EP 82: Why You’re Still Struggling: Root Causes, Habits, and Bipolar Recovery

I explore why real recovery from bipolar symptoms takes two kinds of work: treating the underlying causes and changing the coping patterns built to survive them. I share practical ways to rebuild emotional health so you can feel deeply, respond wisely, and create relationships with clearer boundaries.

• pathologising human suffering and how labels can end curiosity
• treating symptoms versus identifying root causes of bipolar symptoms
• common drivers like micronutrient insufficiency, medication effects, THC-related psychosis, and trauma
• why you can’t change habits without addressing causes and can’t heal causes without changing habits
• dissociation habits like TV and doomscrolling and how they persist after stability
• mindfulness meditation, breathwork, yoga, and therapy as habit-rewiring tools
• changing negative self-talk with mirror talk and using AI to draft a daily script
• relationship “dance” patterns, repair after reactivity, and the work of building new norms
• boundaries as personal responsibility rather than control of others
• choosing sustained effort over quick fixes and building a supportive environment

If you have any questions about anything I've talked about, I hope you'll send me an email. I would love to hear from you.
If you haven't read my book, I encourage you to get a copy of it, The Upside of Bipolar: 7 Steps to Heal Your Disorder. 

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Transcript

Healing Requires Two Pieces

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You can't do one or the other and and have it be a lasting have a have a lasting impact. You need to do both things. Our brains are designed to protect us. It will try to figure out how to cope with things that we're struggling with. And most people will develop coping mechanisms, thoughts and behavior patterns, but our brain is just trying to survive. As we heal the sources of symptoms, it may become more and more apparent that we've got unhealthy thought and behavior patterns. But if we don't do anything to actively change those things, they won't change. 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 back to the Upside of Bipolar. I am your host, Michelle Reitinger, and I'm super excited to do a solo episode today because I have a topic to share with you that's been on my mind a lot recently. Last week on social media, Angie Peacock, who I interviewed two episodes back, was sharing a very raw emotional post on social media. She was talking about some grief that she was experiencing. And while she was sharing this, she was crying. It was a very raw, real emotional experience that she was having that was she was sharing with us. And she was talking about what was causing the grief. She had lost her father last fall and had recently received some more information. And so as she read it, it was bringing all that grief back up. But the post wasn't about the loss of her father, really. It was about her gratitude for being able to experience that grief and experience the emotions because that's one of the most important aspects of being human, is to be able to feel emotion. And Angie hadn't been able to experience that for a good chunk of her adult life because she was in psychiatric treatment. At one point, she was on like 23 different psychiatric drugs and couldn't feel anything. And so now she has so much gratitude and appreciation for the ability to feel even uncomfortable emotions like grief and sadness. And as I listened to her post, I was thinking about what it looks like to learn how to heal and actually learn how to experience emotions in a healthy way. Unfortunately, with our psychiatric industry and its approach to human suffering, we have pathologized human suffering. We have turned depression into a psychiatric disorder. We have turned, you know, emotional dysregulation into an illness that is incurable. And it's not incurable because the underlying issues can't be solved. It's incurable because instead of having curiosity and looking for the source of those symptoms and then treating those sources with things that will actually help you to recover and heal, we use psychiatric drugs that dysregulate our brains and suppress emotional response, which then makes it difficult and sometimes impossible impossible to experience healthy emotional reactions to things, healthy emotional responses to things. But when we are trying to heal, it's important to recognize that there are two really main pieces that go into this process. The first is there needs to be curiosity into the underlying sources of the symptoms. What is causing this dysregulation to occur? What is causing the emotional response to be extreme or dysregulated? So there needs to be curiosity into the source, and then the source needs to be treated. We need to identify what the sources of those symptoms are and we need to treat them. But there's another piece to it that often gets overlooked, and that is usually by the time we get diagnosed, we have been living with these symptoms for long enough, or living with the sources of the symptoms for long enough that we have developed unhealthy patterns in our lives, unhealthy coping mechanisms, unhealthy thought and behavior patterns, unhealthy relationship patterns. And so if you do one, which is, you know, like if you were to go in and identify the sources of your symptoms and treat the sources and resolve those, but you don't change your habits or you don't change your patterns, you can continue to have issues because you have developed unhealthy ways of experiencing the world and thinking about the world and interacting with the world as a result of these symptoms and these difficulties that you're experiencing. And if you don't change the habits and the patterns, you can continue to have problems. The reverse is also true. If you try to work on changing