The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness

EP 67: Beyond Labels: How Your Story Holds the Key to Recovery

• Michelle Baughman Reittinger

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Understanding the true source of bipolar symptoms requires becoming a detective in your own life rather than accepting diagnosis as the final answer. Approaching symptoms with curiosity instead of judgment allows us to identify what's really happening beneath the surface and find effective paths to healing.

• Diagnoses are observations of symptom clusters, not explanations for why you have symptoms
• Breaking symptoms into specific experiences rather than broad categories reveals important clues
• Looking at circumstances surrounding symptom onset helps identify potential triggers and causes
• Coping mechanisms like binge-watching or substance use are clues about underlying distress, not character flaws
• Tracking patterns in symptoms can reveal connections that aren't obvious when living with them daily
• Approaching trauma responses with curiosity helps identify what needs healing
• Medication side effects or withdrawal can create symptoms that complicate the picture
• Writing your detailed story in a dedicated notebook helps uncover the true sources of symptoms

Grab a composition notebook and start writing your story, beginning with your earliest memories of symptoms. Become a detective in your own life so you can uncover the true sources of your symptoms, treat them with integrated research-based approaches, and heal.


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SPEAKER_00:

It's possible for somebody to develop these addictions based on, you know, curiosity as a teenager. You know, you're you're at a party, other people are drinking, you want to see what it's like, and that could lead to an addiction. But it's also very common for people to do these things to numb themselves. I've heard it called self-medication. And you're trying to escape feelings that feel uncomfortable to you, or emotions or you know, other symptoms. And so those, instead of looking at these things with judgment, look at them with curiosity. Write it down in your story and start to look at circumstances that would trigger a desire to do these things. And those things can be clues that can help you then work through and identify underlying issues that need to be treated. Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar, where we uncover the true sources of bipolar symptoms and share proven tools for recovery. I'm your host, Michelle Reitinger, number one international best-selling author of the Upside of Bipolar Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. In this podcast, I bring you solo insights from my journey and guest interviews with leading researchers and experts. Join us to transform chaos into hope and reclaim your life. Let's heal together. Each of these episodes, the last couple episodes, have kind of naturally progressed into the next one. And last week we talked about how the bipolar diagnosis is actually kind of a problem because it makes you think that you have been given an answer to why you have the symptoms, when in fact, all you have been given is an observation that you have a certain cluster of symptoms. And I want to talk a little bit more about that process and then how you can start identifying symptoms in a way that helps you to become a detective in your life rather than a victim. And that can lead to healing. So when I was first diagnosed, the very first time, I went in and filled pages and pages and pages out of questions that were all related to symptoms. Even the questions about family history were related to symptoms. And the whole point of the exercise was to try to gain as much information about the symptoms that I was having so that they could identify the bucket to put me in. What's the cluster of symptoms that I was experiencing so that they could then give me a diagnosis? And one of the things that that taught me to do was to dump symptoms into buckets, to identify symptoms that I was experiencing as categories, instead of looking at symptoms with any kind of curiosity and wondering why the why I had those symptoms. You think you've been told why you have the symptoms, which is not the case. You've just been told that you have these symptoms. A diagnosis is just an observation. And what should have happened, and what I hope will happen in the future, is that when you go in, it is useful to learn about the symptoms within the context of further curiosity. So if you look at somebody's story and start identifying the symptoms, you can then ask what are the circumstances around that? And when you look at family history, if there are, if there is a history of it that might indicate, you know, an underlying source of symptoms that is hereditary. Not a chemical imbalance, that's been completely debunked, but things like micronutrient insufficiency or generational trauma is another thing that gets passed down from generation to generation. And so what we need to do, if you want to start the path to healing, one of the really important beginning steps of that process is learning how to tell your story. And within that process, learning how to look for specific things within your story so that you know what you need to treat, so that you