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 66: Beyond the Label: Rethinking Bipolar Disorder
Michelle shares her transformative realization that bipolar disorder isn't a disease but a cluster of symptoms, and how this understanding freed her from decades of believing she had an incurable condition.
• The bipolar diagnosis ends curiosity about why symptoms occur because people believe they've been given a complete answer
• Being told bipolar disorder is lifelong and incurable creates helplessness and a victim mindset
• The chemical imbalance theory of mental illness has been thoroughly debunked by research
• Psychiatric medications cause chemical imbalances rather than correcting them
• Common sources of bipolar symptoms include micronutrient insufficiency, trauma, health factors, medication effects, and unhealthy coping mechanisms
• Focusing on symptoms instead of disorders allows for identifying and treating specific causes
• Recovery is possible by getting curious about symptom sources rather than accepting a diagnosis as destiny
Go to theupsideofbipolar.com 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.
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Bipolar is not a disease. It is a cluster of symptoms, and what this does is it ends curiosity. I stopped being curious about why I was experiencing those symptoms because I believed I had been given an answer. I stopped looking for other answers because I thought I'd been told why I was experiencing these symptoms. And that was not true. Told why I was experiencing these symptoms.
Speaker 2:And that was not true. 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.
Speaker 1:Hey, welcome to the Upside of Bipolar. I am your host, michelle Reitinger, and I am super excited about today's episode. Today, we're talking about a topic. I actually wrote a blog post about it and I teased it in my last episode. I thought I was going to get to it last time and I ended up having plenty to talk about with the review of the last eight months and the things that I had learned, but this topic deserved not just a little bit of time. I think I realized that it was probably better to focus an entire episode on this, because it's a really important topic, and what we're talking about today is how we need to stop referring to bipolar as bipolar disorder and I'm putting that in scare quotes for anybody who's just listening to this on the podcast and can't see what I'm doing. But this is something that I've actually been learning about over time, and it became very crystal clear for me over the past eight months as I was going through some really incredible life experiences with my family and recognizing the damage that that diagnosis actually did to my life not just the treatment, but the diagnosis itself and so that's what we're going to talk about today. So, in order to discuss this. I think it's really important to go back to my initial diagnosis.
Speaker 1:When I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I went to my psychiatrist. I went to the psychiatrist looking for answers. I had been struggling with increasing mood swings over the prior couple of years and I didn't understand what was happening to me. I was, you know. I'd go through periods where I was feeling really happy and hopeful and my mind would be racing racing and I'd be really confident that I was on the right path for my life and have new plans and new ideas. And then I would crash and get really depressed and have a hard time functioning, not want to be around people, and then I would get elevated again and it was starting to get in the way of my life. These mood shifts were becoming more erratic and more intense and it was starting to affect my life and the people around me. And so my parents my aunt and uncle who I lived near, and then my parents really encouraged me to go seek help from a psychiatrist, and so when I went there, I was looking for answers. I needed help understanding what was happening to me and why I was experiencing these symptoms, and I didn't call them symptoms at the time I just was struggling and I wanted to know why I was struggling. And when I was diagnosed I've talked about this in my book and I've talked about it on the podcast I was initially diagnosed with anxiety and depression.
Speaker 1:I was severely, severely depressed when I went in for my initial evaluation, so much so that a lot of the information was provided by my aunt, because I was having a hard time thinking and communicating. And so I was initially diagnosed with major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders both termed disorders and I was told that I would need medication. But medication would help me to function better. And so when I was given that diagnosis, I remember feeling a couple of things. The first thing that I felt was relief. I felt like this huge weight was being lifted off of me. I finally understood why I was having these symptoms, or these mood shifts, these erratic emotional changes. I thought I'd be given an answer to what was going on with me. I also felt some dread. I felt some apprehension about what that meant for the rest of my life. If I had a disorder, if I had, you know, major depressive disorder, and if I had anxiety disorders, did that mean I was broken? You know who was going to want me that way, and so I started taking. They gave me antidepressants and I started taking those and within a few months I started getting manic and when I went back to I had moved.
