EP 79: From Bondage to Freedom: Claiming Agency in Your Bipolar Healing Journey

I explore the gap between bondage and freedom, and how agency survives even when diagnosis and treatment narrow your choices. Through poems, personal turning points, and practical tools, I map a path from helplessness to daily actions that restore control.

• defining agency versus freedom with clear examples
• reframing bipolar from victimhood to informed choice
• choosing life, asking for help, building early warnings
• creating a Mood Cycle Survival Guide with priorities and reboots
• cautious, supported cross‑titration and micronutrients
• understanding med releases and stress triggers
• using trauma‑focused therapy modalities rather than talk alone
• mindfulness, EFT, journaling, yoga, and supportive exercise
• living mindfully, looping recovery, choosing your hard
• curating inputs and joining a pro‑recovery community

If you have any questions, please send me an email: michelle@theupsideofbipolar.com
If you haven't read my book yet grab your copy here: The Upside of Bipolar: 7 Steps to Heal Your Disorder
If you would like support as you go through the recovery process, join us in  the Upsiders' Tribe

FREE Mood Cycle Survival Guide: https://theupsideofbipolar.com/free/

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Transcript

A Spark Of Agency

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You've got agency. You've got to do something about this. But I was recognizing that if I was determined to live, that I had to choose something different for myself. And so that day I went in the house and got a notebook and started writing out what I knew about what I was struggling with. What did I know? And what kind of help did I need? And what could I do differently than what I had been doing before? And over time I started discovering things that I could do for myself. And that's how the mood cycle survival guide developed in the first place. Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar, where we uncover the true sources of bipolar symptoms and share proven tools for recovery. I'm your host, Michelle Reitinger, number one international best-selling author of the Upside of Bipolar Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. In this podcast, I bring you solo insights from my journey and guest interviews with leading researchers and experts. Join us to transform chaos into hope and reclaim your life. Let's heal together. Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar. I am your host, Michelle Reitinger, and I have a really interesting topic that I want to discuss with you today. I've talked a little bit about this concept in the past, but I have a new angle that I recently started pondering based on the conversation I had with a former university professor the other day. When I was talking to this woman, she was talking about the difference between the concepts of freedom and bondage on the one side and agency on the other. And one of the things that she talked about is how nobody can take our agency away. Nobody can remove our agency from us. That is something that belongs to us and it cannot be removed from us. However, we can lose our freedom. We can lose the ability to act. We can, you know, there are times when we struggle with being in a form of bondage. And the way she described it was using the analogy of somebody who was completely bound to a chair. They were in a chair and they were bound hands and feet and body, and there was a tape around their mouths. So they are in a form of bondage, physical bondage, but they still have agency to decide what they are going to think and how they're going to respond to the situation. And as I've been pondering this, I actually gave a presentation for a group on Tuesday, and I was thinking about this concept and the information that I shared in the presentation. And it's caused me to really think about the importance of understanding the difference between these two concepts. Because when you are diagnosed with a mental health disorder and you are treated using psychiatric drugs, it creates a form of bondage for us. I used to associate that with losing your agency because I believed that I had lost my agency. I had lost the ability to act for myself. But as I've been thinking about this concept, I realized that that wasn't actually true or accurate. What I had lost was my ability to act. Like I had had a lot of my freedom taken away from me by the beliefs that developed around this diagnosis and the treatment itself that I was going through that was limiting my ability to act and choose for myself. But I still had agency. And one of my favorite poems came to my mind when I was thinking about these concepts. And it's from it's called Invictus by William Ernest Henley. And it says, Out of the night that covers me, black as a pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears, looms but the horror of the shade, and yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments to scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. And several years ago I watched a movie called Invictus that was talking about the life of Nelson Mandela, who was the leader of South Africa when apartheid fell. And he has an extraordinary story because he was unfairly imprisoned for years. I think it was over 30. It was unjust. And the prison was an awful place. He was in a tiny little cell and he was meant to do made to do hard manual labor all day long, every single day. And he chose to, even though he was in a form of bondage, actual physical bondage, he was in prison. He recognized that he had the ability to choose how he was going to respond to it. And when he was freed from prison, he did not take revenge on the people who had who had unfairly imprisoned him. In fact, when he took over the government, when he won and was in charge of the government, he integrated the