Bipolar With a Side of Abandonment Anxiety

Along with the challenges that bipolar disorder brings to our marriage, my wife was recently diagnosed with abandonment anxiety as well. Reflecting over the years of our relationship, it makes sense now as the signs and numerous red flags were right in front of our faces, but we never really paid much attention until recently.

Without going into great detail of my wife’s past, yet for the sake of clarification, her past was an extremely tough and traumatizing experience. Even today, it is still difficult for me to hear about some of the stories she’s able to share with me as it is challenging for me to comprehend the ugliness that she has witnessed in her own life.

Aside from a very small number of people, she had been abandoned several times in her life by people that she had grown to trust and expected to be there for her through thick and thin. Through the years, she developed some understandable trust issues and she very rarely will let her guard down, including with me to this day. As her primary supporter and, of course, her husband…it makes it very difficult to negotiate the day-to-day challenges we may come across and when her bipolar cycles beings to shift, it only adds to the frustration when trying to be there and help, for both of us.

She has told me a number of times that I have been the only one to really show her how to live, love and be loved as a person. This comes to me as a wonderful compliment, however, the anxiety has progressed over the years and certain situations that may seem normal to the unexperienced with manging a relationship with mental health issues, become very difficult for some to deal with. Unfortunately, this affliction convinces my wife that any other relationship I may have with other people is a direct threat to her and will create a fear deep within her that I, too, will abandon her.

I have always been one to cherish my relationships with other people and have had strong and very positive friendships with those I have been lucky enough to connect with. My wife, again due to her past, has never been able to experience this and was unable to truly develop such social skills. When we first started out on our own relationship together, it was difficult for her to understand how I could manage different friendships, especially with the opposite sex.

Until recently, we assumed that most of her issues were more of a jealousy issue than anything else. We explored the idea that maybe it was a direct connection with her bipolar disorder, however, these anxieties had intensified over the past year, much faster than the progression of her bipolar cycles and episodes.

The final red flag that told us that this was much more than mere jealousy occurred after I had reconnected with an old friend, which happened to be female, from high school after about 15 years of losing contact. We had a great friendship back then and nothing more as there were no romantic feelings whatsoever to worry about from either end. My wife was perfectly fine with the friendship and encouraged the communication so it seemed she had begun to trust and all was appearing to be good.

One evening, we were in the living room with some of the kids and my wife asked me if I could help her out with something on her computer. I needed to get some information from an email I had so I used her computer to retrieve what I needed and got her on her way. A few minutes later, my wife was growing visibly upset and calmly asked the kids if they could go to their room for a bit. As I sat on the other couch wondering if she had located an unexpected expense or something similar, I could tell that this was something more than a misplaced bill payment.

She immediately flipped her laptop aside, stood up from where she was sitting and began screaming and panicking about me possibly having an affair with the friend that I had recently reconnected with. While on her computer, I had apparently left my email open after I helped her with whatever she was working on and she noticed a message that launched her into the most severe and intense episode that we have ever experienced in our relationship.

I have never had to manage such an outburst and didn’t know what to do next. Meanwhile, as her anxiety had fully engaged, she could not stop crying, screaming and started throwing anything she could get her hands on at me. Plates, phones and even tried to pick up one of the dining room chairs, luckily she was not successful and managed to run off to the bedroom for a bit.

With shattered dinner plates on the kitchen and dining room floor, I tried to make my way to the bedroom to ensure that she was not doing anything else destructive. With the amount of anger, confusion and shock that was in the house at the time, I checked on the kids, which were all pretty shaken up and I then made my way out to the kitchen again to survey the area and calm down myself. She stormed back out and was still accusing me of carrying on an emotional affair and was gathering up some of her things to leave me.

She ushered the kids out of their rooms and told them to get into her car and that she was leaving me and taking the kids. I managed to stop her, only by threatening that I would involve the police if she left with the kids especially in her present condition. She went back to the bedroom, not talking to me but still very angry at me…the only time in our relationship where I felt real hatred from her. I calmed the children down the best I could and still very upset myself, I decided to leave the house myself for a bit and give her some space.

No, there was no emotional affair. There were not and hasn’t been any other romantic feelings toward another woman. The fact that my wife has never been able to manage a successful friendship with a member of the opposite sex and her abandonment anxiety had pushed her over the edge into a panic that she has never experienced before.

On top of her anxiety disorder, she also has Approach-Avoidance Repetition Complex, which she sometimes uses as a defense mechanism. In this case, her anxiety of being abandoned by me for another woman fired her AARC and immediately pushed me as far away from her as she could in order for her to hurt me (by leaving me), before I could hurt her (by me leaving first). This triggered a bipolar episode as well, throwing her into severe hypomania with a mixed state due to her ultradian cycling and the combination of all of these fed on each other.

Bipolar disorder aside, abandonment anxiety and AARC combined is a very difficult monster to handle. We have invested over one-third of our existence to each other and have been though many ups and downs. Even so, this anxiety still presses my wife to believe that I will simply get up one day and leave her. The fact that she has been abandoned so many times in the past only reminds her of the pain, and the attack on her self-esteem tries to convince her that, “Everybody else has left you, so will he….wait for it.”

Playing the role of a supporter in one’s life that has gone through such a horrible past is extremely challenging as again, they have gone though a hell that most of us will never understand. No matter how hard we work to keep our loved one’s securities up, these disorders fight dirty and rarely allow us to get ahead and keep them close and the whole AARC issue only amplifies these challenges as their best defense truly is a to have a good offense.

Being strong enough to be there at its worst, is what solidifies the strength between the sufferer and the supporter. It’s tiring and sometimes thankless work, but that’s what love is all about when you’re involved in such a relationship. There have been many times where it seemed easier to give up and walk away, but at the end of the day, that’s what this horrible illness wants me to do…but it’s not what she wants me to do and I’m not going anywhere.

With as much love and understanding that we’ve put into the relationship since then, we’ve managed to jump over the hurdles and have a much better understanding of the “why” of what has driven many of the past challenges, we’re now closer to dealing with these issues even before they occur and that alone has made the relationship that much better.

With a passion to reach out and to help others, Rich opens up a direct view into the trials and tribulations that come with managing a bipolar relationship and how to use real-world techniques to aid in stability and support.

Rich Wallace

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