had so many things going on and that is a normal emotional response and it was just a red flag.
Speaker 1:But you've got too many things happening and you need to take a step back and evaluate, which is again step three of the mood cycle survival guide, or what are your power priorities, what are the things that matter most and what things can be? Can I let go? And during this time I did not want to sacrifice the experience of planning my daughter's wedding and experience, you know all of those, those once in a lifetime opportunities and experiences with my daughter. I didn't want to sacrifice those because I was trying to do too many things in my life, and so the power priorities for me and that changes. One of the things I've talked about in earlier episodes when I've talked about the Mood Cycle Survival Guide, is how your power priorities will change over time, and so it's important to kind of evaluate those on a periodic basis and see where you are. And so it's important to kind of evaluate those on a periodic basis and see where you are.
Speaker 1:And for me, the priorities were I in her little world that needed some attention and I needed to be able to be present for her. And, of course, I had the planning that was going on, and I had never planned a wedding before. I don't remember my husband and I we almost eloped. There was very little planning that went into our marriage. It was just a little tiny ceremony and our family did a wedding luncheon for us, but there was no big wedding, and so I had never gone through this process of planning a wedding before, and so I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. And as I started to feel the weight of all of the things that had to be done and starting to recognize how much work was actually going to go into this, that was when I started to step back and say I'm doing too many things right now and something has to give. And so that's when I evaluated and identified what my priorities were, what were my power priorities and what things do I need to let go of right now so that I can give my best to those priorities. And it was. It was absolutely amazing, the whole experience, and I know that I'm using amazing and incredible.
Speaker 1:I wish that I had better vocabulary right now to describe the experiences that we went through, but but because I had done all this healing. Number one, I was able to be fully present for my daughter and and it was a healing experience for us it was a beautiful memory, all of its beautiful memories. We don't have any negative memories from this whole experience. We didn't have fights. We didn't have. There were no meltdowns. There were times when we had disagreements about things, but we were able to handle them in a healthy way, but there were no big blowups or damage to the relationship because, number one, we had done a lot of work on healing our relationship and, number two, I had done a lot of work on learning how to identify when I was starting to get snappy or cranky or having emotional responses that were undesirable. I was able to check myself and recognize like there's something going on underneath this. What do I need to change in order to get back to where I can have healthy emotional responses to things? And I think I was in the middle of a thought that required a second thing, but I apologize because that took me off on a tangent and I don't remember what I was saying, anyway.
Speaker 1:But the other thing that has been incredible is our move. So there was a lot of stress leading up to the move because we had the wedding and then we had my sons, you know, graduating and we had, you know, finding a place to live can be a very stressful experience and thankfully we had some help with that and we were able to find a really great place for our family to move, able to find a really great place for our family to move. And I set some pretty aggressive goals for myself with our move this time, because I had already been through a move once where I didn't trigger, you know, any hypomania or depression afterwards, and so I got much more aggressive about how I wanted to handle this move because I think I realized, like I feel I'm not going to trigger any, any kind of mood swings with this move, but I also recognized so one of the things that I learned about when we get curious about why we experience symptoms, it can lead us to some really great insight into ourselves. So one of the things that I learned about myself with moves is that when I move, it is a lot of change and a lot of stress all at one time and in the past I would hide from that stress in coping mechanisms. And one of the things that my therapist said to me a long time ago is what is the need you are trying to fill with this coping mechanism?
Speaker 1:And my main coping mechanism that I struggled with for a long time was binge watching television and I didn't like it and I don't want this to anybody to feel like. If you binge watch something for a weekend because you need a break, this is not an indictment of that. This was me becoming totally dysfunctional for for several weeks, sometimes a month, after a move, not taking care of myself, not taking care of my family. That is the kind of binge watching I'm talking about is highly unhealthy, but I was. That was the way that my brain was trying to cope with the overwhelming stress that it felt with the move. And when we moved to you know the last year, I tried to figure out, you know kind of played with. My brain needs something. It's feeling overwhelmed and stressed right now. What can I do to give it something to help with that stress that does not involve binge watching, because I did not want to do that again, but I needed to give my brain something to help, because it needed help. You know, moving is a very stressful experience for most people. I'm super impressed by people that are in the military that have figured out a way to move regularly without getting overwhelmed. That's highly impressive to me.
Speaker 1:But this move, I was wanting to see if I could do a better job this time, if I could improve even more, and so I set a really aggressive goal for myself with unpacking. You know, the packing part was stressful. It's I don't like. I don't like moving. It's not my favorite thing to do, but we we were able to to get all the packing done and the move, you know, done in one day, which was our goal, meaning like everything from one location to the other. And then I wanted to try and unpack in two weeks, like completely unpack my house, get all the boxes unpacked, put away things put on the wall, everything done in two weeks.