government. He took a lot of actions that were making an attempt to help unify the country after the terrible apartheid suffering that had gone on for years and years and years. And I loved his example because he shows us how terrible suffering doesn't have to take away our agency. We are the ones who have the choice of how we're going to respond to situations. And when I was going through the healing process from my bipolar, I had times when I started to feel very angry and betrayed by the system that was supposed to help me. And I every time I would start to feel angry or I would start to get upset by it, I kept thinking, well, what good is this going to do? I just have to decide what am I going to do what am I going to do now? So I want to talk a bit about my experience and because I want to help you understand this concept. To be fair, I am still working through this concept myself because it's kind of a new way of looking at things that I really I'm I'm really grateful for, this new perspective. But I recognize that even though I didn't fully understand the concept, I was applying the principles in my own life during my story. So for the first 12 years after my diagnosis, well, the first 10 years after my diagnosis, I was doing what everything that I thought I had the ability to do. I was going to every psychiatric appointment. I took every medication I was given. I tried to go to therapy multiple times, even though it felt totally useless to me. I didn't understand the point of it. It didn't ever make me feel better. But I felt like I was doing everything I could, and my life was getting progressively worse. And I was making choices and doing things when I was struggling with my symptoms that were causing tremendous harm to myself, to my family. And I felt like a victim. I felt very helpless. I didn't feel like I had agency to choose for myself. Whenever I would experience symptoms, I felt like I was getting yanked onto a roller coaster and I was just holding on for dear life until it was over. And I started to feel more and more and more helpless throughout the entire process. And I was in a form of bondage because, and I didn't understand it, because I had been told that I did not have any choice about my symptoms, that that that I had a disorder, that I had a chemical imbalance, that I had a brain disorder, and that the symptoms were not my fault and they and I didn't have any control over them, and that the medication was meant to help, that the medication was meant to stabilize and help me to live a, you know, as normal a life as possible. But I didn't understand at the time that the diagnosis itself was a form of bondage, and I've talked about that in the past because it it turns me, turned me into a victim. And the treatment itself was a form of bondage. Because psychotropic medications don't normalize the brain. They abnormalize the brain. They were not regulating my brain. They were not balancing a brain chemistry issue. They were dysregulating my brain. They were causing my brain to act in an abnormal way, which was causing further distress and further problems. And in addition to that, I had all kinds of side effects that were accompanying the medication. And as I've talked about again in the past, those side effects, quote unquote side effects, were actually just the effect of the drug. That was what the drug was doing to me. So when I had drugs that caused psychosis, that was the effect of the drug. When I had a drug that caused mania, that was the effect of the drug. When I had a cause when I had lots of drugs that caused severe fatigue and sedation, that was what the drug was doing to me. It wasn't a side effect. That was the actual effect of the medication. You know, at the point where I was on seven different medications and I was feeling totally numb and struggling to feel any desire to even keep living because I couldn't feel anything, I was in a form of bondage. I was in the chair with my arms and legs wrapped and often feeling like my mouth had been wrapped up with, you know, a covering because I would ask for help and nobody was helping me. I didn't, I didn't feel like I had any ability to change my situation. But the two experiences that were turning points for me, and I've shared them in the past, and I apologize for sharing them again, but it's necessary in this context to help you understand what I'm talking about. There were two experiences that I had that were turning points for me that helped reveal to me that I actually did have the agency to make choices for myself. Even though I was bound up in a lot of ways, I did have the ability to think for myself, to make choices for myself in at least the way that I was viewing my situation. And so, in that little bit of freedom that still remained inside my own mind, I made the choice first to live. My unwell mind had convinced me thoroughly that there was nothing left to live for. And that not only that, but that I was ruining everybody's life and that everybody would be better off if I was gone. My unwell mind had made these, had convinced me of these things. And watching my children play one day and recognizing that if I ever did successfully end my life, that I would ruin my little four-year-old daughter's life because she would believe it was her fault and it would ruin her life, I chose something different from that point forward. I made the decision that I was going to live for her. I didn't believe my life had value at the time, but I knew hers didn't. I wanted her to have a happy life. And I wanted to give her the best chance at that. And I recognized the best chance that she had was for me to survive. And so even though at that point I had no hope for anything ever getting better because I had been told bipolar was chronic and incurable, and I'd have it for the rest of my life, and that medication was my best chance and the medications