Speaker 1:During that time I graduated from college and I moved home and my parents had a front row seat to see that the chaos that ensued when I started taking these antidepressants and so I was. I went back to a new psychiatrist in up in Washington where I moved to after graduation, and I was told that I had been misdiagnosed, that the medication by putting me on an antidepressant and it making me manic, I was actually it was actually showing that I actually had bipolar disorder, that it was revealing that I had bipolar disorder and they said they called it bipolar two. And so again I thought, oh, they just misdiagnosed me and gave me the wrong medication. So now I'm going to get the right medication and I'm going to be okay or be able to manage it better. And again it was this feeling of like relief, like getting an answer. It was helpful and I felt like I was being given an answer to the struggle that I was experiencing. And this created a trap for me because over the following decade I proactively went to every psychiatric appointment. I didn't skip. So I didn't skip appointments with my psychiatrist. I moved a few times and each time I moved I would immediately contact and get established with a new psychiatrist so that I could continue my treatment.
Speaker 1:I took every medication that was prescribed to me and I continued to struggle severely, especially after I had children. I had very severe postpartum depression. I would have mood swings. I experienced a lot of symptoms that just made me feel out of control and it started. I experienced a lot of symptoms that that just made me feel out of control and it started to do a lot of damage to my family.
Speaker 1:And because I had this diagnosis of bipolar disorder and I was told it was, it was a lifelong condition, I would have it for the rest of my life it made me feel very helpless and it made me feel very hopeless. I started to get to a point where I thought, well, if, if I'm going to have this forever and things are just getting worse. I had some doctors tell me this was neurodegenerative. It just kind of tended to get worse and worse and worse over time. I thought, if this is kind of like having I can't remember the name of the thing All of a sudden my brain's going, but where your body starts to shake and you start to lose motor control. It thing. All of a sudden my brain's going, but where your body starts to shake and you start to lose motor control, um, it was like you know, it was kind of feeling like that, like if I'm just going to keep getting worse, it's going to ruin everybody's lives. You know, my life isn't worth anything. I started to feel like I wasn't, I didn't have any value in my life because I I was able to do less and less and less, because I just couldn't even manage my own life and my own symptoms, let alone help anybody else, and it started to feel like a trap.
Speaker 1:And then, as I've shared in past podcast episodes and also in my book, I had a period of time where I ended up hospitalized in three different hospitals over two different months. They did electric convulsive therapy on me. I made multiple attempts on my life and I was desperate. I felt totally hopeless, totally desperate. But then I had an experience after my third hospitalization. I was watching my children my two little, my two middle children they were little at the time, four and two playing with each other. And I had this really clear thought come into my head that if I ever successfully ended my life, that it would ruin my daughter's life, that she would believe it was her fault and it would end and it would ruin her life. And that turned everything around for me. Even though I didn't believe my life had value, I knew hers did, and so I knew that I had to find a way to live with my disorder in the best way possible so that I could give her a good chance at life. I was not willing to ruin her life. I would continue suffering for her if that was what was necessary. And thankfully, over the following decade I actually found the path to healing, even though I didn't understand that I was healing.
Speaker 1:At the time when I was going through the healing process I didn't know I was healing because I believed, because I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, that I had a lifelong condition, that there was no cure for it, that I would always have it. But over time I thought I was just learning how to manage it better. I thought I was finding things to help manage my disorder better. I thought I was finding things to help manage my disorder better, and even when I started my blog back in the beginning of 2021, I still believed that I had this condition. I just believed that I had learned how to really manage it well so that I rarely had symptoms, and I wanted to teach other people who had this lifelong disease or condition or disorder. I wanted to teach other people how to manage theirs better too, because I thought if you have it for the rest of your life, let's try to live the healthiest way possible with it.
Speaker 1:It was only when I started learning more about what was actually happening in psychiatry and in the creation of these diagnosis that I started to question what I had been told. The first book in that process was Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. I interviewed him on an earlier podcast. I can link that in the show notes, but that was a really eye-opening book for me. That one helped me to understand that these diagnoses the diagnosis of bipolar disorder was not created once they found a disease. They hadn't identified the etiology. I think it's called etiology the underlying condition. They hadn't identified an underlying condition. They had just created a diagnosis based on a cluster of symptoms and then, over the following decades, the psychiatry started to try and justify their diagnosis. They were looking for a cause for this disorder they had created and when people didn't fit within the parameters of that, over time they expanded the parameters so that they could group people into these diagnostic categories.
Speaker 1:And then I started reading Professor Joanna Moncrief's books. She wrote the Myth of the Chemical Cure. Most recently she wrote Chemically Imbalbalanced, which is a book that was based on. She was a lead researcher in a group that that did analysis of years, decades worth of studies that proved that the chemical imbalance theory is not true. The chemical imbalance theory is not true. It completely debunked the chemical imbalance theory of illness and even now people continue to use that as a justification for the diagnosis. They continue to say that well, we know that bipolar is a chemical imbalance. And now I'm starting to understand. No, it's not. That was a theory that was developed to justify the diagnosis, to justify the category that was created, based solely on symptoms.
