Hi,

Today I wanted to talk to you about: The WORST thing you can do about bipolar disorder. And that is NOTHING. That’s right, the worst thing you can do about bipolar disorder is nothing. Even if you do accept that you or your loved one has bipolar disorder (which is hard enough to do in itself), if you do nothing about it, there’s no chance for stability. There are just certain things you MUST do to attain stability with bipolar disorder. You cannot simply do NOTHING!

It’s the same with life. If you graduate with a high school diploma, yet learn nothing else, you’ll never go anywhere in life. I’m not saying you then have to get a college degree, but you still have to learn – you at least have to get trained in a trade, or else you’ll have to work in fast food for the rest of your life. When you get married and want to have children, but learn nothing about being a parent, you will have more problems than you can handle. You at least need to learn something about being a parent to be a good one. You must learn something about children in order to raise them. If you want to be in a healthy relationship, then you have to learn how to be a good partner. If you’ve had bad relationships in the past, then you have to learn from them.

If you do nothing, you’ll just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and you’ll never have a good relationship.

It’s the same with life lessons. If you’ve made bad choices and poor decisions in the past and didn’t learn the lessons you needed to in order to learn from them, then nothing changes. If you do nothing about them, you’ll just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. You need to grow and learn from your mistakes, but if you do nothing, you won’t. There is a saying that goes, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” So, it’s the same with bipolar disorder. If you do nothing, you’ll stay unstable. If you’re a supporter and you do nothing, your loved one will stay unstable, because there’s a lot you do to help them manage their disorder. You may not like the way things are, but if you do nothing to change them, then they’ll just stay the way they are.

You can’t expect them to change by themselves.

Here’s an excerpt from a reading a friend showed me, and I think it relates to what I’m talking about: “…unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.” We can learn a lot from that. For instance, you can’t change the world. You may not even be able to change your circumstances, but you might be able to if you try. But if you do nothing, how will you ever know? You can’t change the fact that you or your loved one has bipolar disorder. But you can change the fact that there is no cure for it just by learning how to manage it. If you do nothing, then the disorder is in control over you. If you do something, then you are in control over it.

You can’t do anything about what’s already happened. You can’t change the past. But you can do something about today. But if you do nothing to change today, it will be just like the past that you can’t do anything about. You can make today better, but not if you do nothing. If you find that your attitude is negative, and you do nothing about it, it will affect everything you do – your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, your reactions, your behavior towards yourself and others.

You can change your attitude if you want to, but not if you do nothing. If you or your loved one with bipolar disorder are depressed and you do nothing about it, you are going to stay depressed.

But you can change that by changing your attitude to a more positive one as well.

You may not be able to change your loved one, but you can change yourself. But if you do nothing, you will still stay the same. And all of us need to be constantly growing, constantly changing, to better ourselves. And this especially relates to bipolar disorder. If you are a supporter, you definitely want your loved one to get better. You want them to be stable, but if they do nothing, they’ll never be stable. If they don’t do the things they need to do to be stable, like if they don’t watch their triggers, they’ll stay unstable. And if you don’t help them to watch for signs and symptoms of an oncoming bipolar episode, then they won’t ever reach stability.

And here is the worst of the worst: If you or your loved one see signs or symptoms of an episode and do nothing – if you don’t report them to the doctor or psychiatrist, say, then your loved one WILL go into that episode. Do NOTHING, and you might lose EVERYTHING.

Well, I have to go!

Your Friend,

Dave