Doing something a bit different. Awhile back I was a guest on Justine Carino’s podcast called Thoughts from The Couch. She was a recent guest of mine as well.

Justine is a licensed mental health therapist who interviewed me on what it means to stay resilient when it seems everyone else’s mental health around you is going to hell in a handbasket.

My hope is that you gain some positive perspective listening to what I went through and how I dealt with the ups and downs of being raised by a teenage mother who was later diagnosed with bipolar.

Reach April - ofcoursetheymakemecrazy@gmail.com

IG @ofcoursetheymakemecrazy

April's Recommendation for Bipolar Support Books https://theymakemecrazy.club/bipolarb... Download April's 4 Sanity Saving Tips Guide to lift your mood & change your perspective. https://theymakemecrazy.club/Guide

If you like this, PLEASE subscribe & leave a comment.

Justine Carino is joining Of Course, They Make Me Crazy host April Norris to talk about teens and young adults living with mentally ill parents.

Justine Carino is a licensed mental health counselor working in Westchester County New York. She also has a great podcast called Thoughts from The Couch.

April says, “We're discussing teens and young adults managing living with with a parent who has a mental health illness like bipolar or borderline personality disorder just to name a few. Before we get into that, Justine. Why did you get into your line of work?”

Justine answers saying, “I think there's probably two different layers to it. The first layer is I've always been really interested in why people do the things that they do, why they act the way they act, and the stories behind their lives and their choices. Everybody has a story. And once we start to learn that story, they make more sense to us. Right? Their decisions, the way they interact with their relationship styles makes so much more sense when we get to know their story. So, everyone has some kind of story. I'm so intrigued and interested in that. I think that was the first part of it. I started feeling that curiosity in high school. I took a Psychology 101 class as a senior. I loved it. In my mind, I thought  I'm going to be a psychiatrist. I went to college pre-med, and quickly dropped out of the pr-emed program because it was so scientific. It was so challenging. I cried before every test, I said, you know what? Let me still explore psychology in a different way. And I majored in psychology and went to graduate school to become a therapist after that. So, I had one route, but it turned to the other, and I've loved it.

And the other part of it is I'm an adult child of an alcoholic. I also come from a divorced family system. I think looking back also, I struggled with anxiety as a child and as an adult from time to time. But I think there's also some personal layers to the decision to choose this career.”

April says, “And what you're doing is now helping dysfunctional families essentially come back to each other. I think that that speaks volumes, and it's huge. And we need so many of you out there.”

April asks, “Regarding the teenagers you treat ... what is their biggest struggle? What do they come to you with?”

Justine replies, “The teenagers that I see that are seeking therapy, I treat mostly anxiety and depression. I also have a subspecialty in grief. I support teenagers that lost a mother or a father or a sibling. But also it comes down to family dynamics as well. I do a lot of family therapy. I'm looking at these unhelpful patterns between parents and teenagers that lead to conflict and kind of get them all in the room and unpack these patterns and understand why they're happening and what we can do to correct them. But when we're talking about a teenager that has a parent with a mental illness, there's another layer to it. They might be dealing with different family dynamics because of their parent’s mental illness. There are a few things that are really challenging. One is that there's a lot of feelings of shame and isolation, embarrassment and feelings of disconnection. When you have a parent with a mental illness, you may grow up with that mental illness, not really realizing that your parent was different in any way. But then there's this moment as a teenager, you start to explore, like, Wait a minute. This isn't so normal or something's a little off here. And once you discover that it's hard to share that with other people. As a teenager, as an adolescent, we are so insecure at a baseline, we don't want to be different. Being different is scary for a teenager at that time of development. When you have a parent who might be different in mental health perspective, it's hard to admit that and talk about it with your friends or your peer

I felt compelled to talk about dating or living with a spouse who has been diagnosed with bipolar because it comes up a lot in Bipolar Family Support groups.

I’m talking about this because there was a girl who recently posted in one of these groups about feeling upset and unsupported.

She said that when someone posts about the hard times they’re having with their boyfriend or girlfriend, everyone suggests just to run while you can! She went on to say she loves her boyfriend who has bipolar disorder very much. She doesn’t want to run. She wants to make it work and she’s looking for advice on how to cope during his bad days.

My heart went out to her.

I thought what if my stepfather just ran from my mom when she was having one of her depressive and narcotic episodes? If he didn’t stay, I can’t imagine what our lives would have been like. They would have been a mess. There’s something to be said for people like my pops. He saw passed her illness. They were married for 25 years. It was challenging, but they still held hands, talked, and ate dinner together. She passed away 5 years ago. We all miss her more than you can imagine.

Back to the Bipolar Support group. Many different comments started firing up after the girl posted that she felt unsupported. Many said they’re sorry. But one lady spent time on her response, and I want to share it with you. It said – “It is sad that everyone is telling you to run. I think I know why though. Every man in my family is/was manic bipolar. My grandpa, father, and brother. Since the day I was born I’ve learned how to deal with this manic behavior. In 2018 I ended my marriage, and in 2020 I started dating someone new. This person was manic, bipolar. It one day got pointed out to me by someone we were hanging out with, what a “great job” I do with this man, and how nobody else has ever been “able” to deal with his manic behavior. Then it hit me, I had been choosing to do what I was forced to do my entire life. Put me, my wants, my needs, my feelings in my pocket and tuck it away, because everything revolves around someone else and their behavior, their reactions. Your entire life is solely based on how someone is going to act and what can you do to avoid an episode, or how can you help. In time doing this will damage you. It will cause you to literally not care about or do anything for yourself, and what makes you happy. When you revolve your entire being around someone else’s behavior, you lose who you even are as a person. I never knew this. As I did it my entire life. Now my grandpa, and my dad have passed, my brother and I do not speak, and I ultimately broke up with the BF, and I sit back and realize so so much how damaging their behavior was in my life. Just because I know how to placate a situation and I know how to deal with out of control men, doesn’t mean I should have to. Doesn’t mean I should pick someone over me, doesn’t mean I should tuck my wants and needs away. You don’t realize how damaging dealing with people like that are to you. Now I feel like I push people away constantly, or I test them right off the bat to see how far they will go, and it’s not fair to people that I do that. It’s not fair to me that I do that. I literally have to unlearn all the toxic behaviors and try to let my guard down that I put up. People call me cold, that I don’t have a heart, because I have this hard exterior and literally got to the point that n