know how to identify things as these are symptoms. This is a symptom of the brain in distress, this is a symptom of the body missing something. And so I want to talk a little bit today about what that looks like, how you can start writing your story down and telling your story in a way that will lead to further curiosity, help you become a detective in your own life, and look for clues about why you're experiencing these symptoms that can then lead to you to identifying the effective tools and resources that can treat the underlying source of the symptoms so that you can heal and recover. So the first thing that I want to talk about is how important it is not to lump symptoms into categories. We have been trained to look at these symptom clusters as categories. We talk about depression and we talk about mania and we talk about anxiety as categories. And one of the things that's interesting about that when we talk about these in these categories is we think a lot of times that when we hear somebody talk about depression, that they're experiencing the same thing we do because we are not breaking out the specific symptoms. We're just talking about the category of depression or the category of mania or the category of anxiety. I'll give you some examples from my own story. So let's do that. That's probably the easiest way. I'll give you some actual examples. So when I started my blog back in 2021, I didn't actually know I was healing still at the time. I thought I had just learned how to manage my bipolar really well. I still believed that bipolar was incurable. And so I was trying to tell my story and talk about the things that I had learned to manage these symptoms that I was experiencing. And the more that I would write my story and the more that I would do research and learn about tools, I started connecting dots. I started recognizing, like when I was the first time I experienced suicidal ideation was when I was in junior high. And the, and I, as I thought through, you know, the experiences that led to that point, it became very clear that the reason I was feeling depressed was not because I had, and and feeling the suicidal ideation and the embarrassment and the you know, the bad feelings that led to that were not because I had some kind of disease. It was because I had been severely bullied for four years up to that point. I had lived in four, you know, we had gone, I had gone to four different schools. Each school, I had started off, you know, starting to make some friends. And then within about a month of starting school, they would find a very mean, very public way of ostracizing me, telling me they didn't want to be my friend anymore. And then I would just become a social pariah from that point forward for the next rest of the year, and then I would move to a new school and the whole process would start over again. So by the time I was in seventh grade, I was desperate. I I felt I felt like there was something fundamentally wrong with me. And I kept trying to change myself and nothing was getting better. And I got to the point where I was severely depressed and I didn't want to live anymore. And so if if I if I looked at that experience, if I had gone to a psychiatrist, I'm very grateful actually back in those days that that wasn't something that was very common. Because if I had gone to a psychiatrist at that point, I probably would have been put on psychotropic medications as a teenager. That wasn't what I needed. What I needed was somebody to listen to me and to help me because I was so lonely. I was so, I felt like there was something fundamentally wrong with me because nobody wanted to be my friend. When if if you go forward, one of the things that came out of that, I had I developed coping mechanisms that progressed through teenage years and into young adult years that made me vulnerable to an unhealthy marriage. And I ended up in a marriage that was abusive. And I didn't talk to anybody about what I was going through in my marriage. And when I finally got the courage to leave, I didn't ever want to talk to anybody about it. I was so filled with embarrassment and shame for the things that I had been through in my marriage that I just wanted to hide it. I didn't want to talk to anybody about it. I wanted to move on with my life and pretend like it never happened. And I moved to another state. I, you know, got back into college. And over time, that suppressed trauma started manifesting with depression symptoms. I would go for long periods of time when I would not want to be around people. I would develop coping mechanisms like binge watching television shows and movies. Um, and and then I would start to get an elevated mood. My mind would start to work really rapidly, and I would get big new ideas and think that I had a new plan for my life and tell everybody about it. And this pattern developed uh out of this unprocessed trauma that I was had experienced. And as I started to tell this story more and more over time, I started to understand better these underlying sources of symptoms. I could, I could start to connect the dots about when these symptoms started occurring and connect it back to the experience that I had. So that's why it is so important. Number one, as you tell your story, is you start to write your story out, and you can start with an outline. You