your habits and changing your patterns without addressing the underlying sources of symptoms, it can be a futile attempt. And that's one of the things that I did for a long time before I was, you know, ended up in psychiatric treatment and went through all of that rigmarole. I kept trying to fix myself through changing my habits. So you can't do one or the other and have it be a lasting, have a have a lasting impact. You need to do both things. So I want to talk about what that looks like today because I think it's important to make sure that we understand that both sides of this need to be addressed. So first, let's talk about the first aspect of it, which is identifying the underlying sources of symptoms and then treating those sources. And I'm not going to spend a ton of time on this because a lot of my episodes have kind of addressed these things, but I think it's important to kind of talk about it a little bit at least to understand clearly what I'm talking about when I talk about this first aspect of healing. So when somebody is developing serious symptoms that will lead to a psychiatric diagnosis, there's something underneath it. Oftentimes people will say when I say that, you know, bipolar disorder is not identifying the underlying source of symptoms, and I don't like that diagnosis because it ends curiosity into the sources of the symptoms. People think I'm saying that bipolar isn't real. I hear that all the time. You know, you're saying that this isn't real. It's very real. And I think that's not true. Of course, of course, the symptoms are real. There are real symptoms that you're struggling with that led you to go to a psychiatrist in the first place. And sometimes they're very severe. And that can be very scary because you don't understand what's going on. You know, a good example would be, you know, somebody that is experiencing, you know, seemingly out of the blue. Often there is stuff that leads up to it, but but often we don't recognize it until you have an extreme experience. So somebody experiences a psychotic episode or a manic episode and does things that are very out of character for them. You know, they're they're having delusions, they're talking to people that aren't there, they're seeing things that aren't there, or they're engaging in extreme behaviors. And that can look like, you know, spending excessive amounts of money or having delusions of grandeur or taking really risk, doing really risky things that are out of character for the person. So you've got these really extreme behaviors that are very scary, especially for people on the outside who love them and are like, what are you doing? And you want to know what's going on. And right now, the the general idea in society is when somebody's struggling with is you go to a psychiatrist. But the problem with that is when you go to psychiatrists, they are going to identify you with a label based on the symptom cluster that you have, and then put you on psychiatric drugs that suppress attempting to suppress the symptoms. They're not treating an underlying etiology because one hasn't been identified. They're just attempting to suppress the symptoms. And the problem that this causes is that you stop looking for answers after that. You stop looking for why that occurred. You don't look with any curiosity into anything that might have led to that episode, led to those symptoms, because the diagnosis leads you to believe that you have been told why, and you believe that the drugs are fixing the problem. But the reality is that there is something underpinning those symptoms. You know, whether it's mania, you know, symptoms of mania, excessive spending, erratic behavior, hearing things, seeing things, or severe depressive symptoms, like somebody who just has lost all their motivation. They are cannot get themselves out of bed, they are unable to, you know, even take care of themselves. We want to believe that it's a chemical imbalance, which isn't, it does not exist as an underlying source of symptoms. We want to believe that there's something wrong that can be treated with a pill, because that's a simple solution, and it would, it would solve the problem without it having to be our responsibility. But when you do that, you stay sick because you are not actually treating the underlying source of the symptoms because it hasn't been identified. So let's talk just briefly about what some of those symptoms, the underlying sources of the symptoms might be. Some of the most common sources of symptoms are, of course, micronutrient insufficiency. And I've done episodes on that. You know, I did a three-interview series with David Stefan, episodes 70, 71, and 72, that talk about how micronutrient insufficiency can lead to symptoms, even extreme symptoms like psychosis and mania, that are caused because the brain is not getting the building blocks it needs for the neurotransmitters to function in a healthy way. You know, those four building blocks are vitamins, minerals, omega-3s, and amino acids. And if it's not getting sufficient levels of any of those, the brain is not getting what it needs to function in a healthy way. And it starts to you start to experience symptoms. Similar to what would happen if somebody were stopped eating protein, their body, you know, the muscles would start to break down. The brain is not getting what it needs to function in a healthy way. And so micronutrient insufficiency is a very, very common source of symptoms. Many people in our society just aren't eating in healthy ways. And even people who are eating in healthy ways might not be getting adequate levels of these nutrients in order to support their brain and, you know, their brain's health. Another one is unfortunately medication. And it can be, you know, drugs, but it can be psychiatric drugs. It can be drugs used to treat other things in the body. It's really interesting. Gabapentin is a drug that is used for