Hi,
I wanted to send out a quick email message about the Divorce course I sent out the other day.
It was at:
http://www.bipolarsupporter.com/specialoffer/divorce
Like always when I talk about my divorce information, a bunch of people email and basically ask:
“Hey, Dave, I saw you sent out
something in regards to preventing
a divorce. Did you mean getting a divorce?”
Let me explain, like I have done before.
It was the oddest thing. A few years ago, I use to get people getting my Bipolar Supporter Master Course and
using the f.ree consultation to talk about how to PREVENT a divorce from their loved one.
When people would schedule I was like, “hey, I am NOT a lawyer and can’t help you get a divorce.”
They were like, “I am not looking to get a divorce from my spouse I want to prevent one.”
I started to slowly discover this amazing thing.
People with bipolar disorder were going into manic episodes and coming home one day and saying, “I am getting a divorce.”
Many of the supporters or spouses had 2 or 3 kids and were devastated.
In my consultations I gave the #1non legal key tip which is get the person into proper treatment so they will be thinking right and not want a divorce.
But many people’s spouses were away and not going into proper treatment so these supporters or spouses needed to know EVERYTHING to prevent or stop a divorce from happening when a spouse has bipolar disorder.
So I actually went out spoke with lawyers, judges, marriage counselors, people with bipolar disorder, people who were spouses of people who wanted a divorce with bipolar disorder and prevented or stopped them and put the research all together.
If you need help PREVENTING a divorce from someone with bipolar disorder, please take a look at my special offer at:
http://www.bipolarsupporter.com/specialoffer/divorce
See you tomorrow.
Dave
4/9/09
Dear David:
About two months ago I saw the most realistic and compassionate film about bipolar disorder. It was the 1923 silent film Stella Dallas. Stella has bipolar disorder and makes huge sacrifices for her daughter when she realizes that her daughter will be prejudiced against and socially and economically ostracized as Stella is because of Stella’s bipolar disorder Remember this is the 1920s and a woman’s main way to get ahead in society was to make a “good” marriage which required that she have a “good” family background (which required no evidence of mental illness in the family).
This compassionate characterizaton of Stella has no relationship to the later radio soap opera Stella Dallas.
The movie was based on the novel Stella Dallas written by the writer Olive Prouty (way ahead of her time on psychological and psychiatric issues) who more than thirty years later through her foundation took a chance on supporting and became a friend of the writer/poet Sylvia Plath who probably also suffered from bipolar disorder.
I saw this film as a rennovated print in an art cinema (if you are from New Jersey maybe you have heard of the Walter Reade Cinema, the cinema in the Lincon Center complex)complete with piano accompaniment. I know that it may be very difficult to find the film but the original book is available cheaply on Amazon, entitled Stella Dallas. As art it is not great literature by any means but it says some very important things and is probably one of the first accurate (with perhaps the exception of Tolstoy’s Anna Kareina) and compassionate portrayal of someone with bipolar disorder. It will only take a couple of hours to read and it is very moving.
Sharon Long
My son is at risk for the bipolar family gene from expressing itself. He already has survived so much – with heart surgeries, lung disease, stroke, adrenal insufficiency and crises, primary immune deficiency etc. But it is the bipolar/ schizophrenia gene that most devastates me. He has only a 20% chance of that gene expressing itself if he lives in a stable calm home without chaos. Also, a stable calm home without chaos keeps his heart rhythm healthy, keeps him off of oxygen from constant reactive airways from stress, and helps his immune system, and lessens the need for medication for seizures (he has fewer seizures) and asthma (which is also stress induced in him). But I cannot get my husband to understand how important this is to our son’s health and well being and future life. My husband wants our son to have bipolar!! He wants our son to learn to abuse people too!! My son has an 80% chance of expressing that gene if the environment is not calm and his life is filled with stress. This is what I have been told by professionals. I do agree that it is better to keep a marriage intact and for the parent to be on medication and taking the illness seriously but that has not been my experience. I have been more careful about how I portray bipolar/ schiozphrenia to my son, who is a teenager, now that I know he has this looming chance of having it too.
18 months ago I posted above. Notice there is an x in front of family member now. We brought our bipolar family member home from a shelter/boarding home. It took my son and I alot of trust and strength to do this after 2.9 months. We did everything your posts suggested, the books suggested and we tried very hard to be a family. The problem was the bipolar family member was not behaving in healthy ways (drinking, abusing, shifting moods several times a day, lying etc et al) and he was reported for abusing our son. Then things got even worse and I had to call the police after we were threatened and he was seemingly delusional. The police came and he was able to be “normal” so they could not take him to the psych hospital they took him to jail. I dismissed charges as there was no reason to have a trial which he demanded. I even have a tape from that night so he would have gone to jail for a very long time. He has no remorse for his behavior or threats and no empathy about how that has now caused my son and myself further complex post trauma. We had to stop all contact for safety. Soon after dismissing the charges against him he started writing threats and implied threats. The system is very broken, our stability from going through all of this is fragile, and my son started treatment for bipolar depression soon after his father was living at home. So now we are x family members because instead of having good care and a psychiatrist that is competent in bipolar treatment, and taking medications that allow for stability and recovery, he wanted the whole relationship dissolved. So it is. No contact. And my son and I are just trying to keep ourselves safe from his threats of violence. It is a very sad scenario. We had hoped that we could be a family for many years to come, but bipolar + co-morbidities did not want that, it was all a game to him of his evil winning out. And really it is evil running his soul when he is manic, which he has been for 5 years. We thought letting him stay at home would be the biggest gift in the world for him but he said he was only home to punish and abuse us. And now he took the money we pay rent with, and stopped the health insurance (when I was in the middle of serious medical care) and my son, who is medically fragile, has to survive even more of his abuse. So my question is – when is it bipolar, when is it narcissism, when is it sociopathy, or alcoholism and when is it just plain old abuse? He has been diagnosed with all of them and medications if taken properly and without drinking alcohol work – for instance, he was on buspar, lithium and seroquel and that worked very well. He was also on depakote, lithium and low doses of risperdal and that worked very well. But he refuses to take anything except the lithium and that does not work very well at all.
oops -it was 2.9 years he was in the group home / boarding home. And my son if on Abilify if anyone wanted to know and it works wonderfully. Taken at exact same time every day. He is also on 30-40 other medications a day for his medical diagnoses so it was tricky finding a drug that would not interact badly but the doctor we found is a neuropsychopharmacologist. And no, my x husband would not go to the 3 psychologists we have. He refused, saying I was the sick one not him – which we all know is a red flag that he is really sick and in dangerous mode (saying everyone else is sick but not him). The psychologists have now said to just protect ourselves and stay off of his path. There is no insight on his part to change because he has a twisted reality of what has happened and what has not. He does not like the truth and would rather make up lies. Horrible illness but my son’s is straight up bipolar without the personality disorders or addictions. So hopefully it will be a better experience for him and for me.