Speaker 1:And then last year I read an article in Psychology Today by Jonathan Shedler he's a PhD and the title of the article is A Psychiatric Diagnosis is Not a Disease. And I actually I wrote a little synopsis article in my in my blog if you want to go and read that and I would encourage you to go and actually read his article I've linked that in in the blog post and I'll actually link it in the show notes for this episode. But he talks about how, up until the most recent version of the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Psychiatric Diagnoses, there was a disclaimer at the beginning of the manual or an explanation. I don't know if it's called a disclaimer or an explanation, but there was a designation at the beginning of the manual that said that the diagnosis in these manuals were not identifying underlying conditions. They were just identifying symptom clusters of symptoms, symptom clusters, that's all that they were defining. So anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia all of those diagnoses. They were acknowledging that they are not identifying the underlying mechanism for those diagnoses. They were acknowledging that they are not identifying the underlying mechanism for those diagnoses. They are just identifying a cluster of symptoms and it is not identifying a disease. It's identifying just the symptoms.
Speaker 1:And it would be like going to the doctor If you started running fevers all the time and you went to the doctor and for help and an an explanation and they told you you had fever disorder. That is not an explanation. That is not giving you an answer, it is just an observation. All they are doing is observing a cluster of symptoms and saying you have this cluster of symptoms, and the problem that that creates is that it misleads people into believing they've been given an answer. I went to a psychiatrist looking for an answer when I first went to get diagnosed. I was looking for an answer to understand why these things were happening to me, and I was given an explanation that led me to believe that the underlying cause of my symptoms had been identified. And it wasn't true. Bipolar is not a disease, it is a cluster of symptoms, and what this does is it ends curiosity. I stopped being curious about why I was experiencing those symptoms because I believed I had been given an answer. I stopped looking for him, you know, for other answers, because I thought I'd been told why I was experiencing these symptoms, and that was not true.
Speaker 1:It also fosters helplessness in people when I was getting worse and worse and worse, when I would do things that were triggered by the symptoms I was having. So, for example, I struggled with binge watching television and I didn't understand why I couldn't stop doing it, and it might sound silly to people. I'm not talking about like taking a break over the weekend and binge watching, you know a few episodes of a show or something. I'm talking about weeks upon weeks of from the time I got up until the time I went to bed, watching like 18 seasons of law and order, svu after one move, or all 10 seasons of the office in one sitting, like back to back to back to back to back, and I not doing anything else, not taking care of my family, not taking care of myself. It was, I was.
Speaker 1:That was a coping mechanism that I had developed, or, like the quote unquote bipolar rage. Especially after I had children, I would have these like rageful outbursts that I had no control over and I felt like a terrible person and I didn't know what to do about it. And when I went to the doctor and talked about that, you know they were trying to tweak the medications or whatever, but it was all attributed to my disorder, which made me feel like I had no control over it, like I couldn't do anything about it and I was doing damage to other people. I was doing damage to my husband. I was doing damage in my relationship with him. I was doing damage to my children and I felt like a terrible person and I thought, if I have this disorder and these and I can't don't have any control over these things I need to remove myself from their life so that I don't keep hurting them. The other thing that it does is it creates a victim mindset in people. I experienced this myself, and I've also experienced it through relationships with other people who are struggling with this quote-unquote disorder, where they feel like they can't help it, and so people just need to understand. I see this online all the time, this bringing awareness. People want people to be aware that they have this disorder that they can't do anything about, and so they just need people to excuse their bad behavior.
Speaker 1:There's a television show or a movie I'm not sure if it's a TV show or a movie. I've never actually seen the show itself. I've only seen this one clip of it where Anne Hathaway plays somebody who has bipolar disorder. Her character has bipolar disorder quote unquote and she's having a discussion with somebody that she, I think is a coworker, who she wants to be friends with, and she's trying to describe her bipolar to them. And the reason why this has gone viral on, you know on social media is because so many people feel seen by this, this scene. They feel like it. You know it's a great way to introduce to people what you suffer from.
