Rapid Cycle Bipolar.
PTSD and Other Goodies that came along by being stabbed in the right side of my head by my drugged out brother.

I am a naturally happy go lucky person. I live to laugh and get others laughing. Having a daughter is the best thing that could ever happened to me. 7 years old, and my little side kick. I have my bad days. They vary. Even on medicine sometimes they can be terrifying.

I grew to the age of 13 in a household where my father would beat my mother. Why? Because he was out of pot mainly. When my brother was born I was 8. His crib was in their room and my mom worked 3rd. At night when he’d cry I’d rush in and get him. I swore I wouldn’t let some of the abuse that happened to me, happen to him. After he chilled out, I snuck him back in, then crept bback to my room. A few minutes later I would get beat for being up late. Belt. Hand. This was no spanking.

At 13 they divorced. A couple of years of freedom and the ccycle shifted. Mom got physical. I took her place in the chain of events.

Here I am. 29 years old. I feel terrible for what I’ve put my wife through. Though I have never hit her, I have screamed, cussed and broken things. After I rage, I go on the downlope. I feel sorry. I cry. I lay there. My wife is there for all of it. She holds me and tells me that she loves me.

She puts up with the days of being just down, and even the few times i’ve felt suicidal.

I am getting better. I am controlling it better. The medicine helps. However the best help is Brandi. We have recently moved 3 hours away from my "crazy family", as everyone calls them. Mom has gotten worse,, married to a drugged out theif. His latest trick was taking a handful (7-12) valium 10s and driving. He ended up trying to eenter the off ramp to the iinterstate. My brother is doing better, but traded up illegal for rx drugs, then finally drinking, which hopefully isn’t as constant.

I tend to run to my mom’s aid day or night. I believe it is due to a bond we formed during the years of living with dad. That and she is my mom. Still…I end up in fights, and battles that I have no business in. But since she is in danger…I don’t listen to brandi. Her and all my friend’s say she stays with him. She puts up with it. You don’t need the eextra stress.

Bran is right. It is hard going against what has got to be instinct now, though.

There are days where I wonder if she would be better off without me, it has to take it’s toll. The freak outs. Seeing me drenched in my own blood and it still leaking.

My family is crazy. I’m certifiable. My wife has been pulled through a lot. One day I wouldn’t be surprised if she said she had enough. I refuse to let that day come. The cycle will end, and I will regain myself. My wife and daughter deserve it.

I deserve it.
Anyone with that kind of father would end up like you, for this reason you must let go of the past and what has become of you, why ,because its not you rather its something of which you are a victim off, namely the bad card that life has given to you by having a father like that. You do not choose your family and its not like your father who you want to be. Therefore let go of the past, not in the sense of memory because its not likely something one can forget.

However one can jump out of the vicious downward spiraling lifestyle by making a choice. A choice to go into a better direction in life. Now, i would be the last to recommend you a religion. However bhuddism is all about balancing, and regaining balance in your life is something that you need. Bhuddism will be a better father for you then your real father ever was. What your dad showed you was an example of how things are NOT supposed to be, as a matter of fact why don’t you do your entire family a favour and drag them out of the hell hole they are in and convince them to join your bhuddism effort, if they refuse tell them its better then the shitty lifestyle they are leading now, your mom ending up with some thief, and your brother who is on drugs, tell them to save themselves and that they got so used to their appalling lifestyles that they can’t even distinguish it from being a bad lifestyle anymore.

You need to convince yourself and your family to step out of that lifestyle that your father gave all of you. The devestation has gone far enough. To here and no further!!!

Try to live a constructive lifestyle from now on. Thru bhuddism you can find a pathway to chakra meditation and spiritual balance. Thru healthy food and sports you can claim back the life that you, your family ,your wife and your daughter deserve. And thru never letting down effort you can convince them all to join.

Somehow this story reminded me of this song, (dont have to take that vid seriously tho), just feeling like saying ‘no thank you’ against that terrible lifestyle your dad displayed.
It is funny you should mention that. I seem to have a form of OCD when it comes to balance. Symmetry really gets to me at times.

Thank you for your kind words and encouragement. I am learning i don’t need my guard up all the time. I believe that is step one for myself. I am going to look more into bhuddism. He was always in my life in a way…my grampa would always collected them.
You have a golden opportunity to break the destructive cycle of anger and abuse. You and your wife deserve to live in love, not in anger. Don’t give up trying even when it seems too hard. You’ll be glad for it.
I’ve been where your wife is. It is hard. Physically taxing to take on all that stress. As long as you make it worth while for her – don’t make her carry every burden – things can remain ok.
Bran and I constantly talk about it. She says I am worth it, to her and myself. I want to do better and will do better.
Can I make a suggestion? Skip the anger and go straight to the crying. The anger is just a shield to protect yourself from emotional trauma that is no longer ongoing. If crying is ultimately what makes you feel better, skip straight to that. I think your wife has already demonstrated that she can be trusted when you’re emotionally vulnerable; you don’t need to scare her with yelling and cursing first.

Very well put.