neurological issues, but it's also used for psychiatric issues and it affects your brain. It affects your emotional response to things. It can cause severe depression and it's it causes dependency. And so if somebody starts taking these drugs, or marijuana is a big one now that we're starting to recognize, the potency of the THC and marijuana, I believe it's a THC in marijuana is so high now that it is very common now for people to experience psychosis as a result of smoking weed. There are a lot of different medications, some psychiatric, some just, you know, for other uses in the body, that can cause psychiatric symptoms. And because we have pathologized the symptoms, because when somebody comes in with feeling depressed and difficulty getting out of bed and difficulty functioning, instead of somebody looking through and identifying, well, you're taking this drug and that's a side effect of this drug, most doctors will just send you to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist will not look at the source, the drug as the source of the symptoms. They will just give you a diagnosis of depression and put you on antidepressants. And antidepressants, ironically, can lead to mania. And instead of people recognizing, you know, the doctors recognizing that they caused mania by using antidepressants, they say, oh, it revealed that you have bipolar, and then they give you more drugs. So psychiatric drugs can be, and any kind of medication can be a source of symptoms. And there are people who have had trauma in their lives. That is a very common source of symptoms for depression, bipolar anxiety. You know, when we talked, I mentioned Angie Peacock at the beginning of the episode. I interviewed her a couple episodes back, and she had very clear sources of symptoms with her the trauma from her experience as a as a in the military. She's a veteran. They had like very traumatic experiences they went through. She experienced, you know, assault and show there that was a very serious source of trauma. You know, there were all kinds. She had, she was wounded, she was injured. I mean, there's all these issues. She had physical gut health issues, and nobody asked about those things and looked at them with curiosity and identified, oh, this is the source of your trauma. We need to treat these things in order to help you heal these actual sources of trauma. She was just diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and put on psychotropic drugs that didn't solve the underlying source of the problems and made things worse. So the first thing is that we have you have to identify what is the source of the symptoms, what is causing these symptoms to occur. And those things need to be treated. You need to treat the source of the symptoms. And when I talk about this in my coaching group, we we look, we talk about it looking at the sources, you know, looking at the symptoms with curiosity, over, you know, not judgment, we're looking at it with curiosity. We don't talk about bipolar disorder, we talk about bipolar symptoms, and we become detectives. You start to become a detective in your life and start to learn how to look for the sources of the symptoms, and then we then we talk about the tools and research that will help you identify the proper things that will help you address the underlying sources of the symptoms. If you have micronutrient insufficiency, we're going to use specialized micronutrients since they're going to help your brain get what it needs to function in a healthy way. If you have trauma, we talk about the different tools, you know, how to use therapy in a way that will help you actually heal, you know, how to use mindfulness meditation in a way that helps you become more self-aware and identify these issues that need to be addressed and processed so that you can heal the trauma, reprocess it, heal it. If you have, if you're struggling because you've had drug cause, you know, symptoms that are caused by medication, most often that needs to be addressed through micronutrients and very safe tapering protocols. So it's important, critical for you to identify the underlying sources of the symptoms and treat them. That that is not the end of the story. Because we, our brains are designed to protect us and it will try to figure out how to cope with things that we're struggling with. And most people will develop coping mechanisms, thoughts and behavior patterns. You know, we have things that we, you know, relationship patterns that we engage in that often are not healthy and often exacerbate the situation, but our brain is just trying to survive. It's trying to protect us. And as we heal the sources of symptoms, it may become more and more apparent that we've got unhealthy thought and behavior patterns. But if we don't do anything to actively change those things, they won't change. They're not going to resolve on their own because they're well-worn pathways. Our brain has learned to respond to certain situations in a certain way because we have developed habits, relationship habits, emotional habits, you know, patterns of coping or not coping with situations. So I'm going to give you some examples. The first one is from my personal life, one of the coping mechanisms that I developed when I was quite young with dealing with depression and anxiety was trying to escape through watching television. And I've talked about this a lot, but it's helpful to kind of understand what I'm talking about here in context. So when I would experience depression or difficult situations like abuse, cope, one of my main coping mechanisms was TV and movies. And when I would do that, I would escape. It was a form of dissociation for me. I would escape into these movies and television shows and kind of lose myself in them. And so over the years, I kept trying to stop myself from engaging in these behaviors. I wasn't resolving the underlying issues because I didn't understand