Speaker 1:And so she was talking. You know she's talking about how you know, sometimes she'll be really happy and and, and you know, elevated and make kind of some bad decisions and then and then all of a sudden she'll get depressed and she won't talk to anybody for a while and I understand from past experience that that would have made me feel very seen when I was going through this, because I felt like I felt helpless, I felt like a victim, like I didn't have any control over it and I wanted I wanted loving relationships in my life, but I didn't have any. I didn't feel like I had any control or any ability to affect the symptoms, to stop myself from doing these things that were compulsive, based on the symptoms I was experiencing with my bipolar disorder. And the issue that we have in this disorder is that it misleads people into believing they've been given an answer and the way that psychiatry has decided to treat this disorder. The best practices, the gold standard for treatment, is psychotropic drugs and this creates a whole nother level of issue for treatment is psychotropic drugs and this creates a whole nother level of issue. So when I talked about at the beginning of this episode, I talked about my experience where I went to the doctor for answers. I went to a psychiatrist for answers and I was first told that I had depression and anxiety and given psychotropic drugs and then, a few months later, as those drugs built up in my system and as my brain adjusted, it became manic and I was told that it had revealed that I had bipolar disorder, when in fact what actually happened was I had iatrogenic symptoms, iatrogenic meaning caused by the drug. The drug itself had triggered mania in me and instead of the doctor understanding and acknowledging whoops, we actually triggered mania in you with this antidepressant. They said that it revealed that I had bipolar disorder. This is a very common source of symptoms for people and it's not just psychotropic drugs Psychotropic drugs are a very common culprit in this area but other medications.
Speaker 1:There's a medication one off the top of my head is called gabapentin. It's a very common drug that's used for a number of different things, but it can cause depression and what will happen is somebody starts taking this drug and they start getting depressed and if they go to the doctor and start talking about their depression symptoms, the doctor does not ask are you taking medication? Most doctors will not do this. They will not ask are you taking any medications and then find out that the side effect of this medication is depression? They will diagnose that person with depression and give them the antidepressants. So they will get diagnosed with major depressive disorder and then given antidepressants.
Speaker 1:Marijuana there is starting to be some. Thankfully there is starting to be some research into the fact that marijuana can trigger psychosis and people. Because of the prevalence of the use of marijuana, it's becoming legal in a lot of states and it's increased use and because of that we are starting to see more and more people presenting with psychosis because of smoking pot and they go to the psychiatrist and are told that they have bipolar disorder and put on drugs for bipolar disorder. There is no acknowledgement that their psychosis was triggered by marijuana and they needed to detox and needed help getting off of this. Another common culprit is ADHD medications. There are a lot of people I know somebody I don't know them personally. I know them through a friend who started taking ADHD medications and started abusing the ADHD medications and triggered psychosis in herself and was then diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Speaker 1:So the medications themselves are causing a chemical imbalance in the brain. I was told for years that the source of my disorder was a chemical imbalance. I've talked about that before. I've talked about it with guests on other podcast episodes. This is not true.
Speaker 1:Professor Moncrief was one of the lead researchers on this research project that spanned 20, I think, over 20 years of research, proving that it had been that this theory of illness, the chemical imbalance theory of illness, had been disproven over and over again. One of the things that was actually discovered and Robert Whitaker talks about this in his book is that not only was there not an underlying chemical imbalance to begin with, but the medications themselves cause a chemical imbalance in the brain. They are not regulating the brain because no underlying condition has ever been identified. What they have done in psychiatry is they created this diagnosis and then they spent a lot of time trying to create drugs. The original, the first generation of psychotropic drugs were actually found by accident. They did not develop them based on an underlying condition. They found them accidentally. They were in use for other purposes and the doctors observed that they impacted people's emotional state, and so they started using them for for psychiatric purposes and then, based on, they would study the mechanism that was causing this and then started developing additional medications that would would have a similar effect. And so we ended up with with a whole bunch of drugs that cause chemical imbalances in the brain that we don't really actually fully understand what they're doing to the brain. They are dysregulating the brain further.
Speaker 1:So the underlying symptoms, the underlying sources of the symptoms, persist, because we have stopped being curious about why somebody is having these symptoms and we are creating more problems for people, which is why people say bipolar disorder cannot be cured. The reason why people say bipolar disorder cannot be cured is the treatment itself is preventing them from healing. We believe we've been given an answer. We're told that we need medication, so we take the medication and we're told all the things that we're told come true. So I was told that bipolar was a chemical imbalance, that it was, you know, it was like diabetes and that medication was like insulin. That is totally false and there was never any justification for it. It was used for marketing medication. And then I was told that it was chronic and incurable and that it was neurodegenerative, that my brain would potentially continue to get worse. All of that started to happen, and so I didn't have any reason to question what I had been told, because everything I was told was happening and it trapped me in this disease. I was trapped in this disorder.
