(To explain: I recently started CBT and my therapist took me aside one day and said that she didn't think CBT was going to do much for me - and gave me a lot of DBT resources and pushed me to contact them. When I was reading about DBT, I read that mostly it's used for BPD, and found this forum, and I would like to say that though I don't have an official diagnosis, I have never read so much that so accurately reflects my experience, and I am so lonely and would really like to talk to someone who understands how frustrating and upsetting these feelings are). 

My husband has bipolar. He is a really wonderful person, who has worked very hard on himself, and has encouraged me to seek help and treatment for my own mental illnesses. He is also incredibly smart and direct and logical. He comes from a place of thinking, and careful, considered judgment and does not mince his words to save my feelings. 

Last night, he was having a manic episode, and I chose that moment to tell him that he doesn't take enough pictures of me (or that he does very rarely). I take photos of my husband all the time, because I think he is so beautiful, I often feel compelled. I post photos of him on social media, often. The last time he posted an image of me, it was a video I requested he take. That was three and a half months ago. He shows his affection for me in numerous ways, all the time - far more than the average partner could or should, but I am a bottomless, never-ending pit of need for affection and love and adoration. I want to live in a Disney dreamworld where everything is perfect and everyone is kind to me all the time and compassionate and understanding of my sudden mood swings. I am able to move past these things very quickly, but my husband's response to annoyance is often to suddenly explode and leave the room, and then I chase him around trying to get him to calm down, to diffuse the situation, to be gentle and that enrages him even more. He told me I was being a whiny bitch and a child and those two things sent me down a hole, googling verbal abuse and abusive partners. Of course, I went after him into the living room, trying to touch him, which he hates when he's angry and panicked, and he told me to go to my room, or to pick any room he wasn't in, or if I had to be in the same room as him, to stay quiet. I had taken GBH and I had been falling asleep, and he told me I was flopping about and that I look dumb and ugly when I'm passing out, and I know it was his mania speaking, but the irrational part of my brain went completely insane. I feel disgusting and hideous all the time and even hearing those things is like a shot of pure poison to my heart. I just felt like I was dying, like I always do. I can't run anywhere. My home is a prison. I have so few friends left, and the ones I do have left, I don't want them to just be punching bags, only calling them when in crisis and ignorin them the rest of the time because I'm just so tired of being alive. It's like there's this energy in my body that I can't release, no matter how much I squawk, or cry, or beg, and begging just makes him hate me. I understand it. I hate me. 

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In the end, I kept chasing him around until he completely freaked out at me and told me to go to my room or he would kill me. I did, and then he drove out in his car. I tried to stop him, nearly getting hit and running out into the road (what did I think, I'm impervious to a car?) and called his best friend, because he was so enraged I was worried he would hurt himself. Of course, he thought I was being manipulative and it was a tactic. Perhaps subconsciously it was. I just had no idea what to do, and I was so distraught and panicked and upset, I just needed to talk to someone who knew better than me, who knew him longer and had seen more of his manic episodes.

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I get really tired sometimes. I had a very abusive childhood - my father was a very loud, violent man, and when men shout at me it is like I cannot even see through the fog. My body shuts down - it has been at least twelve hours and I am still shaking. I am so tired of being this way. I wish I was normal, and I will never be normal - not with medication, not with therapy. There is no amount of love that will fix me. If I keep badgering my husband when he needs space, I will lose my marriage. Space is such a normal, reasonable request, and I know from experience that my husband calms down when he has space. As bipolar people go, he has his shit remarkably together.

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A large part of this is that when I am kind, I am nothing but a big glowing ball of kindness. I can take care of him when I see he is in his version of a panic, but when he sees I am in mine, he becomes enraged by how irrational and insecure I am being. He is highly intelligent - intimidatingly so, and speaks rapidly, and aggressively, while flailing and failing to understand his neurotic, tissue-thin wife. I understand his reaction - but I am the worst person to deal with that, especially when my mood has swung low due to insecurity.

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Thanks for reading. 