them. I had a psychiatric diagnosis and I didn't look anymore for the sources of my symptoms because I believed I'd been told what was going on. I believed I had a chemical imbalance and I was taking the medication that was supposed to fix it. But I kept trying to go in and change the behaviors. I went to addiction recovery programs because I thought I was addicted to TV. And I would, I, at one point I bought a device called the Power Cup that I put, I plugged the source of the power for the TV into it, and then I would lock it to try and prevent myself from getting into the television and give, you know, give myself one more thing that I would have to do in order to, in order to, you know, watch television. And it wasn't effective because the the reason that had developed, the reason I had developed this coping mechanism was this unprocessed trauma. And the un you know, I didn't have the proper nutrition in my brain to help my brain function in a healthy way. I had sources of symptoms and I was on medication that were suppressing my emotional response. I had all of these issues that I was trying to cope with with television, and I was trying to stop the behavior without resolving the sources of symptoms. And so over time, I, as I started going through the healing process, I started getting my brain what it needed to function in a healthy way. I, you know, I got off the medications safely through a safe titration protocol and got on the micronutrients. My brain started to heal from all the damage from the medications and from the electric convulsive therapy. And then I started learning how to use mindfulness meditation and I started learning how to use therapy in a way that would help me heal. But the habit was still there. And so periodically, I would go through long periods of time sometimes when I wouldn't feel the need to engage in watching lots of television. But I had developed the emotional habit of coping with distress through television. And as social media became a thing, it kind of evolved into social media. So scrolling through YouTube and scrolling through social media was another form of dissociation that I had. So even though I was resolving the sources of the trauma and the and the micronutrient insufficiency and all that, I had was working on resolving those sources, I still had an emotional habit. Anytime I would feel emotional distress or discomfort, I would go to this habit. And it was very frustrating for me to try and figure out like, why do I keep craving this? Why do I keep wanting to do this? And I had to figure out how to change the habit. I had to learn how to change what I did when I experienced those emotions. And mindfulness meditation was actually a big piece of this. Number one, it was it was learning how to be more aware of the source of the discomfort that was causing the craving for better work, you know, better, you know, I guess that's a good way to say it, like the the emotional need to dissociate and and you know, scroll or watch shows or you know, watch social media. But I had to, I had to do something, I had to come up with a different way to manage those things or a different way to respond to those things. And so this is where the habits for healing come in. We talk about those in my program all the time. We talk about you know developing habits for healing. And this is really the latter part of the program. You know, if you if you've read my book, it's you know, the starting with mindfulness meditation, mindfulness meditation, yoga. Um and yoga includes breath work, you know, doing pranayama practices, breathing practices, exercise, learning how to use exercise in a healthy way. And then the last piece of it is learning how to live mindfully, learning how to become aware of the negative, you know, the unhealthy thought and behavior patterns that have developed, the unhealthy coping mechanisms, these habits that developed around your around you to help try and support you when you were struggling with unhealthy emotional responses and dysregulation. But now you have to change the habits, you have to change the behaviors, you have to change the way you respond to distress and the way you respond to these, you know, to difficult circumstances. And also that it has to do with our how we how we interact in relationships. When you have relationship patterns that develop while you are struggling with emotional health, you know, while you're struggling with symptoms of depression or mania or anxiety, you develop unhealthy ways of interacting with people. You know, especially if you have a spouse or you know, close loved ones, family members, you will develop relationship habits. You will develop relationship patterns with them. And as you heal, you know, we it would be nice if as you heal that you would just automatically switch those things, but that's not the case. We have developed habits and you have to change the habits. So The reason why I'm talking about this is a lot of times we don't think about that piece of it. We focus so much on healing the underlying sources of our symptoms that we don't think about how we need to work on changing our habits, changing the way that we respond to things, change, you know, identifying unhealthy thought and behavior patterns so that we can change the way our brain thinks about things. Something that I shared recently that I've been working on is I've had old thought patterns start to pop back up, old ways of thinking about myself. And it's not because of, you know, I've worked through the trauma. I've worked through the trauma that were was the source of those thoughts and behaviors and the way that I view myself. But I have spent, you know, I'm almost 52 years old. I've spent probably over 40 years with these thoughts that have developed and over time and, you know, from early childhood bullying and then, you know, abuse in my first marriage and, you know, unhealthy relationships