We don’t blame ourselves for physical illnesses. Why do we carry the burden for our minds?
I’ve yet to meet anyone living with a mental health condition who hasn’t, at one time or another, experienced some level of guilt about it. So many of us blame ourselves for having bipolar disorder, and I’m no exception.
I know my guilt is irrational. I know it’s unfounded. Still, I can’t seem to fully shake it.
Even if we know better, even if we’ve educated ourselves about the organic origins of bipolar (or another condition), even if we refuse to fully acknowledge our guilt, tons of us are still living our lives under a giant weight, blaming ourselves for having a disorder that we neither chose nor created.
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So how do we get out from under this oppressive anvil? I wish I knew.
Though I’ve not yet been fully successful at dropping all the weight, I have managed to lighten the load over the years. It’s not an easy undertaking, but it can be done.
My hope is that, after a while, I may succeed in starving my groundless sense of culpability to death. The thing about guilt, though, is that it has a ridiculously slow metabolism: Feed it just a little, and it packs on the pounds with terrifying speed.
Why Do We Judge Our Minds More Than Our Bodies?
You have to be brutal in any effort to starve this beast. It takes intense focus and concentration to get the vicious miscreant to drop just a few pounds.
To make matters worse, like so many others living with bipolar, I have the added challenge of feeling guilty for having both a physical and psychological condition. Still, there is a huge difference in terms of the capacity and consistency of that guilt.
My physical health issues have been incredibly hard on those around me, and even though I have no control over or responsibility for them, I feel somehow culpable for causing my friends and family so much grief.
The same is true of my mental health condition, but in the case of bipolar, the guilt is amplified. In a way, how could it not be?
People have actually told me — to my face — that they don’t “believe” in bipolar disorder. Of course, I know better, but part of me can’t help but internalize this doubt and the implied accountability that comes with it.
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After all, no one has ever told me that I should take responsibility for my dysfunctional pancreas or that growing a tumor amid the maze of my gastrointestinal tract somehow represents a moral failure or lack of willpower on my part.
How I Finally Shed the Guilt
Still, as helpless as I sometimes feel in the face of my unfounded guilt over having bipolar, I always remind myself that I have managed to drop some of its weight over time — and, perhaps more significantly, I’ve managed to keep that weight off.
The secret to my slow and steady success? Acknowledging the guilt I feel and then trying to step back and gain as objective a perspective as possible.
It took me a long time to admit that I even bore this weight. It was mortifying that I, of all people — a self-proclaimed activist and mental health advocate — would harbor such negative emotions and perceptions in relation to my own mental health condition. But then I realized I’d never shake the guilt by ignoring or denying it.
Would You Blame Someone Else?
Once I was able to recognize and confront my baseless sense of responsibility over something I couldn’t control, I could then step outside of myself and imagine I was looking at a stranger — at which point, I asked myself, from the outside looking in, if I would ever blame this other person for her mental health condition. Of course not.
Making a conscious, ongoing effort to grant at least as much compassion to myself as I would to a total stranger in a similar situation was a revelation for me.
So now, every time I recognize and honor the fact that it would never occur to me to blame another person for their mental health condition, my own guilt lifts a little.
Printed as “Flight of Ideas: A Guilt Free Diet”, Summer 2012