The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance.
Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com and Amazon.com.

Right before the break, a woman had called talking about being 59 years old. She had a serious illness for the past few years, and she was put on medications for infections and possibly other things at her doctor's suggestion. She walks into a psychiatrist's office thinking that he's going to, you know, take a look at her, but also try to figure out if it was the medications that were causing the problem. She walks out with a label. She's got bipolar disorder. Now that's a heavy label that isn't just like saying you've got an adjustment disorder, which is a bump in the road type thing.

So what is bipolar? For those of you sitting, scratching your head saying, "What is bipolar?" Bipolar disorder is a disorder that has two different poles to it. A very depressed pole—you're down in the dumps, blue, you're very sad. It's been going on for a while, most of the day, nearly every day; you feel empty. You don't have the regular pleasures in life. You're either losing weight or you're gaining weight, and that's different from what normally goes on. You're either not sleeping enough or sleeping too much. You're either very agitated, or you just feel like someone put a hose in you and drained all the energy out of you. You just might feel worthless. You might feel a lot of inappropriate guilt, and you're given all of this. What's your ability to think or concentrate? Not very good.

And you may feel some hopelessness, some suicidal thoughts. It can interfere. Can interfere. If you're feeling this depressed, it's obviously going to interfere with any relationship you have, with your work, with other important areas of functioning, and you have to figure out what's going on. That's the depressed pole.

The manic pole is not just feeling elated. Oh, it's a nice day out today. The daffodils are blooming, and I feel great. When you have a manic episode, you're very happy, very energized, very elevated, very, what they call, expansive. It might be a very irritated mood. It may not be a happy mood, but you're highly, highly, highly charged, and you may have these feelings of grandiosity. I can do anything I want. I can fly out of windows. I can drive down the road, you know, a country road at 180 miles an hour, a city street. I don't need to sleep.

You may have a flight of ideas, racing thoughts, or pressure to keep talking. It sounds like I'm manic right now, doesn't it? Just talking, talking, talking. You may be very distractible. Something happens outside, and you pay a lot of attention to some little old woman who's talking, and nothing is logical. Nothing makes sense. So even though you've got all this energy, it's flattering. It's not focused on getting a PhD or finding a job in an organized manner. It's all over the place.

People have sexual sprees, buying sprees, business investments that go bad; they make foolish decisions. So this is not good. If you find you're doing that and you also have the depressive component, then yes, you may have what's called bipolar disorder, and that doesn't mean that it's something you necessarily have for life. I know they can put you on things like lithium that can really help.

So you may want to try giving a trial of medication, but I would not label yourself. I would look at this as a problem to solve, and I would get the skills to manage your thoughts better because if you add a new component to it, which I call labelitis—oh my God, I've got a label, I've got this disorder, this disease or something—then what typically happens is people feel like there's not much they can do. For example, I can't think away cancer; I just have to take the doctor's recommendation.

Well, a psychological problem is very different than cancer. You can think about it. You must think about it. You must take charge of your thought processes. You need to know better thinking skills, better organizing skills, and that's what I keep mentioning: cognitive therapy. Does it give you assertiveness skills? It gives you skills to think clearly, how to take any emotion you have, whether it's depression, anxiety, guilt, anger, feeling what people say weird, and decoding them, understanding exactly what those emotions signal within you?

For example, if you're really depressed, it may be because you lost a job or because you don't have a loved partner. Well, then you can look at how do I go about dating? I'm anxious; I don't know how to do that. Or I lost a loved partner. Is it bereavement? Do I need to know more about the guilt process and what's normal and where I'm going off base here, which becomes complicated bereavement? So you want to give yourself the knowledge to make your life easier.

And I would go to a website, Academy of CT for cognitive therapy.org. They've got articles on that that can be very helpful, and they have resources around the country that could help you get the help you want. But when people come to me and say that, you know, I have a biochemical disorder, I went to a psychiatrist and I have—then fill in the blank: depression, bipolar, you name it, ADHD—I say to them, "What if you didn't have that label?"

And we just work on fixing the problem and getting you better. Many people get better much faster because they don't have the weight of a label that comes with so much excess baggage in their own mind. So I hope—I wish you a lot of success in getting better, and definitely take a look at the medications too that you've been on.

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Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co-author Dr. Edwin Locke, who's world-famous for his theories in goal setting.

Telling your partner why you fell in love should not be a one-time occurrence, and it would become meaningless if you went through the same list every day. Better to point out specific qualities that you've observed from time to time: "You look especially handsome or beautiful tonight. I love that color on you. I admire the total honesty you showed when talking to the Smiths. That's a quality I've always cherished in you. I love the way you encouraged me to pursue my career when I was having real doubts about my ability to do it."

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy The Selfish Path to Romance at Amazon.com.