There isn't really much to say. My ex-partner's life has gone down the pan since I last wrote. He hasn't managed to get his start-up company off the ground; his savings have run out; he's split up from his wife and they are selling their house, and he will probably use that money to keep himself afloat. He's sold his car and although he tried living with his new girlfriend, that didn't work out either and he's had to move out again. He's aware that he's messed up a lot of his life, but the horrible thing is that he doesn't understand what he does wrong. He thinks he was right to get into a quarrel with his boss, even though it cost him his job. He thinks he was right to attack me verbally over and over again, even though I know that his attacks were not justified and did not respond to anything that I did wrong (and it has cost me a lot of pain and therapy to be able to say this with confidence). Our relationship as a whole was littered with moments at which he lashed out for no reason at someone who happened to be there while he was having some sort of mood blip.

And it's all useless, knowing this. Maybe some of you out there who are partners of people suffering from cyclothymia will be able to recognise the process I am talking about, and maybe, just maybe, it will help somebody to get the help they need before they wreck their life instead of after. Since the characteristic feature of cyclothymia is a series of failed relationships and jobs, you would think that some researcher might have looked into what happens when they fail. But the trouble is, as I now see from talking to my partner, he absolutely believes his version of events. It takes another person in the relationship to know that these situations were not ones which called for a violent verbal attack. To know that there is a difference between feeling a bit miffed about something your partner has done and 'attacking' them. I suddenly understood that close relationships scared my ex-partner because whenever he got close to someone he perceived them as irrationally attacking him. Only his ex-wife didn't do this, because she was used to an abusive father and knew not to respond and to hide away from men in a bad mood. What my partner did was not abuse in that sense. He attacked when he believed himself to be attacked--even when he wasn't in fact being attacked. It fits the definition of psychosis, not neurosis.

Going through all that and reaching this insight leaves me, and him, no further. He looks on me now as his enemy, believes I acted unjustly in asking him to move out when he kept on and on quarrelling with me. I told him that I would go with him to seek help, try to get him some mood stabilisers. He asked if I was certain that this would work. From having depression myself, I know how long it takes to find a drug therapy that will work, to stick to it, all of that. I couldn't lie to him so I said that i was not certain, but that it was worth a try. We left it like that, in October 2014. I haven't heard from him since then, only about him, from his ex-wife whom I still see.

I was stupid for looking for some kind of tidy ending for all of this. Even with the right medication, his life was never going to be the same again. I'm trying my best to keep it together for our son and for myself--with what I have left. Like most women whose partners have left them. There's comfort in numbers.

I know you guys out there are all going through what I am going through and worse. I just wish I could have helped my partner, somehow. But I was working in the dark, and without help. He had zero insight into his condition, and it was only noticeable, not from face to face interaction with him, but from making a graph of his mood. I took all of his emails from day 1 of our relationship, and I scored them:

+5 for days when he was talking wildly about extravagant wealth or crazy deeds (he wanted to climb to the top of Everest 'past all the dead people frozen in the ice'), extreme...

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Since my previous post, I've learnt that my ex-partner had gone off and found someone else in January 2013. It has taken me a long time to process this, partly because of the feelings of guilt I've had about not being able to help him more, partly because of the sheer pain of learning that he was sleeping with someone else, having fun with someone else, spending money he didn't have with someone else. I have also observed something really important though, which is that he quite genuinely perceived me as 'attacking' him (in his words), even when I knew that I wasn't. So his verbal attacks on me were responses to his perception of me as a threat.