weren't helping me, I still chose to live for her. And so I became very determined. And one of the things that I made the decision to do was that if those thoughts of self-harm or ending my life ever did come back, that I would ask for help. I would not hide that anymore. I had hidden it for a long time because I was afraid of ending up in the hospital and I didn't want to end up in the hospital. But I made the decision that if those thoughts ever came back, that I would go back to the hospital because I was going to stay safe. I was going to keep myself alive. And so I hung on for a year, just hanging on by my fingernails, and the thoughts started to come back. And so I asked for help and I ended up in the hospital again. And then after that fourth hospitalization, I was again watching my children play and had the thought come to me, nobody is coming to save you. You have to find a way to save yourself. And that had never occurred to me. I had so thoroughly believed that I this was beyond my ability to do anything about that the thought had never occurred to me that I could do anything about it. But in my mind, I started recognizing, you've got agency, you've got to do something about this. I didn't know the word agency in that way at that time. I wasn't thinking that way, but I was recognizing that if I was determined to live, that I had to choose something different for myself. And so that day I went in the house and got a notebook and started writing out what I what I knew about what I was struggling with. What did I know? And what kind of help did I need? And what could I do differently than what I had been doing before? And over time, I started discovering things that I could do for myself. And that's how the mood cycle survival guide developed in the first place. And over the years, as I went through these tools and as I started discovering the tools for healing and recovery, and I struggled and I kept having symptoms, every time I would struggle, I would choose to get back up and try again. So I started recognizing that even though I was bound up with a psychiatric diagnosis and I was struggling with the medications, I didn't really understand what was limiting my freedom at the time. I still had the ability to choose what I was going to think and how I was going to approach this, what I was going to do about it. So over the following years, I began to find tools that began to liberate me. Little by little, I was discovering the tools necessary to liberate me from the bondage I was in. And the first one, as I mentioned, was the mood cycle survival guide. And the thing that's interesting as I look at that and I teach it to people is we are so convinced in our society that these mental health symptoms are the result of an underlying disease or etiology that often we don't think about the agency we have to choose for ourselves or the ability we have to act or to take responsibility for ourselves. But as I went through and started thinking about case, so you know, as I went through and developed these steps, I recognized, number one, that I needed help. For years I had been embarrassed by the symptoms and the things that I was struggling with, and I tried to hide it. And I needed help desperately, but I was afraid to ask for help. And so I didn't ask for help until I was in crisis. And as I developed the mood cycle survival guide, I started recognizing that's not that's not helpful or healthy. I know now, as I was thinking about what do I know, I know that I need help. There will be times that I need help. And if I can ask for help sooner, be humble enough to ask for it sooner, ask people ahead of time, you know, if they can assist me, set healthy boundaries around that assistance, I could start being respectful of the people that I was asking for help and hopefully not damaging relationships in the process. Recognizing that I needed to create an early warning system for myself and stop letting myself get yanked onto the roller coaster without any warning, but start looking at things with curiosity, symptoms with curiosity instead of judgment, and being aware of triggers and symptoms and red flags so that I could do something about it sooner, so that I didn't end up in crisis. And making sure that I identified my power priorities, taking responsibility for myself when I was struggling emotionally, and making sure the things that mattered most were done, learning how to say no to things and learning how to make choices that were going to be healthy choices to take care of myself and my family, the things that were my responsibility, my top priorities, and then learning how to reboot my system, how to get myself back into a healthy, balanced mental state. That was the very first time that I started unwinding some of the bondage that I was in. I started learning how to take responsibility for myself instead of choosing to let myself be a victim. And the second step, the second tool that I found was the cross-titration with the micronutrients from true hope. And this was a very big unwinding of bondage for me because I did not understand the effect that the medication was having on me, having on my ability to react to things in a healthy way. I struggled. One of the main sources of the bipolar rage that I was struggling with was the psychotropic medications that were dysregulating my emotional response. But the challenge with psychotropic drugs is that you cannot just stop taking them safely. It is very dangerous to just stop taking psychotropic medications because it changes your brain chemistry and it can cause a lot of problems if you just stop taking your medication. It can be life-threatening even. And so gratefully, I was introduced to the micronutrients in a way that helped me to go through a safe cross-titration process to safely get off of the medication and help my brain begin to heal and get the nutrition