that I that I had. Over the years, I developed these habits of thinking about myself in a certain way. And when you're going through difficulty, when you're going through difficult circumstances, it's very common for those thoughts to come back up. It's very common for you to start thinking those things again. And so recently I started, you know, struggling with some of those thoughts of, you know, self-doubt and not liking myself, you know, things like that. And I didn't understand why, you know, I thought, what do I do about this? I don't understand why this is coming back up because I sealed I healed the source of the trauma. You know, I healed that trauma. So why why are these thoughts coming up in my mind now? And uh I did a breath work session with um my fantastic, I actually should have her on. She's an amazing somatic therapist. She's she does breath work uh in yoga. Her name is Abby Da. And she and it's so interesting because we don't often think about the habit of how we think. The way that we think about things and the way that our brain reacts to things in our mind is developed over, you know, through habit. And if we don't do something conscientiously to change things in the way that we think about things, it will continue with the habits that we've developed over our lifetime. And so I ended up writing a mirror talk. She calls it mirror talk script for myself. I used AI. This is a really cool tool. We are actually talking the other night in our in our tribe Zoom about the the I the ways that we can use the AI tools to help challenge some of our negative thought and behavior patterns. It was pretty cool. I'm still exploring that, so I'm not ready to necessarily talk about it on here. But it was, I did that, I did this with my uh, I will share how I came up with this Mir Talk script for myself. But I I started by telling AI about my experiences in my childhood and the negative thoughts that developed out of those experiences, and then presented what I wanted to believe about myself and the way I wanted to talk to myself. And that was that was a little bit hard for me because when you when you are used to hearing your brain tell you certain things about yourself, it's really hard to challenge those thoughts sometimes, especially if they're seated deeply in our emotion and we've lived with them for our entire lives. But I I used things that like I have a very good relationship with my mom, and she sees me in a different way sometimes than I see myself. And so I thought, well, I like the way my mom sees me and I want to believe that those things are true. And so I put those things into AI and I said, these are the things I want to believe about myself. And it gave me, and I said then, and I told it, please give me, you know, 90-second mirror talk script for me to use to tell myself these things every day. And so I it pulled it, it gave me this really cool mirror talk script. I only had to change a couple things in it. And the reason I changed them is because I didn't like the way it worded things. But I changed them and started doing 90 seconds of mirror talk with myself every day, looking at myself in the mirror and saying these things. And I hope that you'll hear what I'm saying and understand that what we say to ourselves has tremendous power to affect the way we bel we see ourselves and the way we believe what we believe about ourselves. And we develop thought patterns often, especially if you've been struggling with mental health challenges. We develop unhealthy thought patterns based on coping with these unhealthy experiences, these trauma or our brains not functioning in healthy ways. And even if we resolve the source of the trauma, we can still struggle with how we feel about ourselves because those thought patterns haven't been challenged or changed. You have to conscientiously change the way you think about yourself. And so doing something like mirror talk is a way to change your habit, the habit of how you think about, you know, what you think about and how you think about yourself and what you say to yourself in your own mind. And I have to tell you, even after just a few weeks of doing this mirror talk, it has changed how I feel about myself. It has changed the way I see myself. And I'm going to keep doing it for a long time after this. I don't know if I'll ever stop because I'm understanding now how powerful it is to conscientiously change the habits that I have in the way that I talk about myself and think about myself in my mind. The same thing is true for, you know, as I mentioned before, relationships. So when we interact with somebody, we have habits of the way we interact with them. And especially people that are close to us and anybody who's been with us through, you know, if we're struggling with emotional, our emotional health or our mental health, there are there are habits that develop in the relationship based on often unhealthy ways that we interact. And one of the things that I see regularly in people that I'm coaching are very unhealthy relationships because when one partner is unhealthy, the relationship, even if one partner is healthy and one partner is unhealthy, you can end up with a super unhealthy relationship because the unhealthy partner is interacting in unhealthy ways. And you develop habits in your relationship. And as the unhealthy partner heals, that is not automatically going to change the relationship because you still have to change the patterns in the relationship. You have to change the patterns of how you interact with each other. And I'll I'll give you an example of my youngest and I. I have when I when my older two children were were younger, when they were little, I was very I was struggling a lot with my mental health. And I for and I've talked before about you know struggling with the quote unquote bipolar rage. You know, I would have this like hair trigger and I would get I would dissociate and