can kind of outline, um, and it's it is useful to start when symptoms occur and then kind of work backwards sometimes. But um, it is important to make sure that you don't generalize categories because you need to look at the specific symptoms you're experiencing. So, for example, um, anxiety is a very broad category that can lump a whole bunch of different kinds of symptoms into one category that starts to become meaningless because that category is so broad. For me, anxiety started to look like a really intense tightness in my chest. My I felt like there was a vice around my chest. And I I felt like I was, I was constantly yawning and I couldn't get enough air in my chest. I didn't, I even went a few times and got tested for asthma because I had such a hard time getting a full breath of air that I thought maybe I had a lung problem. And it was important to make sure that I recognized those symptoms for what they were. I don't want to talk about it generally as anxiety. Those are those are symptoms that could be called anxiety, but they occurred when my body felt unsafe, when I felt unsafe. And so it was something that over time, as I started to understand, I started to break down those symptoms and started to understand that those symptoms were an indication that my body felt unsafe, that my brain felt unsafe. Then I could look around me at what had what was going on when I started to feel those symptoms and start to look for clues about what led to the symptoms. The next thing that's really important to do as you're as you're doing this. So the first thing that I'm I wanted to mention is as you tell this story, don't lump these things into categories. Don't say I felt depressed or I felt uh I still struggle with that. But I if you say I felt and if you do, you say I started to feel depressed, I want you to then break that down. What did that look like? I struggled to get out of bed in the morning. I had a hard time wanting to be around people. I everything felt like work. You know, I felt really hard to, you know, to just get up and I didn't want to take a shower. I want you to talk about the specific breakdown what that looked like because there are clues within those categories. The next thing that's important as you're doing this is, and I talked about this a little bit, is I want you to look for circumstances. Um, and that can be um circumstances of abuse, neglect, it can be circumstances of major life events, major changes in your life. One of the problems we created by by categorizing these, you know, taking these symptoms and just lumping them into buckets and then giving them a name is it gives us an idea that we have a disease when there can be really, you know, this could be in uh at the way that your mind and your body are responding to traumatic events in your life. Um, were there changes in your environment? Were there changes in uh in your eating habits? One of the things that's really interesting is the onset of symptoms for a lot of people occur in the young adult years when there is a lot of change. There's there is physical change within our bodies, there is environmental change. You know, people are moving away from home. There's there are, you know, you're all of a sudden you've been going to school. Most people are, you know, if you're in public school, you've been going to school for 12 years and then all of a sudden it ends. And now you're supposed to figure out what you're doing for the rest of your life, and there's a lot of pressure. Um, you may be moving away from home for the first time, and you're in charge of your nutrition, and all of a sudden your nutrition goes in the toilet because all you know how to do is bake potatoes and cook ramen. So it's important to look at when some you know symptoms start to occur and what the circumstances are that are surrounding the onset of your symptoms. The next thing that's important to look at is to look at coping mechanisms. And coping mechanisms don't always, it's not always easy to understand that that's what they are. I've talked a lot about in different episodes, I've talked about my one of my coping mechanisms was binge watching. I mentioned a little bit earlier. When I was growing up, we we weren't allowed to watch TV a lot. And so television, there was a there was a stigma around TV. My mom didn't like television, she didn't like a lot of the programming on TVs. And so we didn't watch TV very much when I was growing up. So there were some ideas that I had in my head about television that made me feel like if I watched a lot of TV, that I was doing something wrong. And so that became a coping mechanism for me because it was a way for my brain to escape that was um it was for whatever reason that's what I gravitated towards. So it was, I had a very vivid imagination when I was growing up. And so when I would watch TV or movies, my brain would like escape into that alternate reality. And for whatever reason, that was what my brain sought out. So as I got into my young adult years and I was really struggling, I would binge watch television or binge watch movies. And it was a coping mechanism, but as but I didn't recognize that that's what it was because I thought I just didn't have any self-control. And so for years, I spent a lot of time trying to stop myself from this bad habit in my mind that