that it was missing that was contributing to a lot of my mental health distress. And that was a very liberating experience. I've shared before on here the day that I woke up and it felt like it was the first time I was I was awake in over a decade. It was, it was so incredible to me to think, oh man, is this what healthy people feel like? When you have been sedated by medication for 10 years and you haven't felt awake in 10 years, and all of a sudden your brain feels awake and alert, it's almost impossible to describe to somebody who has never been on psychotropic drugs or never been sedated in that way. But that was just the very first glimpse of the freedom that I was working towards. And it was a releasing of some of the bonds that were keeping me stuck, that were keeping me in a form of bondage. And over time, as I went through experiences with med releases, and I've talked about this before, but just briefly so that you understand the term if you're new here, psychotropic drugs can stay in your soft tissues for up to 10 years, according to studies that have been done. And those drugs sit in those, you know, in the soft tissues of our body. And when you are under a lot of stress, you know, emotional stress, physical stress, I was, I was uh putting myself, my body under a lot of stress when I was doing triathlon training and not unwittingly causing med releases in my body. But what happens is the stress causes these pockets of medication to release into your body, and they can cause the symptoms they were meant to prevent in the first place. And so over year, over the years, as I learned more, I gained more understanding of what was happening in my body with these med releases, I began to understand what was happening. So I didn't feel like a victim when I experienced those symptoms. I was able to be self-aware enough to recognize I had caused a med release in my body and then call for help, call my part of my support system, which was true hope, and tell them what was going on and have them guide me through the process of helping my body safely navigate this med release so that in a couple of days I was feeling fine again. And then the third step in this releasing myself from bondage was learning how to use therapy in a healthy and productive way. And one of the things that's really challenging about therapy is that probably 80, 85% of therapists are just talk therapists who do not have any training in trauma or how to help people over, you know, heal from trauma. And so when you go to therapy, if you're going to straight talk therapy, it can make you feel worse. You're focusing on the problems and talking about the problems over and over and over again. And it kind of focuses you on your bondage. And it's interesting because if we think about this in terms of bondage, you know, the bondage freedom side versus the agency side. If you're sitting in a chair and you are bound up in your chair and you're looking down at your bonds, if you're focusing on them, it can make you feel like I don't have any freedom, I can't choose anything. But you still have the ability to choose what you're going to think and how you're going to respond to the situation you're in. And so it's really critical in this part of the process to stop focusing on your bonds. Stop focusing on the damage and the pain. But focus on solutions, focus on being proactive in therapy. Number one, look for the a good therapist, look for somebody who has the ability to help you identify underlying sources of trauma and treat them. That was one of the things that I had to learn to do was learn about treatment modalities for trauma. And the ones that I use specifically were EMDR and art therapy. I've used some somatic therapies like breath work and emotional freedom technique, which is tapping. But it's really critical to learn about the different types of trauma modalities that are out there, and then find a competent therapist who is certified in those trauma modalities so that you can find somebody that can actually help you identify the underlying sources of your trauma and treat them in a way that is going to. help you recover. And in my program, and I've talked about this in my, I talked about this in my book. I talk about it, you know, I've got blog posts about it, but there are things that you can do to be more proactive in your therapy. It's really important for you to learn how to look for sources of symptoms that might be, you know, from trauma, that might come from unhealthy thought and behavior patterns, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and then decide that you're going to work with a therapist on those things so that you can treat the source of those things and heal. You have to be willing to do homework. You have to be willing to, you know, to do the uncomfortable work to heal and learn how to let go of past pain and move forward. And this is again another way of releasing yourself from bondage. I know I I do remember there's one experience a couple of experiences I'll share really quickly with therapy. One of them was I have I have been felt very loyal to my family my entire life. And so when there were things that I struggled with that I had kind of an underlying recognition that there were things that I had experienced with family members that were unhealthy. And I'm not I'm not talking about abuse or anything like that, like actual like physical abuse or sexual abuse. I'm talking about just unhealthy ways of of interacting that can be traumatizing for a child, that can be, that can create you know false beliefs about ourselves or you know, we can develop unhealthy thoughts and behaviors as a result. And I spent a lot of time talking about these situations, but not knowing what to do about them. And one of the things that helped was recognizing that if I I think I've given this analogy in the past, but if you had broken a bone