I'm pretty sure I've mentioned in previous blog posts that my mom also lives with a clinically diagnosed anxiety disorder. I'm pretty sure that I've also mentioned that she does a great job at managing and living with her anxiety disorder. What I haven't mentioned before is that my other parent lived with bipolar disorder for which he refused to follow through on any kind of treatment plan. In addition to the untreated bipolar disorder, he also had pretty extreme issues with power and control that made him an abusive person. The fact that he self-medicated for the bipolar disorder with alcohol only exacerbated the power and control issues and worsened his bipolar-related impulse control issues.
Growing up with my father in the house for the short time before the end of the relationship, I mostly remember fear. I remember his anger, the yelling, and the times when he would become violent. I remember other times, too, when he was downright cruel in very calculated ways that had nothing to do with impulsive, violent outbursts. I remember the multiple suicide attempts when my mother would try to get him to leave to end the abuse. I also remember the multiple times he had to go into in-patient treatment to get his medications and the rest of his treatment plan sorted out, but then he'd always go back to the same hurtful pattern as soon as he was released.
His family and sometimes mine would make excuses for his behavior. He had bipolar disorder, and they blamed the anger issues and even the abuse on the bipolar disorder. For some reason, nobody ever really pointed out that it was his responsibility to treat and manage the combination of his bipolar disorder, his power and control issues, and his drinking in order to not be the abusive person that he was.
As you can imagine, with the way people linked his violent behavior with his mental illness, I also made that same link in my young brain, and it stuck there for years. In medical appointments, I often heard doctors talk about my genetic predisposition for mental illness (which doctors made seem like an inevitable thing) because of my father's bipolar disorder. As a result of that kind of input, I was terrified of developing any mental illness, because in my mind, mental illness could make me more like the man that had caused so much fear and hurt in my family.
I spent a lot of time as a teen monitoring myself to make sure I wasn't LIKE HIM. I monitored my anger very closely. I monitored myself for signs of depression. When the intrusive thoughts made their appearance, one of my thoughts besides thinking I was possessed was, "Is this going to make me LIKE HIM?" This fear of being LIKE HIM may have played a small part in why I refused to acknowledge the fact that something was wrong and I why I didn't seek treatment. It definitely played a part in my earlier refusal to accept my mental illness as a thing with which I could co-exist peacefully.
The thing that I didn't realize until much later than I should have was that I was never going to be like him, even if I developed a mental illness, even if I developed the same mental illness. Although his mental illness was often used as an excuse, it wasn't what truly made him the person that hurt our family. (Because, as we all know, living with bipolar disorder doesn't just make someone uncontrollably violent.) His choices made him that person. He actively made the choice to continually behave in ways that were violent, abusive, and cruel. He actively made the choice not to go to therapy and not to take his prescribed mood stabilizing medications. He actively made the choice to self-medicate with alcohol even though he knew it wasn't healthy. Since he actively chose to be the way he was, I realized that I could actively choose to be different from him, even with a mental illness. I was already actively choosing not to be like him before the mental illness became an issue, and I could continue making choices that were different from him as I learned to live with my mental illness.
I'll end with this: Having an abusive, mentally ill parent, especially when we actually hear people linking the abuse with the mental illness, can make us afraid of confronting, dealing with, and accepting a genetic predisposition to develop a mental illness because we may worry about becoming LIKE THEM with mental illness. But...just because we're genetically predisposed to develop mental illness because of genes we share with a terrible person doesn't mean that we will become a carbon copy of that terrible person if or when that mental illness appears. Our mental illness, even if we developed it because of the genetic bits we share with an abusive parent, will not be the dreaded, terrible, terrifying thing that makes us LIKE THEM. It's the choices that we make, whether we make the same harmful choices they made or whether we actively choose to make different choices, that make us LIKE THEM.
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