I had. I even went to addiction recovery programs. Um, I bought a lockbox to put on the power cord to prevent myself from being able to watch television. I was doing all these things to try and stop the behavior, not understanding that that behavior was actually a clue. It wasn't until I met with a therapist, I was in a time period when I was feeling a lot of depression and stress and worry, probably partly because I was processing trauma. And I was binge watching shows again. And I went to my therapist very frustrated one day, you know, upset that I'm like, I don't know, I have no self-control. You know, I just can't, I can't stop myself. You know, I'm watching TV again. And and she asked me, what need are you trying to meet? And I remember her when she asked me the question, I'm like, what? And she she repeated the question, what need are you trying to fill for your brain or your body or your or your emotions? What what need are you trying to meet? And I said, I'm not trying to meet a need. I, you know, I have no self-control. And she repeated the question again, just very calmly, but she said, What need are you trying to meet? And and after the third time her asking me, I stopped to think about it and I thought, I don't know. And so that was a clue that helped us to start recognizing that that behavior that I engaged in was an indication that I was feeling distress. Just like I talked about earlier, like the physical symptoms of anxiety for me, the the test chite, the chest tightening, the you know, difficulty breathing was was an indication that I was feeling distressed. So was the binge watching. This coping mechanism was an indication that I was feeling internal turmoil or distress. And that would give me pause, and then we could take a look around and see what was going on in my life at the time that was making me feel this stress, feel distraught, feel like I needed to escape. And then we could work through, you know, working through what's going on that needs to be healed. What is what is my body asking for? What is my mind asking for that needs to be healed? And some people will have this will manifest some people in addictions to you know harmful substances. So alcoholism, um, drugs. And this is a very common thing when people go through addiction recovery programs, they have to figure out what the triggers are for them, what's causing them to feel like they need to cope or escape. And I do believe that it's possible for somebody to develop these addictions based on curiosity as a teenager. You know, you're you're at a party, other people are drinking, you want to see what it's like, and that could lead to an addiction. But it's also very common for people to do these things to numb themselves. I've heard it called self-medication. And you're trying to escape feelings that feel uncomfortable to you or emotions or you know, other symptoms. And so those instead of looking at these things with judgment, look at them with curiosity. Write it down in your story and start to look at circumstances that would trigger a desire to do these things. And those things can be clues that can help you then work through and identify underlying, you know, underlying issues that need to be treated. The next thing to look for is um patterns in in your symptoms. So one of the things we do in my program is we start tracking. We use a mood tracking app called Bearable. I've talked about that in my book and I talk about it on my blog. Um, and it's actually one of the tools that we use as part of developing the mood cycle survival guide. But it's really important to start seeing patterns. When you live with these symptoms for your whole life or long periods of time in your life, um, these patterns feel normal and so you don't recognize them. And so as you start tracking your symptoms in a mood tracking app, you can start to see patterns. You can start to see connections, and that can reveal information to you that can be useful in the healing process. Um, one of the other things that that is really helpful when you're going uh when you're learning about how to how to tell your story for yourself or you know, write things down and start to become a detective in your story is to start to understand what the symptoms are meaning. So I am a huge proponent that everybody should be taking micronutrients. One of the main reasons, based on the research that I've done, is so many people are being diagnosed with with mental health issues now, is because of the serious issues with the nutrition in our foods and in our diets, and people's brains aren't getting what they need to function in a healthy way. And this peels back one of the layers of symptoms for people, but then you have to start looking for clues within the other symptoms that you experience. We have to stop thinking that there is a single answer to all of our problems. Um, even when people talk about like the ketogenic diet or, you know, even micronutrients, they'll say, Well, I tried micronutrients, but I still experience symptoms. And I always, you know, a lot of times this is in forums where I don't have an opportunity to respond, um, like on social media, but or where it doesn't feel kind to respond because I don't want them to feel like I'm attacking them or just discounting what they've done. But the problem is that it it dismisses