and it had healed wrong and you had pain from it no sorry that's the wrong analogy. If you break your bone and you go to the doctor the doctor might want to know what happened so that he can properly assess that the injury but the doctor is not going to dwell on the situation that caused the pain. He's going to to he's going to focus on the actual injury. So you don't keep talking to the doctor about how the injury occurred once the doctor knows then we focus on the actual injury and that helped me so much when I was when I was doing therapy and working to try and heal these wounds that had come from unhealthy relationships and unhealthy relationship patterns because instead of dwelling on the person in the situation the focus became the wound and how to treat and heal the wound so that I could move on with my life and let go of the pain from that situation. And the other thing that was really helpful is it's really critical to take responsibility for yourself. There was a person online and I've said this before I wish that I could remember her name because I would love to give her credit for this because this was not my idea it was something I heard from a, I think she was a therapist that she said that trauma is a story and healing is a choice. And that choice is using our agency to do something about it. And as we exercise our agency to seek the help necessary to heal we are again unwrapping more of those bonds that are keeping us stuck. The next step in the process was the mindfulness meditation which I cannot say enough about the value of mindfulness meditation. It is the way to help you regain so much of your control over what's happening in your life I one of the challenges again with struggling with these kinds of symptoms is that they are overwhelming sometimes. You know the the experiences that we have the symptoms that lead to a label like depression for example can feel overwhelming and like you don't have like it just feels like it takes so much effort to do anything. And so we day after day will lay in bed or stay in our pajamas, not brush your teeth, not brush your hair, you know, not take showers because we are so overwhelmed by the emotion of depression like the the symptoms of depression the same thing will happen when we experience you know symptoms of mania, you know, taking on gigantic projects or spending lots of money. You know we feel like compulsive you know these behaviors that grow out of these these symptoms and it can make us feel like we don't have any control of ourselves and and we start to dissociate from ourselves in a lot of ways. I've talked I've shared before you know the one of the worst symptoms that I struggled with was the bipolar rage and then also the really negative intrusive thoughts that were just like relentless during you know times of distress. And and I had not I didn't like staying present in my mind and my body like I I would intentionally force myself to daydream and and go somewhere else. I would imagine that you know what my life could be like or I would imagine myself somewhere else and take myself outside of the situation because I was so uncomfortable in the situation I was in. And when I first started practicing mindfulness meditation it was very uncomfortable I did not like it because it was trying to keep me present in things that I didn't I had learned to avoid or to dissociate from. But mindfulness meditation once I really started to work on it and really started to practice this, you know, to practice mindfulness meditation it totally changed my life I learned how to stay present with uncomfortable emotions. I learned how to stay present and process things when I was going through therapy with my you know with my therapist when I was doing trauma work I was able to stay present with the emotions so I could actually process the emotion and release it. And I had mentioned EFT, you know the emotional freedom technique, the tapping, but that was another another avenue for helping me to process emotion and release the emotions journaling was a huge help in this process. And I often will talk to people about mindfulness meditation or tapping or both and coupling it with with journaling because a lot of times when we're when we're working on mindfulness meditation one of the things that you do when you're learning how to ground yourself is be aware of you know where the thoughts if you have thoughts that keep trying to take you outside of yourself, you want to be aware of them but then you want to continually bring yourself back to the present. And that's the point of grounding is is learning how to keep yourself present. But one of the things that I started learning how to do was you know I practice the mindfulness meditation grounding techniques and that consistently so that I learn how to stay present. But I also started paying attention when I was in just stressing situations to where my mind was going. And then after practicing the mindfulness the meditation for you know 10 minutes or so and I get myself back into the present, grab my journal and just write down all of the thoughts that came into my head and start looking for clues in those thoughts. Start looking for you know things and they it gave me lots of information to take to my therapist. It's one of the ways that I actually recognized that there was some really serious unhealed trauma that needed to be addressed when I had a bad reaction to my husband one day was, you know, practicing mindfulness. I talk about that in my book actually in the mindfulness chapter. But this was another big way of releasing the bonds that were keeping me stuck releasing myself from bondage by choosing, using my agency to choose to practice the mindfulness meditation on a consistent basis and practice taking responsibility for the things that were happening inside my mind and my body and learning how to stay present with