between the broken places

Posts Tagged ‘triggers’

Weird Triggers

I have some weird triggers.  They are small occurrences that send me over the edge and can lead me down a dark path of anger, anxiety, and guilt very quickly.  This may or may not be a “Bipolar” thing but it creates many of the same feelings that can last for weeks during an episode and if I’m not careful it can trigger rapid cycling.

One of my stranger triggers involves dinner.  Yes, that’s right, I hate dinner.  I have no problem eating dinner and honestly it’s not the making of dinner, it’s the deciding what’s for dinner.  Can’t stand it.  Who died and left me in charge of what everyone else in the house wants to eat?  I don’t want someone else deciding what I’m going to eat, so I don’t want to do it for others.  Yet, society states that it’s my job; my J.O.B.  I did not apply for this job and I don’t want it.

But who else is going to do it?  What happens to these people I live with when I’m away?  Do they stop eating?  I don’t think so.  Do they just scrounge for food? Probably.  I can hear the conversation now.

“Hey Kate, are you hungry?” My husband would yell up the stairs.

“Yeah, a little. “ Our youngest would yell down the stairs.

“What do you want to eat?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to eat?”

“I don’t know.”

And so it would go, back and forth until Kate would make her way downstairs and the two of them would begin to forage through the kitchen.  Eventually, some decision would be made and dinner would be eaten and viola, I would be nowhere to be found.  However did they manage?

I’ve explained this dilemma to my family.  I’ve done my best to make them understand that constantly picking out the dinner menu makes me crazy.  And yet the expectation still exists and it still makes me nuts.

Tonight my husband, who sometimes works from home, came downstairs around 5:30 and asked what we were doing for dinner.  I was on the computer, working on my website and my writing – my new job.  I told him that I hadn’t thought about dinner because I wasn’t hungry.  He began to bang around the kitchen, digging around for food and small containers so that he could consolidate the leftovers already in the fridge.  And that’s when my anxiety kicked in.  I could feel his annoyance at my lack of interest in dinner.  He grumbled; I panicked.

“If you’ll eat something small, I’ll make baked mac and cheese.” I tried to placate.

“I’ve got it, don’t worry about it.” He retorted.

Ugh, ‘don’t worry about it,’ the words that meant I should worry about it.  Shheesh.

I need to interject here because I’m making my husband sound like an ass.  He’s not and we’ve got an awesome relationship.  This is just one of those issues that he forgets bugs me and I can’t help but get bugged.

“Do you want me to run to the store and pick up a chicken?”

“That would be ok, but I’ll go get it.”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ve got it.” I grabbed my keys and stormed out.  I popped him the finger once I was in the garage.  Coward.  I grumbled the whole way to the store.

When I returned home I tossed the food on the counter, began to bang around as he tried to apologize.  He said he’d been grumpy and he was sorry.  Too bad I was pissed off now.

I have learned to reel in the anger; deep breathing.  I’ve also figured out that I can avoid the full onset of craziness by simply letting go; forgiveness.  And I do everything I can to not be so hard on myself; no guilt.

Now wait until I tell you about the joy I experience when my daughter asks me to go to the fabric store.

Out of Context – Life of a Bipolar Chick

Per Dictionary.com the word Context means the following:

con⋅text (noun)

1. the parts of a written or spoken statement that precede or follow a specific word or passage, usually influencing its meaning or effect: You have misinterpreted my remark because you took it out of context.
2. the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular event, situation, etc.

Bipolar Disorder is an Out of Context mental illness. It takes normal, everyday events or comments and knocks them out of context, sending them back to my brain jumbled, with a trigger attached no longer allowing me to make sense of the situation, much less react in an appropriate manner. This has the ability to leave me paranoid, irrational, confused and suicidal, among other things.

The worst part about thinking out of context, is when those around you realize that’s how your brain works and they use it to their advantage. My ex-husband once told me during an argument that he could love me more if I were prettier. Yes, his exact words; “I could love you more if you were prettier.” There were no surrounding sentences to place this comment into some wacked out context; it was a random thought thrown towards my head with the speed of a flying dinner plate. He tried to play it off, told me I had misunderstood…again. That I was always picking individual comments and holding people accountable for my “out of context” interpretation.

To this I say: HEY! Speak in context…say what you mean and mean what you say. I’ve got enough trouble trying to sort out all your crap on a daily basis. I don’t want to have to decipher your comments as if they were Di Vinci’s Code. Yes, my brain twists the truth and tells me lies…I don’t need any help from idiots who think it’s funny to watch me react badly to something and then try to wrestle myself out of the cage I’ve locked myself into.

When I am living “Out of Context”, I am forever apologizing for not understanding what someone was trying to say, for taking something to heart that wasn’t meant to go there or for reacting to someone else’s action as if it were meant only to hurt me. This is why I have had to learn about my “triggers”.

Triggers are unhappy, sad or even joyful events that can make depression or mania more likely to occur. The baseline trigger is generally something that happened in the past which caused an extreme reaction and now some new event twists the Bipolar brain into a visceral response because of some familiarity to the initial situation. With the exception of the originating moment, the new reaction is an “out of context” moment caused by Bipolar Disorder. This is why we have to learn our triggers, understand how they played out in the first place and put the whole situation back into context to help avoid new and exacerbated reactions.