get very angry and yell and and that and I worked for years to overcome those issues. I worked for years to address the underlying sources of the symptoms and then you know worked on practicing mindfulness, learning how to be aware when I started to get upset, give myself space to make choices about how I interacted with my kids. And it took a lot of time and a lot of effort. And the one that I that was the biggest struggle, honestly, was my oldest, because she and I had developed relationship habits. And so we it it created, you know, one of the one of the ways that I've heard it described, these kinds of relationship habits are is like a dance. And you you know the steps really well and you just do them without even thinking about it. And in order to change the dance, you have one at least one of the partners has to change the steps. You have to change the way you interact with each other. Man, it took a lot of work over the years. And now with my youngest, every once in a while, you know, especially if I'm I'm having a day where I'm really tired or, you know, real you know, really worn out emotionally or something, those little old habits try to work their way back in. So I might start to get, I don't get angry, I don't yell anymore, but you know, I might get agitated and stressed and, you know, kind of speak sharply. But I have developed new habits now. So even if I start to do that, I catch myself very quickly and I think and I immediately apologize and say, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have said that or I shouldn't have reacted that way. And and so she and I have developed new habits. You know, she was when she was little, I was still going through the healing process. So she experienced a little bit of, you know, kind of the unhealthy patterns. But thankfully, I had done so much work with my older two in changing the relationship habits that by the time I got to my youngest, I had developed new relationship habits. I had developed new ways of interacting, I had developed new ways of handling stress. And so it's really critical to conscientiously work on identifying these unhealthy behavior patterns, the unhealthy relationship patterns, and then actively work to change them. And there are, you know, you can you can work with a therapist to do these things. You know, a lot of times it's hard to understand how to establish healthy boundaries in a relationship if you don't understand what healthy boundaries look like or don't even understand what boundaries are. I've talked about this in previous episodes, but I feel like since I brought it up, I probably should say something about it here. But the simplest way to understand what boundaries are was something that my therapist taught me. And I I loved it because for years she had talked about, she and other therapists and other people had talked about boundaries, and I didn't ever admit to anybody that I didn't really know what they were talking about until I finally was in a session and I really wanted to understand what my therapist was saying. And I stopped her and I said, Can you explain to me what boundaries are? I don't think I understand what that is. And she described it as the boundaries of a country, the borders of a country. So the borders of a country define the space that that is that country. And within the borders, the government, you know, the people are responsible for the care of the people inside there, the care of the land, you know, all of the, you know, deciding what's appropriate there, what what is going to be acceptable there, and and what is going to be allowed within the borders. And but they are not responsible for what is happening in other borders. They are not, it's not their prerogative to tell another country what to do or how to behave, right? They're responsible for themselves, and the other countries are responsible for themselves. And you can have treaties, you can have, you know, cooperative relationships with other countries, but ultimately, you know, this country is responsible for themselves, country A is responsible for themselves, and country B is responsible for themselves. And that is what boundaries are. Boundaries are recognizing I am responsible for myself. I am accountable for my behavior. I am responsible for my self-care. I am responsible for the choices that I make, and I am not responsible for controlling somebody else's behavior or, you know, with the exception, of course, of children. Like I am responsible for taking care of my children. But at the same time, you know, I want to be respectful of my kids. I want to be respectful of their autonomy as a person, you know. So I want to teach my children healthy boundaries as they grow. But one thing that happens very frequently in relationships with people that are struggling with their mental health is in erosion of boundaries. You know, there's especially when we have psychiatric diagnosis that make us believe that we have a disease, you know, a bipolar disorder is a disease or a chemical imbalance that they don't have any control over. If you believe that, then they're not responsible for the bad behavior that they engage in when they're struggling with a manic episode or a depressive episode, you know, as they call it. And so then what do you do with somebody that you love that's struggling with those things? You want to help them. And so boundaries get destroyed in these relationships. There's a lot of codependency in these relationships. And something that I have seen happen is a struggle to learn how to have healthy boundaries in those relationships, especially as the partner is trying to heal. Because there weren't healthy boundaries in the first place. And so, in order to change the relationship and change the patterns, you have and change, you know, change the way that you interact with each other and and help to create a healthy relationship, you have to change the habits. You