We Recently Found Out My Husband Is Bipolar
Today, feeling overworked, my husband exaggerated about something he said I hadn’t done to pick a fight with me, when I pointed it out he reacted by imitating me in a singsong childish way! I’ve asked him not to mimic me like that. He wants to control the fight, he gets to yell and bully and if I defend myself he yells at me because I’m the one extending the fight by keeping the fight going on and “Can’t he just be mad and stressed out without me making it worse?”
We recently found out he’s bipolar, we’ve been together for 15 years and suddenly everything makes perfect sense. Sometimes he’s wonderful and loving, sometimes I imagine all the bad things I did in my youth and I think this must be my punishment.
When we met I knew he was temperamental, but I didn’t mind ‘much’, he was also funny and he treated me well. I also thought, it was a breath of fresh air to meet someone who didn’t hide his faults, at least I knew what they were right? I thought he just needed someone to ease his burdens, I thought I could be a calming influence. And, to a very good extent, I have been. He even gets along great with his family now and that was a lot of work to repair a lifetime of fighting! However, I always thought someday these phases between us would end. This week, with this diagnosis, I realize we’ll never get there. He’ll always have these long mean phases where he builds up and gets nasty until he picks this huge fight with me, and I’m not the type to be bullied so it ends up being an argument and he thinks if he turns into a bear he can shout me down and make me subservient. I’m not that girl. Now I have permanent hearing damage.
I don’t want to leave the marriage, I love him and I want to stay for the long run but realizing that this is going to keep happening for the rest of my life is draining me like few things have ever done. Last year I said I would like to start going to a psychiatrist because I need someone to talk to, he almost lost his mind. Why you ask? Because he wouldn’t be there to defend himself and there is a reasonable argument for everything he’s done and a reason why I’ve been in the wrong. So, I get to talk to nobody.
He keeps mental ledgers of people who he feels have wronged him, usually by saying or doing something 10+ years ago they never apologized for. Even though they changed their behavior, he didn’t get his apology. I can’t defend them or he gets mad at me for defending them. Sometimes those people are my grown children or my friends.
After each blow-up he immediately acts like nothing happened and gets upset if I remain upset, I have to pretend to be fine even though I’m screaming inside. Because in his mind he got to get mad at me for what he was angry about and now the fight is over. If I bring it up he gets to be mad again and will yell at me again. Meanwhile, I want to cry because he almost always blew it all up to cause this huge fight so he Could yell at me. I just don’t know what to do.
When he really calms down, when he’s ready to go into the honeymoon phase he starts to apologize for everything and tells me how much he loves me and how happy I make him. I feel like he’s just apologizing so he can do it again later. That used to work, now I just wonder how long it will last until he flips his switch again. Now I’m expected to be mad at the disease in his brain and not at him. I get that. But he’s the one being mean to me, every single time. How do you forgive that when you know they are going to do it again and again without end? It’s like, now you Have to accept your abuser because they can’t help but abuse you… for the rest of our lives, because sometimes it’s nice for a while. Before I was looking at the rest of our lives thinking that someday he would stop this and now there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. My tunnel is full of unfair fights and hearing damage and stretches of happiness that I can’t ever truly enjoy because they end without notice.