Speaker 1:And I discovered that for me, if I listen to audiobooks, that I can, that serves the same purpose and I'm actually able to be productive at the same time. And so I did. My son-in-law turned me on to a really fun trilogy called the Mistborn Series and it was shocking to me when I figured out how many hours of this book I had listened to. I think it was like 55 or 60 hours of this book. But I would get up in the morning, go on a walk and then we would take care of my family and it was summertime, thankfully. So one week I had a niece come play with my daughter, come stay with us and play with my daughter, and then about a week and a half later I had my nephew come. So I just found a friend for my daughter and let them play, and then I went to work on the house and it was a really fulfilling experience because I was able to stay focused and productive and still give my brain what it needed to function, to kind of escape a little bit because the move was stressful. It's a stressful experience, but I was able to provide my brain what it needed so that it could manage the stress and still be productive. And so each day I was able to sit in a room that I had unpacked or, you know, look at something that I had accomplished that day and acknowledge, yes, this is stressful and I'm not super, you know, super big fan of moving, but I'm managing it and it's working. And so after two weeks everything was unpacked and I was able to, you know, have a positive summer, the rest of the summer with my daughter, and now we are homeschooling.
Speaker 1:I didn't think I was ever going to homeschool again. I homeschooled my older two children until each of them were in eighth grade, and when my youngest came along, she's 11. No, she's eight years younger than my son, and by the time she came along, I was totally burnt out. I was like, yeah, I don't want to do that again. But she asked last year multiple times if we could do homeschooling, and at first I thought I have no interest in doing that. But as I thought about it more especially through all of the you know, we were packing and getting ready to move and I started thinking about I thought maybe we could do that, and so I did a little investigation and found a really great online school that she loves, and so we're homeschooling now.
Speaker 1:So I think maybe this might be it for today's episode. I didn't realize that it was going to go. I was going to talk for this long, but I don't want it to be too long, but next, the next episode I'm actually going to do another solo episode because I want to talk about something that I learned through this experience. I'll give you a little preview. I did write a blog post about this. It's called Don't Call it Bipolar Disorder in scare quotes, and it's something that has been on my mind a lot during this past eight months, because by labeling bipolar a disorder, we do a huge disservice for the people struggling with these symptoms, and I don't want to get into this too much right now because I think this deserves its own episode, but that's what we're going to talk about next time. So I hope that this update has been helpful.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry that I don't have a broader vocabulary. I feel I feel that the words that I'm using are highly inadequate to express the gratitude and joy that I've felt over this past eight months. Highly inadequate to express the gratitude and joy that I've felt over this past eight months. And stress, you know, and some overwhelm, but mostly joy. You know we've had some really beautiful experiences, you know, even after they got married. You know we've had fun. When we moved in for 4th of July, my son-in-law and daughter came and stayed with us, so we had all of our family together for 4th of July for a few days and it was just so happy. It's so much fun to see your children moving forward in their life. We have a really fantastic son-in-law. We love him so much and he's such a great addition to our family. I know that they are their own family, but he is part of our family now as well, and so we're so happy to have him as part of our family and maybe I'll ask and see if they'll agree to let me share a few of the wedding pictures. I might see if they'll let me do that, because that would be really fun to share that with everybody.
Speaker 1:But if anybody has read my book the Upside of Bipolar Seven Steps to Heal your Disorder, this that I'm sharing right now is the rest of the story. You know, in the book I talk about how my daughter she saved my life. My desire to be a good mom for my daughter and both of my daughters and my sons. That's what saved my life. That is what finally helped me to recognize that I could not make any more attempts on my life and I had to help myself. I had to figure out a way to survive. I had to figure out not a way just to survive, but to thrive, to heal. I didn't know that I was healing when I was going through the healing process. I was just trying to be a better mom process. I was just trying to be a better mom. That was what motivated me in the first place, and I am forever grateful that I made that choice, and I hope, if you are struggling, if you're listening to this and you're struggling and feeling hopeless, that you will take a look at my other podcast episodes, read my blog. I would highly encourage you to read my book.
Speaker 1:I wrote the book because there was too much information that I had learned to share in one sitting. A lot of times, people would come to me and ask for help and I would try to teach them everything I knew, and it was a little bit like drinking through a fire hose. It was too much information. You know. This is information you know, and and studies and everything that I've gained over 15 years, and trying to share that in one sitting with somebody was was very overwhelming to them, and so that's why I wrote the book. I wrote my book to teach people what I've learned, so that you can find your own path to healing.
Speaker 1:Record another episode and we'll put another episode up next week. I'm really excited to share what I've learned and some of the new insights that I've gained. That will hopefully help each of you on your own path to healing. Until next time, outsiders. Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you're ready to start on your path to wellness with bipolar, go to myupsideofdowncom and get your free mood cycle survival guide four steps to successfully navigate bipolar mood swings. If you're ready for more, check out the map to wellness. Until next time, upsiders.