Maintaining Personal Boundaries When You Love Someone With Bipolar Disorder

It can be pretty tiring loving someone with bipolar disorder. It’s like Forrest Gump’s “box of chocolates” in that you never know what you’re going to get from one day to the next.

Take today for instance… we’ve just had a brilliant long weekend full of friends and surfing. We laughed a lot and enjoyed the time hanging out in the sun. I woke up this morning still feeling great, the effects of the weekend lingered, and I bounced out of bed to walk the dog.

My partner, on the other hand, slept late and eventually got up to drink some coffee. He had a list of things he had planned to do today but he found himself completely fried. The stimulation of the weekend was too much and he slumped on the couch to watch the footy highlights. He will sit there all day and eventually start to feel like a failure. He’ll ruminate on the fact that he had a list of things to do and he hasn’t done any of it and then he’ll decide he’s a “waste of space”. Guilt and shame will kick in and, if we’re lucky, he’ll come back out of this cycle in a few days. If we aren’t lucky it could be a couple of weeks.

It used to be a shock to me how this could happen. I used to second guess myself and try to figure out what I had “done” to make it happen to him. I used to think I must have said something to upset him. I used to get drawn into his depressed mood and withdraw with him feeling completely inadequate that I couldn’t make it better for him.

I used to. I don’t do that anymore. One thing loving someone with bipolar has taught me is the importance of setting personal boundaries. We’ve all heard about the need to set boundaries but…

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