Speaker 1:So people are told they have a disorder, they're told that it's lifelong and incurable, that they have to take medications. The medications change their brain chemistry and they and everything, everything that any symptoms that you experience are all attributed to the medications. So, for example, when somebody comes off the drugs, they go through withdrawal. Example, when somebody comes off the drugs, they go through withdrawal, and those withdrawal symptoms are then attributed to the disease or the disorder, not the medication withdrawal. And I watched this.
Speaker 1:I actually had a really interesting conversation with somebody one time, because a lot of people who have bipolar and are taking medications don't like the medications because they don't like the way they feel, because their brain is not functioning in a normal way. I have this. I felt this way all the time. I didn't dare come off my medications because I was told that that I you know, if I, if I, came off the medications, that you know, I'd end up at the hospital, and so I was afraid of coming off the medications, but I did not like the way that I felt. I only went off the medications when the doctors told me to do it, and I experienced withdrawal every time. Every time I would come off a medication and it was all attributed to my bipolar disorder, but what was actually happening is my brain was withdrawing from a substance that it had become dependent upon.
Speaker 1:So when somebody comes off of medications, one of the things that Professor Moncrief talked about and I think she actually talked about it in the book, but she talked about it in one of the episodes that I interviewed her on Lithium, for example suppresses emotional response. It's like pushing a balloon underwater, and when you take the lithium away, the balloon will rocket back up. If you push a balloon underwater, when you let go of it, it shoots back up higher than it was before, and that is what they would see with medications like lithium. People would take the medication and it would sometimes suppress the symptoms that they were having, and when they would stop taking the medication, the mania and the symptoms that they were having before would come back. With inventions, they would come back worse than they were before and instead of recognizing we created a chemical imbalance and the withdrawal symptoms were intolerable. Maybe we should change the way we withdraw people from these medications. They said oh, you have to be on lithium. Look see, your symptoms came back worse, so you have to be on this drug.
Speaker 1:We need to change the way that we talk about what is actually happening in order to help people heal. We need a paradigm shift here. In my group, in my coaching group, we've actually worked on this. We talk about bipolar symptoms instead of bipolar disorder, and the reason that that differentiation is important is because symptoms have sources and the sources can be treated. When you talk about bipolar disorder, this incurable condition, you feel like there's nothing you can do about it, but when we talk about the symptoms, we can get curious about what's causing the symptoms and then use the research-based treatments that actually treat those symptoms so that you can heal. When we talk about the sources of the symptoms, there are some main sources. There's still ongoing research trying to help us understand all the different potential sources for symptoms, but there is adequate research now that has helped us to understand.
Speaker 1:Micronutrient insufficiency is a really big one. I've got podcast episodes where I interviewed like Dr Bonnie Kaplan, who was wrote the better brain, and she is one of the pioneers in this field of research that helped us understand that micronutrient insufficiency can lead to symptoms like bipolar symptoms, you know, mania and depression. It can lead to symptoms of ADHD. It can lead to symptoms of, you know, of anxiety. So micronutrient, micronutrient insufficiency, is a very common source of symptoms.
Speaker 1:Trauma is also a very common source of symptoms and it's interesting because very severe trauma can actually lead to conditions like, like schizophrenia. They talk about this like it's some kind of brain disorder, when in fact it is the brain's defense mechanism for severe trauma. And there's a woman that I've, you know, I've read her book where she, when you read the book and you see the extreme trauma that she was raised in and that she experienced throughout her childhood and teenage years, it is no wonder that her brain became dysfunctional and she was able to heal because she got curious about what was causing her symptoms. So unhealed trauma can lead to depression, it can lead to anxiety, it can lead to anxiety, it can lead to mania and psychosis. And so if you learn how to identify and heal that unhealed trauma, you can resolve the source of those symptoms Health factors.
Speaker 1:This is a big one that needs to be talked about more, because when somebody is experiencing things like hypothyroidism so when somebody's thyroid isn't functioning in a healthy way that can lead to depression symptoms, and what often will happen is somebody will get diagnosed with depression and put on an antidepressants, when what needs to be addressed is the underlying health factor. What needs to be addressed is the underlying health factor. The fact that their body is not functioning in a healthy way is leading to mental symptoms, and we need to not diagnose it as major depressive disorder and give them psychotropic drugs. We need to address the underlying health issue that is leading to these mental health issues. Drugs, both illicit and prescription and I talked about this probably a little more than I meant to earlier in the episode. One of the underlying sources of my symptoms was iatrogenic. It was drug-induced my psychosis.
