Hi All!
I’ve posted a couple times and I have been searching the site for some answers to my own issues.
My story: I have been this way (BP) since high school. The only problem was that I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I didn’t know it was normal to be so depressed. I didn’t know it wasn’t normal to be so aggressive, angry, frustrated. I thought it was part of life and that I was just a strong person and more of a loner. I thought the reason I didn’t have friends was that they didn’t measure up to me. That they always failed in the friendship test. And so on… so many of the symptoms, b ut no answer as to why.
I was diagnosed years ago as Bipolar. My brother is Bipolar but his was stage I and he had the hallucinations and the depression, mostly caused by drug abuse and alcohol. In other words his drug use triggered a major episode. So my frame of reference for BiPolar was that, I didn’t know about stages, so I always thought that I couldn’t be BP because I didn’t have the manic stage.
I am very angry now because my Dr diagnosed me as BP Stage II 4 or 5 years ago and never bothered to explain it to me. He just wrote it down, gave me some drugs and sent me on my way. A couple weeks later I felt better and the side effects were bothering me so I stopped taking the medicine and continued on with my life. I didn’t know or realize the hell I was putting my wife and our families through with my anger, outbursts, depression, ugliness and so forth. I just thought I was angry about something and that I needed to let people know how angry I was. Funny, anger seemed to be the way I dealt with all my emotions.
Two weeks ago my wife came to me and said she wanted a divorce. She couldn’t handle living with me anymore. I had alienated her family too much and she couldn’t go on without her family and she couldn’t bring them here because she never knew when I would lose it. The same with her friends. She says she has been “disengaging” from our relationship for a while and that a month and a half ago she decided it was time for a divorce. She started planning her escape route. During this she had her 25th High School reunion. While planning to attend and talking to old high school friends about the event. She hooked up with her high school sweet heart and started talking to him while at work and away from me.
She went to her reunion and met up with him. I don’t think anything physical has happened yet. But the phone calls are every day. She has said things like she can love two people at the same time. She needs time to work this out in her head. That she doesn’t know if she can ever trust me again. That she is thinking of moving back to her home town. I know he is whispering sweet nothings in her ear, something I haven’t done since we were dating. He is giving her the romance she needs and the good feelings she needs over the phone, while I am going crazy here.
All of this has triggered a major episode in me. I have been running around like crazy the past two weeks. I’ve talked to a priest, I’ve started seeing a counselor and finally on Tuesday I went to my Dr. He put me on Symbyax and Xanax. The Xanax he gave me to calm me down as I hadn’t had but maybe 10 hours sleep in two weeks. My mind racing out of control. And the Symbyax to start leveling me off. This is when I found out that he had diagnosed me 4-5 years ago as stage II. Now I am angry at him for not fully explaining to me what stage II was and what the symptoms were. If I would have known I would have stayed on the meds instead of putting my wife and family through hell.
Now that you have the back ground… my questions. Do I try and save my marriage? Do I beg my wife to stay and help me? Do I let her go so she can pursue a life with this other guy? I know I can’t continue to have her here while she is still sneaking off to have conversations with this other guy. We have to sell our house because of financial problems. My question is, should I move out while we sell it? Do I stay? Do I ask her to move out? She can stay with friends until the house is sold and then the money from the house she can use to by herself a new house or move back to her home town. She has friends and relatives here in Texas, while I have no family here. I just don’t know what to do. My emotions are all over the board. She is gone for two weeks out of the country on business and I am climbing the walls. I just don’t know what to do. She keeps saying be patient that she needs time to figure this all out. But how can I be patient? I’m cycling between manic and depressive almost hourly sometimes more often. The Symbyax won’t charge my system for at least another week and while the Xanax is helping me to sleep, making waking time is filled with worry, depression, anxiety, energy, crying, and so forth. What do I do? I am scared and I don’t know how to fix this.
Sorry this is so long but I needed to get it out. Thanks!