have to change the way that you interact with each other, you have to change the way that you talk to each other, think about each other, interact with each other, and that requires effort. It requires consistent and determined effort. Just like I had to learn to change the way that my brain was thinking about myself. You have to wait, change the way that you talk to each other and the way you interact with each other. You have to stop reacting and start and start responding. You have to, you know, learn what healthy boundaries look like and then learn how to have healthy boundaries in the relationship. So the reason why I brought this up is I've I've seen this, I've recognized it in myself, and then I've also seen it in other people as I've gone through, you know, I've coached people in the in the upsiders tribe, and also as I've you know observed other people that are asking for help, but don't really know what that looks like, what help would look like, is it's important to have both pieces in the healing process. You have to identify the underlying sources of your symptoms and then treat the underlying sources using research-based integrated tools that will help to actually address and heal the underlying sources of the problem of the symptoms. So healing needs to occur. But part of the healing process is then changing the thoughts and behaviors and coping mechanisms that developed as a result of these of the unhealthy emotional responses and symptoms that you were struggling with in the first place. You cannot do one without the one without the other if you really want to recover. And it's not an overnight process. That's the other thing that I think is really hard for people to understand sometimes is that healing takes time. We have a society that wants things to be done quickly. We don't have very long attention spans. We've been convinced by the psychiatric industry and the medical industry, frankly, that all you need is a pill and that's gonna make everything better. And so, even a lot of the people who are looking for more holistic approaches to recovery want a quick fix. Like, you know, people want to just know like, can I take the micronutrients and then everything is going to be better? Yes, it will help make things better, but that's not the only piece. You can't just take some micronutrients and all of a sudden all your problems go away. It's really important to look at both sides of this equation. You have to identify the underlying sources of the symptoms, treat the underlying source with patience, because healing takes time, and you have to address the unhealthy patterns, unhealthy thought and behavior patterns, unhealthy coping mechanisms, unhealthy relationship patterns that have developed out of the emotional struggle that you've been experiencing for years, often. So I I hope that this is helpful. It should be hopeful. It should help you feel hope because there is something you can do about this. You don't have to struggle for the rest of your life. That's good news. You know, a lot of times one of the things that is so sad to me when somebody is struggling with this is that they just don't feel like they can put the effort in, the sustained effort necessary to heal. But as I mentioned at the very end of my book, your life is already hard. You can choose the hard that keeps you stuck and keeps you struggling, and you will continue to be stuck and struggle. Or you can choose the hard that is the work that will eventually lead to healing and recovery. And it I again, I mentioned this, I've mentioned this in previous episodes, but it is so important to make sure that you are surrounding yourself by influences that are going to encourage you through that hard that leads to healing, that are going to encourage you, you know, yes, this is hard right now, but it does get better. I've seen, I've seen healthy, I've seen recovery, and and I promise you it's worth the effort. Surround yourself with people who are on the same journey, with people that are going through similar things, who understand what you're going through and what it feels like and the struggle that you're experiencing, but also understand that there's hope on the other side of it, that it does lead, you know, this effort that you're putting in does lead to recovery. It does lead to better things. Make sure that you're listening to uplifting podcasts, things that are encouraging you, that are giving you insights and helping you to learn more about how to think in healthy ways and how to respond in healthy ways and the tools that you can use to help change the way you interact with the world world. Make sure that you're filling your life with good things that will help encourage you as you're struggling through the trenches sometimes, through the healing process, because we already have enough bad in the world. We already have enough discouragement in our own heads. Now it's already hard enough there. We need sources of support and encouragement that are going to help keep us moving towards healing and recovery. If you have any questions about anything I've talked about, I hope you'll send me an email. I would love to hear from you. And make sure that you, if you're new to the podcast, check out the earlier episodes. I've got lots of great episodes that talk about, you know, sources of symptoms, tools that will help you with, you know, recovery. There's some really great episodes that can help you along this path. If you haven't read my book, I encourage you to get a copy of it, The Upside of Bipolar, seven steps to heal your disorder. And if you're ready to start your healing journey, check out the link in the show notes that talks about the upsiders tribe. Thanks for joining me on the Upside of Bipolar. Your journey to recovery matters, and I'm grateful you're here. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.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