Speaker 1:When I was in the hospital that changed my bipolar diagnosis from bipolar 2 to bipolar 1, I had electroconvulsive therapy on me. So I was in the hospital severely depressed. I was so severely depressed I was in a locked ward because I was a danger to myself. So I was in a locked ward for a week and then they, the doctors, decided to do electroconvulsive therapy on me and I wasn't taking I don't know if I was taking any medication on that at that time so they withdrew the drugs and then shocked my brain and within a few treatments I became psychotic. And instead of saying, oh man, we cause psychosis with taking away the drugs and doing electric electroconvulsive therapy on you, they changed my diagnosis from bipolar two to bipolar one, so now I had a documented psychotic episode and so they could change my diagnosis to bipolar one.
Speaker 1:You know the medications themselves. So medications themselves and we talked about marijuana being an illicit drug that is another source of you know drugs. Different types of drugs can cause a chemical imbalance in your brain. They affect your brain function and that creates symptoms. And so if you resolve that, if you heal the brain and heal it from the effects of the medications, you can heal those symptoms. You can heal the underlying source of those symptoms. We also see people who have developed unhealthy thought and behavior patterns and unhealthy coping mechanisms that then can trigger symptoms. So all of these sources of symptoms can be treated and resolved, and which is why we need to call, we need to refer to this experience that some people are having these symptoms, that people are having as bipolar symptoms, not bipolar disorder. Symptoms that people are having as bipolar symptoms, not bipolar disorder.
Speaker 1:When you experience these symptoms you do not have, they are not identifying an underlying cause. A diagnosis of bipolar disorder does not tell you what you are suffering from. It just is an observation of the symptoms. I want to encourage people to change the way that you talk about this. We do this in my coaching group all the time. We talk about it pretty consistently because, especially when somebody has been in treatment for 20 years, like I was, you know, from 1998 until 2023, 2022, I still believed that I had bipolar disorder and that it was an incurable condition that I would have for the rest of my life bipolar disorder and that it was an incurable condition that I would have for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1:Once I started understanding that that's not true, that I had symptoms and I, as I identified and healed the underlying sources of the symptoms, they resolved and that has led to I don't experience these symptoms anymore. I was having a conversation yesterday with somebody and she asked me pretty incredulously like you really don't experience symptoms anymore? I was having a conversation yesterday with somebody and she asked me pretty incredulously, like you really don't experience symptoms anymore. And I told her no, I said I have normal emotional responses to life circumstances. You know we've been through a lot in the past five years and thankfully, because I have done so much work healing, I was able to handle those situations in a healthy way.
Speaker 1:I had normal emotional responses to things. When we lost our son, our oldest son, to suicide, I had a normal emotional response. I was devastated by the experience. I was heartbroken. I went through all of the grief, the grief cycle you know anger, rage, bargaining, all of those things. I had a normal, healthy emotional response to a tragedy. When my husband lost his job, I had normal emotional responses to the stressors. I you know when I, when, when I was under all that stress, I talked about the last episode. You know we had all of these stressors going on. I had normal emotional responses to those things and because of all the work that I had done, I had tools in place that helped me to manage things effectively so that my emotional responses didn't get out of control.
Speaker 1:It is possible to recover and heal from bipolar symptoms if you identify the source of the symptoms. Something that we talk about in our coaching group regularly is that we need to get curious instead of judging, making choices based on these compulsions from the symptoms. No, we don't want to keep doing those things, but instead of judging ourselves as broken or a bad person you know low moral character get curious about what is causing that compulsion. Get curious about what is causing the symptom, about the source of the symptoms. Identify the source and then treat it with research-based integrated treatment methods. You can heal.
Speaker 1:If you have any questions about this, I know this is a lot of information and I would love to hear from you, so let me know if you have any questions or insights. I will make sure I go through and link all of the resources that I've talked about so that you can go do this research for yourself and learn more about it yourself. It took me a long time and a lot of research to change the way that my mind thought about these things, because I was so thoroughly convinced that bipolar disorder was a disease, that it was an incurable condition, and it took a long time and a lot of research for me to understand that that's not true, and so I encourage you to learn more about this. If you have questions, let me know, look at the resources that I link in the podcast episode and then let me know what you think. And this is an important step on the path to healing is is understanding what you're actually struggling with in the first place. All right, until next time, upsiders.
Speaker 2: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.