it, looking for clues and the information that I was receiving through my emotions and the thoughts that were coming into my head. And this was another way of again releasing myself from that bondage. When I started working on yoga and exercise one of the things that was really important was I I had a lot of curiosity because I'd had a couple of experiences with yoga and with with exercise when I was running that helped me to see the value of what I was doing, but I didn't totally understand how to apply it in a way that would help me to actually heal. And this was again continuing to persist in using my agency to choose into this to choose using these tools until I figured out how they could actually work with you know help me free myself from you know these these bonds that I had been in with my you know bipolar diagnosis and the treatment that I had been going through and the things that had created the symptoms in the first place. And and so you know the yoga took the mindfulness practice into my body. It helped me to start to become aware of indications of distress in my body become much more aware of what was happening in my body and then be able to address those things that I was struggling with in a way that gave my body what it was asking for. You know I one of the biggest things for me was learning that when I was having anxiety symptoms, I could tell the difference between different types of anxiety that were triggered by different things. So for example, and this this happened through not mindfulness meditation and yoga those two things together helped me start to become the you know aware of myself in a way that helped me start distinguishing between trauma responses. So I have one type of anxiety response to trauma, you know, a trauma response. And then there are you know other types of anxiety feelings that I have that mean my brain is not getting enough micronutrients. And so I started to become more sensitive to the different types of symptoms I was experiencing and what they actually meant as I became more self-aware with mindfulness practice in yoga. And one of the things that I learned with with exercise was how to use exercise in a way that supported my mental health rather than feeling like I had to always be training for an event that was that was me. I was I had I had learned to exercise through being a competitive athlete and so that was the only way I knew how to exercise and as I learned as I looked with curiosity at exercise as something that could help me begin to free myself from this you know mental health bondage that I was in I started to learn how exercise could actually support healing rather than exacerbate emotional states that I was struggling in and by pushing myself too hard. And then the last you know one of the well I shouldn't say the last I think I've got one other one but um living mindfully was something that I started and I don't mean this is this is an extension of the mindfulness meditation but also an awareness of what the healing process looks like. So in my book and in the in the program step seven is uh is living mindfully and understanding what healing actually looks like. And I've got this graphic behind me that is representative of the recovery cycle that helps us to recognize that we will continue as you go through the healing process, you will have times when you'll experience symptoms and symptoms are not failure, they are information. And it's really important to understand what that recovery process looks like so that you don't feel like you're failing when you experience symptoms. Recently I was talking to something somebody that I that I coach and we were talking about how when you're depressed, when you're struggling with depression everything feels dark, everything feels heavy it feels like you know failure. And then when you come out of it, all of a sudden the world, the sun is shining, the world is bright again and you almost it's almost like you can't remember what it felt like to be depressed and you think maybe I'll never feel that way again. And so when you do start to feel depression coming on again it can feel like failure. You start to focus on like keeping yourself out of the depression. And so when you do experience it again it can feel like you failed. But understanding that the symptoms don't indicate that you are failing in any way they are just information and they are learning points. They're opportunities for you to learn to look with curiosity about what might have caused the symptom to occur or the symptoms to occur and use the tools and the habits for healing that you've developed over time to address the symptom to see if you can identify the source and then heal the source. And again this is another unwrapping of these bonds that you're in because instead of choosing to be a victim to the experience and feeling like you failed or something, you're choosing to look at it with curiosity and not judgment and and look for clues and look for ways to improve and continue down the path of healing and recovery. And one of the other things I talk about in that chapter of the book is that we have to choose our hard your life is already hard. When we're struggling with mental health challenges our life is already hard and we can continue just suffering or we can choose like I said at the beginning that each time we quote unquote fall down or struggle or you know whatever things feel like setbacks or or difficulty we can choose to sit down and cry about it or we can choose to get up and and try again. And so that again is us applying our agency and using our agency to continue to make choices that are going to help keep moving us forward on the path to healing and recovery. And the last piece of this that I've been thinking about as I was thinking about this concept of the difference between you know the bondage and freedom versus agency is you