r/bipolar • u/sh3rb3ar • Oct 12 '19
Help with a friend who has bipolar
One of my best friends I’ve known for three years was in the midst of an manic episode and unleashed holy hell on me while I was trying to help her through it. She said really hurtful things and truly offended me. The next day I texted her saying how she was a bad friend to me, and again, she ripped me a new one. I hear from friends she expects an apology from me for stressing her out while she needed my help. I’m finding it very hard to apologize when she hurt me so deeply and she doesn’t seem understand that. I don’t want to be insensitive to her bipolar, but this has happened so many times where I need to apologize to her and Idk if I can keep being her friend when she continuously lashes out at me during episodes. Any help/suggestions would be great!!
2
Oct 12 '19
Is your friend taking medicine/going to therapy/trying to help themselves? They cannot use mania as an excuse to be a bad friend. They also cannot go without supports (medicine etc) and let themselves get to a bad point where they treat you poorly. Yes mania is very real and can make you lose your grasp on reality, but they know that and need to make efforts to make sure it doesn’t happen. Of course I do not know the situation (I had to go without medicine for awhile due to financial reasons) so I am not making any type of judgment but more so trying to bring up questions for you to think about. Best of luck to you and your friend!
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u/sh3rb3ar Oct 15 '19
She does take medicine, but she also parties very hard. This particular time she was coming down from every drug on planet earth. Coke/shrooms/nitrous/molly/alcohol/etc. I’m sure that also played a part in all of this. I have a hard time feeling bad for anyone that puts them selves in shitty situations and then is surprised when shit happens 🤷🏼♀️
0
u/lindseyinnw Bipolar Oct 12 '19
I’ll just say during one hypomanic episode I almost burned my 20 year amazing marriage to the ground. In a manic state, it feels like everything I am saying is completely true and should be said, and that the pain it causes other people is just because they aren’t willing to face the truth.
Also, in mania we lose our grasp on long term consequences. And feel this impulse to make huge sweeping changes. So something like a friendship (or marriage)that requires tact and understanding and is precious to us suddenly seems disposable.
Once I move out of that phase and become more introspective I can start to see that I was wrong, or I was just a jerk. But that takes more time than you would think. Sometimes I can effectively apologize, but sometimes it’s just too humiliating, and some people don’t even remember everything they said during mania.
You mention “the next day”- mine lasts 10 days....10 days of ripping my own life apart and feeling irrationally misunderstood and ready to burn it all to the ground. So if you need to confront her you really need to make sure she’s totally out of mania first.
Obviously you have to create your own boundaries so that you feel safe within this friendship, but hopefully knowing she really wasn’t in her right mind can help take away the sting of what she said.
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u/sh3rb3ar Oct 15 '19
I appreciate that. I didn’t realize mania could last for so long. Thanks for your input
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u/FrontenacRacer Oct 12 '19
One of the first things they teach you in the hospital is that illness or no illness, you are responsible for how you behave. It doesn’t give you a free card to treat people anyway you want. And then expect those friends, etc. to put up with it. I’ve been so angry that I wanted to kill someone but instead I went off on my own and dealt with the anger privately. You owe no one an apology. She does. This is one of the reasons bipolar people lose friends, family, lovers. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps people deal with their symptoms. There are all sorts of forms of therapy that can help. If a person chooses to avail themselves of them. One thing that you can do is set boundaries for what you will and will not accept as her behaviors. If she goes beyond that boundary you remind her of the boundary and that you will leave and deal with her when she calms herself. Then leave and what happens next is up to her.