Controlling Disinterest

Posted by fxckfeelings on February 7, 2013

As anyone who’s loved someone crazy or addicted knows—or really, anyone who’s watched any non-duck or -storage related programming on A&E—some addicted and/or mentally ill people take too much responsibility for the impact of their behavior on family, and others put too much responsibility on their family for saving them from themselves. In actuality, your job is never to act on your feelings of responsibility until you’ve first observed, and then accepted, what you actually control. The result may suck, and leave you feel totally helpless, but you need never be a slave of guilt when you’ve done what you can with what you’ve got (which is hopefully more than basic cable).
–Dr. Lastname

My wife (we’re gay) has Tourette’s syndrome, anger issues, and a tendency to drink more than she should. I have Bipolar disorder, and an obliviousness to other people’s feelings that is sometimes intentional, sometimes not. My wife and I dated for seven years before we got married, so it’s not like we didn’t know each other’s diagnoses and drama, but most for most of that time I was well-medicated, held down a full time job with benefits, and felt like I wasn’t being my real self. Last summer my anti-depressants kicked me into a full manic break. “God” told me to start collecting camping/survival gear and move in with friends in my home state to work on a civil rights campaign and spend time with my family. We won the campaign, and I got some cherished time with two relatives in their dying days, but I completely f*cked us financially, and ruined my wife’s trust in me. She is adamant that marriage is forever, whether we’re happy or not, and we are going to make it work. I love her, but I’m pretty sure I’m an Asshole, there’s no reason to believe this won’t happen again, and if she doesn’t get rid of me I will ruin her life, whether I want to or not. She wants stability and kids. I don’t think I can provide those things for her. My goal is to reconcile my wife’s expectations with the real limitations imposed by my case of crazy.

As we’ve often said, the best way to know for sure that you’re not an Asshole™ is the fact that you even considered the possibility that you’re an Asshole™. Assholes™ may feel injured, but, since they know it was someone else’s fault, they never feel guilty. Sadly, as a non-Asshole™, you’re forced to feel both.

So just because you’re mortified by what your last manic period did to your family finances doesn’t make you an Asshole™ or a dangerous marital partner, even though that’s the way you feel. It just makes you a good person struggling with a bad illness.

Worrying about what you’ll do when you’re manic means you’re well motivated to manage your medications, jobs, and finances intelligently and without shame so as to protect you and yours from illness as well as possible. You probably learned something from the last manic break that will help you next time, so between that and your dedication to working around your illness, you have less reason than most to take the symptoms of your illness personally. Your mania may be an Asshole™, but you aren’t.

Whether you have another episode or not, however, you have no business taking responsibility for your wife’s choices; she might be your wife, but they’re her business. If you’d hidden the fact of your bipolar illness from her, you’d have good reason to feel guilty but even if you did, she understands the risks now, so if she wants to stay married, that’s her problem. At the very least, it means that she loves you, and if she does, she should appreciate how hard you work on the problems you’ve got.

If you’re feeling intensely self-critical and responsible for everyone’s bad feelings, you’re probably depressed, since there’s nothing like depression for producing that kind of thinking. People with bipolar illness spend more time being depressed than manic, and antidepressant treatment, as you’ve discovered, often does more harm than good once you’ve been manic. Just knowing you’re depressed is important, however, because you know, not just that it will eventually get better, but that it’s filling your mind will bullshit you have no reason to believe.

The issue isn’t the harm your illness will do your wife—she can protect herself with a separate bank account and other practical measures for managing worst case mental illness scenarios—but the lack of realistic thinking on both of your parts. You’re punishing yourself with a guilt-fest when you should take credit for your marriage’s having survived a tough manic episode. Your wife is talking about having kids when she needs to get her drinking under control and find better ways to manage her feelings, including not personalizing her mistrust of your bipolar illness into a mistrust of you.

You aren’t helping your wife by taking responsibility for her problems or the part of your problems you don’t control; remember, drinking and poor emotional control are her problems, not yours, and they pose a larger threat to family stability than does your illness. You’ll do her more good by reminding her that she needs to get sober than by accepting responsibility for her pain.

So stop kicking yourself for a bad manic episode. You won your political campaign, you learned to avoid those antidepressants, your marriage survived, and you’re ready to work again. Stand by your willingness to do what you can to prevent relapse and urge your wife to take her own responsibility for family stability by assessing whether she drinks and yells too much (problems that may be related).

You’re obviously devoted to one another, despite these serious problems. If you can both learn to manage them effectively and without apology, yours won’t just be an Asshole™-free union, but a divorce-free one, as well.

STATEMENT:
“I feel my last manic episode destroyed my most important commitments but here I am, stable again, with an intact marriage and a determination to get back to work and keep my symptoms in check. I can’t guarantee that I’ll always be in control, but I won’t let shame stop me from living my life, protecting myself from further episodes, and limiting my responsibility to what I actually control.”

I know my father wants to stop using cocaine, but he keeps slipping. He was a wonderful dad for many years, earning a good living, running his own travel agency, until I was in my late teens and my mother told me we didn’t have any money. I confronted him, he lied, and then he finally confessed and we used their 401K to get him into rehab. And then again, 6 months later. And again. Now, though my college money is gone, I’ve made it through on scholarship, but my mother doesn’t have any retirement and she keeps putting everything she has into one more rehab. I don’t want to give up on my father, and I don’t know what to say to my mother. My goal is to help them both.

It feels right to take responsibility for the welfare of your family (see above), but it becomes dangerous if your responsibility is unlimited and covers something out of your control that can drain you dry. Your father’s weakness for cocaine has that potential, and if it’s truly likely that he can’t stop himself, you and your mother need to create a boundary to protect yourself from the risks of his addiction (including the endless costs of his treatment) or the harm will be that much worse.

Limiting the amount you give doesn’t mean you’ve given up on him, just that, as with any severe illness that might befall a family member, you’re ready to go all in only on a treatment that seems likely to help, being otherwise obliged to conserve those resources for other goals, such as your mother’s security. Those are the ideals and priorities your father would share (if he weren’t afflicted with an illness that attacks both ideals and priorities).

So don’t measure your love for your father by how much you and your mother sacrifice to save him. Instead, ask yourself why a new treatment is likely to accomplish something that a similar, recent treatment hasn’t, weighing the benefit of helping him against the benefit of applying the resource elsewhere and the risk of losing it altogether. The best way of helping your mother is to share this thinking when you think it’s necessary; ignore feelings and explain your moral priorities and your concerns about throwing good money—what little you have left—against bad.

Then let your father know that he doesn’t seem any closer to sobriety and that you don’t think intensive treatment is worthwhile. Your opinion may cause him pain, but it hurts him more to believe that he’s changing when he isn’t. All you know is that he’ll need to take additional steps—find some way to make an additional commitment—before treatment is likely to work.

Regardless of how responsible you feel for your father’s recovery, drawing the line where you see fit will do more good than making him feel better—feeling better is what he takes cocaine for—and may persuade your mother to follow your example and erect protections (and create savings) of her own.

STATEMENT:
“I feel like my father would get clean if I could figure out a way to intervene more forcefully, but I know my family has done everything it can to help and that addiction is sometimes too strong for anyone to overcome. It’s better for us to face that fact, both to prevent my father from pretending that he’s doing better than he is and to protect my resources, and hopefully my mother’s, from being totally depleted. In the absence of sobriety, that’s how we can best overcome his illness.”