all of the other factors that can lead to symptoms. And and it it's this idea that we have developed that there is a magic pill that's going to solve all the problems. So once you start getting micronutrients into your body and your brain starts to function in a healthier way, then you can start to go to work on the other sources of symptoms that you experience. And the more that you begin to look at your story with curiosity instead of judgment, then you can start to uncover what's actually happening for you. So, what I mean by that is um coping mechanisms. We have a tendency to judge ourselves because usually coping mechanisms that are, you know, if we develop unhealthy coping mechanisms, they're not behaviors that we want to keep doing because they're not healthy for us. And in which is why we call, you know, I refer to them as unhealthy coping mechanisms. But what's happened is your brain is trying to protect you, it's trying to help you. And so it has developed coping mechanisms in that effort. And so instead of judging ourselves and saying I'm a bad person because I do this thing, ask with curiosity, like my therapist did, what need are you trying to fill? Why, why do I have this compulsion to do this thing? Why am I struggling with this behavior? And what is underneath it? Um, the same thing with the symptoms that we experience. You know, I the symptoms of anxiety, uh like, you know, difficulty breathing or tightness in your chest or numbness, tingling that you experience, um, a desire to hide from people, not wanting to be around other people, those kinds of things. Those are clues. And instead of instead of looking at myself at yourself with judgment and judging, judging yourself for feeling these ways, ask why do why do I feel that way? What makes me feel unsafe in this situation? What is the trigger that's happening? Um, I it was really helpful when I finally started to start to recognize these as trauma responses. I had an experience, um, I can't remember how many years ago. This was, it was after I started my blog. Um, and I was had been, I was starting to understand, you know, how to how to look at my symptoms with curiosity and how to look for clues in my symptoms. And I had somebody attack me online uh and say some really awful things to me about what I was doing, telling me that I was dangerous and that I, you know, I was gonna hurt people, and which is the opposite of what I'm trained to do. I I am doing this because I care about people that are struggling with these things. I offer the things that I wish somebody had helped me with. And so it really hurt me to have this person saying these awful things to me. But more than that, I started having a trauma response to it. And I started recognizing a trauma response for me was this anxiety response. I was, I was feeling unsafe. So my chest got really tight. I felt kind of tingling all over my body like I was, like I was getting ready for a fight. Um, I couldn't, I was having a hard time breathing. And the logical part of my brain was still active. And it was like, why do I care about what this person says about me? But I started looking, and because I had started training myself to look at symptoms with curiosity, I was thinking, okay, why this is a trauma response. Why am I feeling triggered? Why am I feeling traumatized by what somebody, some random person on the internet is saying to me? I I don't know that person and I don't really care that they don't like me or that they're saying those things. I know they're not true, but my body is feeling unsafe. So I wrote everything down. This is what I'm talking about. I got I have a journal that was dedicated to this, to what I, you know, telling my story. And I wrote everything down. I wrote all the circumstances down. I wrote down all of the symptoms, not the I didn't say I felt anxious. I said I my chest got tight. My whole body was like tingling with this, like feeling like I needed to fight somebody. Um, my, my, I was having a really hard time breathing. I kept yawning and feeling like I couldn't get enough air, oxygen in my lungs. And I wrote everything down. And then I took it to my therapist and I said, All right, I have something I need help with because I don't know why this situation triggered this response. And because I had so many details about the situation and I had written down all this information about my symptoms, my therapist and I were able to do some trauma work. And with her, I was doing EMDR, and it helped me to go back and figure out that what this was triggering was unhealed trauma for my hospitalization. And so that was a clue that led to the underlying source of the symptoms that then was I was able to resolve through doing SIME and DR with her and some processing. And now people attack me all the time online, and it doesn't trigger anything because I've resolved the source of the symptoms. Um, one of the other things that is really important to pay attention to are symptoms that occurred with in connection with medications. We have a tendency to look at ourselves as the broken person and you know, that it's chemical in our brain or that we have somehow, you know, that we somehow have something wrong with us. And often if if you have started treatment in for, you know, for uh psychiatric, any kind of psychiatric treatment, that