Thanks. I owe it all to the years of counseling I had as a teenager.
You bring up an odd thing I’ve been eexperiencing. I will still get angry and such, but at random, out of nowhere I will start crying. A good emotional cry, and i wikl feel a lot bbetter afterward.
Well, yes. Ask any woman on earth, they’ll tell you crying is a climax of grief. Just like how there’s a long slow buildup of tension before a climax during sex, there’s that same buildup of tension during a painful experience. (The correlation never occurred to me until I got to know some people who are into BDSM and I finally understood why they like being worked-up to the point of crying.)

Gotta learn to accept that climaxes of all sorts are good for you, because they help you reset your brain chemistry. Drugs and alcohol do the same thing without the buildup of tension, but they cause their own problems.

You trust your wife not to abuse you during sex, right? Learn to trust her not to abuse you during grief as well. She doesn’t need or deserve to be yelled at.

EDIT: The random crying is not random, you’re just not consciously aware of the buildup of tension. Maybe you’ve learned to tune it out, or you’re used to it, but it’s still there. If you can learn to notice the patterns that bring it on, you can start working on fixing your reactions to those sequences of events.

-What is BDSM?
-You make an interesting observation about climaxes and brain chemistry
-I can relate to this…my ex used to take his frustrations out on me by yelling at me. It harmed our communications greatly.
-We can’t stop others or life from pushing our buttons, but we can learn to find better ways to react so we don’t harm our self-esteem or our relationships.
Bondage, Domination, Sadism, and Masochism. Bondage and domination are obvious — one person likes to get tied-up or otherwise controlled by someone they trust during sex — but sadism and masochism are a little more complex.

For reasons I still don’t entirely grok, there are people who enjoy the sensation of being pushed past the limits of their tolerance for pain. (that’s masochism.) Likewise, there are people who enjoy pushing someone past the limits of their tolerance for pain. (that’s sadism.) Masochism is creepy to someone who doesn’t understand it, and sadism is cruel to people who don’t appreciate it, but when sadists and masochists do their thing together it’s apparently just as much fun as plain old boring normal sex is for the rest of us.

I still don’t understand where the enjoyment comes from for the sadist inflicting the pain, but I’m starting to understand why it’s enjoyable for the masochist experiencing the pain. Apparently having someone trustworthy inflicting pain on them is very similar to the sort of pleasurable stimulation most people associate with sex — it’s just pursuing a different sort of climax as the end goal, i.e. catharsis instead of orgasm. But in either case, having such intense sensations overwhelming and washing away all other thoughts in your mind is very relaxing. Anyone who’s ever had a "good emotional cry", as the threadstarter put it, knows the feeling.

Anyway, I just brought up the BDSM thing as a reference to where I learned to understand the benefits of crying, not because I was trying to turn the thread into a conversation about kinky sex.
Interesting! Old fashioned romance and flirting is fine for me!
Regarding crying having a climactic effect, thinking back on my experiences, the only time I got real relief from it was when I had a nice shoulder to cry on. Other times I just felt lonely after crying. Just sayin’!
If you’ve been diagnosed with bipolar and/or ptsd you need to get some real help in the form of medication and therapy.

I know these guys in this thread are just trying to help but to tell you to simply stop being angry or to stop being sad/suicidal is meaningless. If you have a chemical imbalance in your brain you PHYSICALLY cannot help these episodes. I have experience with a loved one who has been diagnosed as bipolar by a few doctors and PTSD by a few others, I know what you go through, I have seen it, and I know that it is beyond your conscious control. Medication has helped this person in my life, more than anything, and you need to realize that this is not something that you are doing wrong, it is something physically wrong with you. You wouldn’t tell someone with a broken leg to just get up and walk around… and no one should expect you to be able to prevent your outbursts of anger or depression.

When Deus said "skip the anger and go straight to the crying" his intention may have been in the right place but he doesn’t understand the nature of your condition. Don’t let anyone make you think you are bad or are doing something wrong because you cannot control the affects of this problem. Just as someone with a broken leg cannot control their ability to walk you have a chemical imbalance in your brain and you cannot control how that affects you.

Again, if you aren’t seeing someone about this, if you aren’t on medication, you need to make it happen for you and your family.

Depends on what makes you cry, I guess. Everyone responds to different combinations of stimuli. I know women who cry just because they had a rough day at work, as a way to release tension, and it has nothing to do with being sad or upset beyond that. It took some getting-used-to to not get concerned when I saw them crying, but eventually I realized that what they were doing was no different than if they got in the bath and spent some quality time with the shower massage.

Anyway, the point is, crying releases tension and rebalances your brain chemistry, so my original suggestion to the TS stands as-is: skip the anger and the yelling and the defensiveness and get on with the catharsis. If there are other issues making him angry, those need to be dealt with separately, but if crying helps, do it.
I am on medications for it all. We are trying to find a balance of them that work for me. I still outburst from time to time and it is really upsetting. My wife understands. Goes with it. I feel like a shit after though because I drag her through it. We talk about it. She isn’t scared. She isn’t going anywhere and she said that I’ve gottent violent with things before but when I spun on her I snapped out of it.

I know that I can’t control it, I still try. I still fight it. I cry out of nowhere just like I get angry out of nowhere. It is all overwhelming at times. My medicine keeps the monster inside in check for the most part.

I am open and talk about iit with everybody as well.

I’m adding this post to my sig. You’ve made such eloquent, honest statements in this thread and it’s pleased me to read them.

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