I accept that this is a fine distinction. These were situations in which I was perhaps slightly irritated or tired or whatever. One can't avoid such situations when one lives with someone else. Yet, looking back, and re-reading my emails, I can see that I wasn't acting in such a way as to deserve the verbal abuse and other cruel treatment he subjected me to. It was as if I could never even disagree with his decision without being attacked. The two aspects of his behaviour that really stand out are that there was an element of paranoia--and I mean this in the strictly psychological sense of a false belief that one is being attacked--and that his behaviour tended to exacerbate very minor situations into major quarrels. When I started to see the situation this way, I came to realise that this had happened many, many times before in our relationship. There was the time when our son ran away into a department store and the store security officer brought him back; whereupon he was treated to a torrent of abuse by my partner. There was the time when my partner decided that his boss was deliberately trying to ease him out of the company, and took retaliatory action which ended in his being dismissed for gross breach of trust. (Afterwards, I read the boss's emails before the crisis and could find nothing remotely persecutory in them). There was my partner's own description of his previous relationship in which he had quarrelled over and over again with his girlfriend until she called the police to keep him away.

Now I have a dilemma. I have completely kept him out of my life since I discovered the new girlfriend. Everything I had believed in came crashing down. I have come to believe that he could be helped with different medication from what he is on now. All my friends talk about abuse and tell me I'd be a fool to let him anywhere near me and our son because of his abusive tendencies. I think they are right, but I also think that realising that what makes him screw up the big things in his life is some form of very mild paranoia is an important insight. It means that, for example, he could potentially be helped (or at least prevented from screwing up all the time, and able to manage close relationships) by medication that included perhaps a low level of an antipsychotic. I am not in touch with him any more, but his ex-wife has asked me to talk to him about seeking this kind of help.

It's not that I don't want to help; I still love him and I don't even want to look for someone else. He was special to me. I know that all the things he's done have probably destroyed my ability to trust him ever again, but I would have wished for him this: that he could have close relationships that worked, rather than being destroyed by his aggression. Though perhaps I'm living in a pipe-dream. There are so many people out there who are aggressive or abusive, and it has nothing to do with cyclothymia. Why should he be any different? I doubt myself, and I mistrust him, and in the end I don't know what to do any longer. I believed we were special together and that we could support one another through the tough times, but actually that was precisely the thing he couldn't possibly do. I've tried to walk away, but I've come to a grinding halt. I can't go on, I can't go back.

Well, since my last post, things have happened. I've been working on the assumption that this was one of our many breaches in the five years we've had together. Until December he was saying that he wanted a long-term commitment and after spending so long trying to get together, I had relaxed a little bit and begun to believe he really did love me. But then we had an argument, I asked him to move out. I really wanted to talk about things between us, and at first he agreed. But over the next few weeks, he went increasingly silent, and then three weeks ago said we were through. Then yesterday he said he's met someone else. So I guess this is really it.

At our last meeting he was furiously angry with me, and all through the time that we were living together he kept picking quarrels about small things. I'm used to the depressions, where he withdraws for several days and talks about feeling numb, or cries. I found these difficult because it was so hard not to feel he was going off me. But I also had a lot of sympathy for his low moods and was sometimes able to console him. But the anger is almost impossible to deal with. It comes out of nowhere and is often directed personally at me, my character, my appearance, my behaviour. I found it terribly upsetting. I asked him to move out so I could try and seek help for him and for me in handling the irritability better. Then I found out that taking antidepressants on their own could trigger it, and also that he'd had a very similar experience of escalating quarrels and breakups with a previous girlfriend, again while on antidepressants. I had been going to pass on this information and the importance of going onto a mood stabiliser to him. But then he broke the news of his new relationship.

He's left me and our son without any kind of financial or practical support, wasn't there for his birth. All of it bears out why I was right not to trust him when he spoke of commitment, but some part of me must have believed what he said so often about a long-term relationship and marriage because it's broken me completely to pieces to lose what we had. Worse, he blames it all on me: won't accept that I asked him to leave because I was afraid and hurting from his anger, not because I stopped loving him. Every time I say this to him he simply denies it and accuses me of inconsistency or even deceit. He gets into this state where he makes completely illogical statements and thinks quite wrongly I'm attacking him. I called him 'honey', he thought I was being sarcastic. There's no escape because even the neutral or tender gets distorted in his mind into an attack.

