I'm just wondering if anyone here has a mood disorder (bipolar disorder, MDD, mood disorder NOS, etc.), or something like BPD.

My therapist claims to have "expertise" in mood disorders, but every time I bring something up about my mood, he basically says that I've "chosen" to act that way, or that my moods are something that "normal people experience". For example, I recently tried Adderall for the first time, and it threw me into a horrible manic episode where I had scary hallucinations and I stayed up for 3 days straight without feeling tired. My pdoc was concerned and confirmed that I was indeed in a manic state, and he helped calm me down with some benzos. Well, my therapist said, "Yeah, Adderall doesn't work for everybody. You just can't tolerate it well. It's normal to be that way." I feel like he brushes everything off as being "normal".

Another time (a few months ago), I felt horribly depressed and I bawled right in front of him. He kept insisting that I had a "reason" for being depressed, and he kept asking me what happened to cause me to become depressed. Then he said something like, "Yeah, I was depressed for a few days when my girlfriend broke up with me. I felt my life was directionless." Well, I didn't have a reason for feeling depressed! I have bipolar disorder, so of course there isn't always a trigger! Depression just happens.

Does anyone else have this problem with their therapist?

I sometimes want T to be far more concerned about a mood than she appears too. She doesn't play trumps with emotions. But she does tend to try and normalize them.
I linen it to being in a burning house ams she's just watching. It's not like that at really. I'm not sure what I'm wanting from her?
What reaction. I mean. What could she say? I'm really concerned about you at the moment? I think is like that. But I think I might play up to it too. I'm not sure.
Anyways. Talk about it a bit more with your T. Check that what you think is happening, is.

[captaineo]

Sometimes I feel like I want start a fight in a train because someone pushes me or looks at me funny, in fact in some cases I do push them back and they leave me alone, or I step on their heel. I am in such a bad mood. I hate taking the train. People are so rude and miserable. Where can I find the mood tracker I'd like to check myself Lou

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I have bipolar disorder, and here is the dilimma. Yes, often my moods come from nowhere by nature of bipolar disorder, but then in those cases, what is a therapist to do? Besides sit and commiserate with me about how awful I feel; those times are mostly a matter of perhaps evaluating how severe things are in case I need to contact my pdoc for a med adjustment, perhaps reminding me of strategies to cope safely with this particular episode, but that is about it. On the other hand, one thing I learned was that not every mood change was totally a bipolar episode, and often I was quick to say it was bipolar, it had no reason, it was just happening to me, when in reality it really wasn't always bipolar, there often was a trigger that I wasn't recognizing, and I did have options on how to deal with how I was feeling and what was going on. It was a matter of distinguishing my "normal" mood changes that therapy could help me work through from my bipolar mood episodes that I needed meds to get me through. "Normal" in this sense distinguished my mood changes that were caused by life and triggers and history and environment that I needed to work on in therapy because I could have some control over those if I chose to figure them out and learn healthy coping, from the severe bipolar episodes that were really much less in my control and probably needed medical intervention to get through.

What I discovered was that I had more control over more of my mood changes than I was recognizing. I was blaming bipolar more often than was actually bipolar, and more of my mood changes were "normal" (as in things I could find ways to work through) than they were bipolar.

Perhaps what your therapist is trying to help you see is that you are defaulting to bipolar and abdicating control to "bipolar" in times when you could actually claim some control over "normal" (again, meaning not bipolar) emotions. But first you have to be willing to explore if there really might be a deeper trigger or cause or correlation as to why you are experiencing the feelings you are feeling. I understand how hard it is to distinguish between depression types. So often it feels like it is just happening to me, but I started recognizing that in reality there really was a trigger or there really was something I could look at or work through or actually do to deal with that emotion mess I was in.

I also learned that even when the bipolar disorder was the issue, I had control over the decisions I made in how to cope with an episode. In therapy, when I was stable, we worked on early recognition of symptoms, proactive measures to prevent episodes or lessen the severity of episodes, contingency plans for when those measures weren't working, being aware of things I did that actually set off my episodes or made them worse, Lifestyle changes that improved my level of stability and increased the time between episodes.

[Gavinandnikki]

Originally Posted by bluebicycle

I'm just wondering if anyone here has a mood disorder (bipolar disorder, MDD, mood disorder NOS, etc.), or something like BPD.

My therapist claims to have "expertise" in mood disorders, but every time I bring something up about my mood, he basically says that I've "chosen" to act that way, or that my moods are something that "normal people experience". For example, I recently tried Adderall for the first time, and it threw me into a horrible manic episode where I had scary hallucinations and I stayed up for 3 days straight without feeling tired. My pdoc was concerned and confirmed that I was indeed in a manic state, and he helped calm me down with some benzos. Well, my therapist said, "Yeah, Adderall doesn't work for everybody. You just can't tolerate it well. It's normal to be that way." I feel like he brushes everything off as being "normal".

Another time (a few months ago), I felt horribly depressed and I bawled right in front of him. He kept insisting that I had a "reason" for being depressed, and he kept asking me what happened to cause me to become depressed. Then he said something like, "Yeah, I was depressed for a few days when my girlfriend broke up with me. I felt my life was directionless." Well, I didn't have a reason for feeling depressed! I have bipolar disorder, so of course there isn't always a trigger! Depression just happens.

Does anyone else have this problem with their therapist?

I think your therapist sucks for trying to normalize what, for you, are major problems. Don't know what how attached you are, but I'd be out of there.

I'm sorry.