have to really careful about what you choose to listen to and view regarding mental health and who you choose to to associate with. When I was going through this process I didn't have the option of joining a group of people that were recovering because I didn't even know recovery was possible. I didn't know I was recovering. I was just doing the best I could to keep my promise to myself and to my children that I was going to survive for them and I was going to find a way to save myself because they deserved a healthy mother and I wanted to try to be a healthy mom for them as much as I could. But I have learned how important it is to not feed the idea that you have a chemical imbalancer that bipolar is chronic and incurable to not keep giving in to this idea that you're a victim. You don't have any choice over these things. We don't want to spend our time focusing on people that are have that have that mindset on social media, on you know podcasts or even in what you're reading because it will keep you stuck in that mindset too. It's really important not to look for validation in your struggle but it's important to look for other people who are trying to do what you want to do. That's one of the main reasons why I started the Upsiders tribe. I wanted to create a supportive space for people who wanted to recover to get encouragement and support and guidance in a place where people understood what they were struggling with. They understand the kind of bondage you're in but also how important it is to exercise agency to choose something different for yourself. And as you're going through the recovery process it's so helpful to have people that are you know there who are in different you know different parts of the recovery process you know people who are further down the road than you who've already gone through cross titration or who have already gone through therapy and and can encourage you as you're going through that struggle to keep moving because it does get better and you are going to get to a place where you know you're not going to be experiencing withdrawal and and over medication symptoms and you know eventually you'll get to a place where you don't even experience med releases anymore. And you know as you're going through therapy people who can give you their perspective on different therapy modalities and and the benefits of those or you know some therapy modalities that they tried that didn't work for them and why it didn't work. And so you can get support from people who have gone who are on the same road and encouragement when you're struggling it's so important to make sure that you are choosing to expose yourself to people that are choosing to use their agency to heal and to recover as you do that you will continue to unwind those bonds that are keeping you in bondage unwind the wrappings unwind the rope unwind all of the things that are keeping you stuck and help you liberate yourself by exercising your agency a little bit at a time at the beginning there might be nothing more than just the ability to keep choosing hope. And again it's so important to surround yourself by people that that know that there's hope. But I want to encourage you to consider that there is something that you can do that yes you may be experiencing a form of bondage with your diagnosis and your symptoms and the treatment that you're going through but you still have agency to choose. You still have the ability to choose something for yourself to choose how you're going to respond to the situation. What are you going to do about it? There's another poem that I would like to share as I as I get to the end here, which is one of my favorites from when I was younger I used to have it memorized. I don't have the whole thing memorized so I'm going to read it but it's the road not taken by Robert Frost Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveller long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth then took the other as just as fair and having perhaps a better claim because it was grassy and wanted wear though as for that the passing there had warned them really about the same and both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black oh I kept the first for another day, yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence two roads diverged in a wood and I I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference. You have the ability to choose to use your agency exercise your agency to begin freeing yourself from bondage. You are the master of your fate you are the captain of your soul you can choose for yourself. If you have any questions please send me an email that my email is linked in the show notes. I would love to hear from you. If you haven't read my book yet I encourage you to do so I wrote that book designed as a self-help book so you can use it on its own to learn the path to healing and recovery, learn how to unwind those bonds from yourself to release yourself from bondage. That if you would like support as you go through the recovery process, please reach out and check into the Upsiders tribe. It's a supportive community that is designed to help teach you the habits for healing that will aid you in your recovery and provide a supportive community that is going to help you keep your agency focused on doing something about this, on freeing yourself from bondage. I encourage you to exercise your agency today to do something to help yourself. If you have any questions let me know and I'll talk to you again soon. Until next time Upsiders Bipolar your journey to recovery matters and I'm grateful you're here. For more resources visit wwwpsideofbipolar dot com. If you're ready to dive deeper grab my book The Upside of Bipolar seven steps to heal your disorder if you're ready to heal your symptoms join my monthly membership The Upsiders Tribe to transform chaos into hope. Until next time Upsiders