that water gets muddied because then you start adding in the symptoms that come from the use of the psychotropic drugs that are changing your brain chemistry. So when you're writing your story, it's really important to include in that story when you, if you did have psychiatric drug treatment, what the treatments were, what what the you know, medications, if you can remember. I don't remember a lot of the names of the medications that I took. Um, but I do remember I was on antidepressants, I was on mood stabilizers, you know, I had electroconvulsive therapy. So those are all part of the story because there are clues in there. Um, and and when I was, when I looked back, I was able to start seeing like the onset of sleep issues occurred after I started taking psychotropic medications. Um I did have, I did have some, they were different kinds of sleep issues. So I did have some sleep issues prior to my diagnosis because I would go through periods where I was very tired, you know, when I was, when I was had low mood, and and then I would go through times when I was elevated, and I did have a few times when I would stay up all night, you know, because I just couldn't sleep because my brain wouldn't shut off. But it was different than the experiences that I had when I was on medication. And that's why it's so important to call out specific symptoms because they were different symptoms. They some of them kind of felt the same, but they were different, and there were nuances about those symptoms that I was able to identify that were actually related to the medications I was taking. So um, and the reason that that's important is because that's another clue. If some of the symptoms that you're experiencing have to do with drug withdrawal or side effects from medications, there are specific treatments that can be utilized to help heal those underlying sources of symptoms. So, all of this to say it is really important for you to start writing your own story. And I encourage people, I'm actually going to give you an assignment. I don't think I've ever done that on this podcast, but I'm gonna give my audience an assignment. I want to invite you to get a cheap composition notebook for yourself. And I want you to dedicate this to your story. And I don't, I don't mean you have to publish a book, but it's really important for you to write down these things. Don't keep them rolling around in your head. Um, if you like to type instead of write, you can do that. Uh, I there is some research that shows that there is a difference, a different part of your brain that is engaged when you're actually physically writing than typing. So do with that what you will. But I would encourage you, if you can, to begin writing. And you don't have to do it all in one setting. In fact, this is probably going to take time. You know, it'll it'll happen over time because it at the beginning, you may not know what to what you're looking for. And it may just be a broad, a broad story that you write for yourself. But I want you to have a dedicated notebook that you don't necessarily share with anybody because I don't want you to edit what goes in that notebook. But I want you to start writing your story. Begin with the earliest time that you remember feeling any kind of symptoms, and maybe go back even a little bit further if there is or if you think there might be clues earlier in your life. Um, I didn't have symptoms when I was in fourth grade, but those the clues as to what the source of the symptoms were started in fourth grade. The, you know, the pretty severe bullying and ostraciz, you know, social ostracis, ostracization that I experienced starting in fourth grade was were the things that led up to the suicidal thoughts when I was in seventh grade. And so I want you to just start writing your story and look for clues. Become a detective in your own life. The more effective you become at this, the more you're gonna be able to uncover the underlying sources of your symptoms. And then as you uncover the underlying sources of your symptoms, if you have more information to work with, it's gonna make it easier to develop, you know, to identify which tools are gonna be most effective in helping you to address the underlying sources of your symptoms so that you can heal and recover. I hope that this has been helpful to you. I would really love to hear from you. If you would like to tell me your story, send me a message. I know that you can comment on the pod on the blog or on this podcast. Um, you can send me an email. If you go on my website, there's a contact link on there. You can send me An email that I would love to hear from you. I'd love to hear about your story. Let's begin the healing process. Become a detective in your own life so that you can uncover the true sources of your symptoms, treat them with an integrated research-based treatment, and you can heal. Until next time, Upsiders. Thanks for joining me on the Upside of Bipolar. Your journey to recovery matters, and I'm grateful you're here. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. If you're ready to dive deeper, grab my book, The Upside of Bipolar: Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. If you're ready to heal your symptoms, join my monthly membership, The Upsiders Tribe, to transform chaos into hope. Until next time, Upsiders.