The angry him has been a relatively recent experience and a horrible one. His previous girlfriend ended by calling the police to prevent him getting near her. I can see why, now. I don't believe it's his fault but the decision to look for someone else is one that he has taken without any kind of discussion of our problems with me, without any effort to work things out. And of course our son is confused and upset as well. I haven't slept more than four hours a night for the last two weeks, so this is a bit incoherent. Have lost my appetite and a lot of weight too. The emotional and physical toll is extreme.

It seems to me that in moving on emotionally he's put himself in a position where I am no longer relevant to his happiness. Hard for me to accept, but it's his life. The terrible suddenness with which he broke up with me is the hardest thing of all to accept--how could feelings of deep love and commitment vanish in under three weeks during which time I was not in contact with him at all, by his own request? Then he said that I should have discussed the situation sooner with him to prevent his feelings 'breaking'; but every time I'd asked to do so, he refused.

...

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I decided to make some entries in this blog to put down how it feels to be on the other side of a relationship with someone suffering from cyclothymia.

We met five and a half years ago. He stayed married, I didn't (don't be too judgemental. He would get depressive episodes whenever he moved out of his house). We had a child who is now three, but while I was pregnant his father had a major crisis and broke up with me and wouldn't speak to me for several months. When our son was born he didn't want to be identified as the father and refused to pay any child support for him.

This all made me pretty unhappy, but I understood that he wasn't doing it to hurt me and that his moods really got the better of him.

Eventually I managed to persuade him to go and see a specialist in bipolar disorder and he was diagnosed with recurrent depression, and started on an antidepressant. Those of you with cyclothymia or with partners who have it will know how hard it is to diagnose, but I felt that there was lots of evidence to support him having cyclothymia rather than recurrent depression, such as grandiose thoughts, fast driving, heavy spending, bouts of heavy drinking, times when he would be talking really fast or need very little sleep. Always only lasting a few days, and always alternating with episodes of mild depression of equal duration.

So the antidepressant at first seemed to help, except that from constantly breaking up with me over his depressive episodes he now went to having fights with me. Some of these were miserable moments, such as when we were on holiday. But mostly, because we were not living together, they passed quickly and I didn't really register them as a problem, and certainly didn't connect them to his mood disorder or medication. But he did quarrel really badly with his boss and lost his job, and with his ex-wife and she hit him.

Then he decided he felt well enough to make the attempt to move in with me. I was pretty stressed out, worrying about whether he would go into a bad depression and move out again right away. In fact what happened was we had several quarrels and after a while I got to feel like I was going mad--they would come from nowhere, out of the blue, about seemingly innocuous things. Finally we had a quarrel in which I felt utter despair. I thought 'I can't predict or avoid his anger and I can't live with it.' I asked him to move out again.

After some weeks had gone by he decided we should split up completely and told me so by email. He had refused to talk to me about the incident between us even though at first he'd been pretty calm about it and even came back and spent the night with me. He just kept saying that his feelings were 'broken' and that he felt 'numb'. I recognised this language as being how he described himself in a depressive episode and indeed, he'd run out of antidepressants just after he moved out, which may explain why he broke up with me then and not earlier.

Then I was reading my diary and found a passage in which he'd described to me really early on in our relationship how he'd moved in with a girlfriend before and they'd had a series of arguments which ended with one of them moving out or being told to leave. They would get back together again, then quarrel, and so on.

This all sounded eerily familiar so I started looking on forums where people were discussing cyclothymia and anger, and found out that irritability was a symptom of elevated mood and became more common if you were taking antidepressants without a mood stabiliser.

So here we are. My partner is still convinced, about four weeks on, that he's fallen out of love with me and that we are incompatible as a couple (this just a week or so after saying he loved me, etc etc). I've become convinced that our whole breakup was a result of his being on antidepressants and that he desperately needs a mood stabiliser as well. But getting close to him is really hard. Catch him in the wrong mood and I'm liable to be shouted at...

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