Does Stability with Bipolar Actually Exist? What does it Look Like? How to I get it?
I recently sat down with MJH Life Sciences The Educated Patient for a conversation about bipolar disorder, addiction, sobriety, motherhood, stability, and what recovery actually looks like when you live with a disorder that doesn’t simply go away.
I loved the questions they asked because they gave me an opportunity to talk about some of the things I think are most misunderstood about bipolar—especially what mania can look like from the outside, why sobriety became essential to my recovery, and why I no longer define “stable” as symptom-free.
Here’s our conversation:
You spent years believing your manic highs and depressive lows were just part of who you were. Looking back, what were the warning signs you couldn’t recognize at the time, and what finally made things click?
Truthfully, I’ve been thinking about dying since 1999. I was only 15 years old.
Because I was so young, I understood those lows and those feelings as just part of who I was. I didn’t really understand the difference.
Untreated bipolar can be progressive, and it can take an average of about seven to ten years to be accurately diagnosed. What that meant for me was that, in the beginning, the highs were so much harder to recognize.
First, because they weren’t as intense.
And second, because they didn’t necessarily look like something was wrong.
Oftentimes, for me, mania appeared as confidence, ambition, creativity, productivity, and success.
In retrospect, some of my biggest warning signs were actually the periods of my life when people were saying:
She’s killing it. She’s doing great.
I could work around the clock. I could generate endless huge ideas. I could make major life decisions super quickly. I got through an MBA in about half the time you’re supposed to get through an MBA.
Professionally, I appeared highly successful. I was earning top-performer status and taking incentive trips because of it.
So all of that reinforced for me that I was doing my best.
You can justify almost anything when the outside world is telling you that you’re doing great.
The biggest warning signs ultimately became what I describe as the progressive extremes.
Over time, the higher I flew, the deeper the crash.
Eventually, those dualities—what I call a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence—became so extreme and so separated that it wasn’t sustainable anymore.
I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t choose either one of those extremes.
The turning point finally came in 2015 during an inpatient stay at a psychiatric hospital.
A psychiatrist sat down with me and truly listened. He looked at the full scope of things—the full timeline of my life—rather than looking at individual depressions or individual catastrophes I had caused as isolated events.
That’s when I finally received my Bipolar I diagnosis.
Getting the diagnosis definitely wasn’t a magic solution. But it gave me context for 15 years of experiences and chaos that had felt so confusing and disconnected for the majority of my life.
You’ve spoken about the connection between bipolar disorder, impulsivity, and addiction. How did sobriety become essential to managing your mental health rather than a separate goal on its own?
For me, I describe alcohol as something that has always been a symptom of my bipolar disorder.
It took me a long time to figure that out.
From day one, alcohol was a way for me to self-medicate something I didn’t have awareness around yet—something I didn’t have a name for.
Alcohol and other substances were always a way for me to try to regulate.
To numb the lows.
To fuel the highs.
To escape uncomfortable realities I had created for myself.
I never actually treated my drinking as a problem because I never realized I had one.
Eventually, in 2021—six full years after my Bipolar I diagnosis—I finally realized how deeply intertwined they were.
I realized what I was doing with alcohol, how dependent I had become on it, and how it was ruining my life.
So I committed to sobriety for good.
And sobriety gave me something that arguably I had never had in my entire life.
Clarity.
My mental health journey started when I was 15 years old. Without alcohol constantly changing or masking what I was feeling, I could finally begin to recognize my moods and symptoms more honestly.
And remember: this was six years after receiving my diagnosis.
This was when the work actually started for me.
I could engage with my healthcare providers and actually be honest with them. I could comply with medication and therapy. I could allow that medication to actually do its job. And then I could start using and implementing other tools as coping mechanisms.
I never want to send the false message that sobriety cured my Bipolar I.
Nothing can.
I still, to this day, experience levels of mania and levels of depression. That’s part of the disorder. It kind of comes with the package.
A pill doesn’t take it away.
But having that clarity allows me to manage it in a way that I simply couldn’t when I was drinking.
I learned that again in 2024, when I experienced an eight-month depression.
That was a really important reminder for me that even sober, even medicated, even doing all of the work, I can still be symptomatic.
The difference was that during that 2024 depression, I had awareness.
I had clarity.
I had a solid care team.
I had more tools.
So I was able to pivot and get myself where I needed to be.
This is a hill I’ll die on:
You have got to be sober if you want to effectively manage your bipolar disorder.
You’ve said that your daughter played a role in pulling you back from your darkest point. How has motherhood shaped the way you manage Bipolar I day to day?
One of the darkest points of my life happened when my daughter was 18 months old.
I found myself on an overpass above the Dallas North Tollway.
She was in her stroller, kind of in my peripheral vision, and I was teetering above this crossroads.
Then a gust of wind broke my trance.
She was sucking on a cherry lollipop, and I remember hearing it hit the ground and shatter.
When I turned around, I saw her reaching for me from the stroller.
And something finally broke through.
I describe it in Tainted Love as the moment when the love of my life had just saved my life.
I’m really careful not to place this huge responsibility for my recovery on my daughter.
She cannot manage my illness for me.
But she inspired my choice to live.
And in loving her—and in asking for help, which is what happened as a result of that experience—I was finally able to prioritize my mental health and understand that prioritization as an act of motherhood.
Shortly before my hospitalization, right after the incident on the overpass, I finally admitted to my mother that I was struggling to take care of my daughter.
My mom and I lived far apart from each other, and I was terrified.
I felt like a failure.
I was absolutely terrified at that time in my life that my daughter would be taken away from me because I couldn’t care for her.
Looking back, I realize that asking for help was the strongest thing I could have ever done.
And I think women today don’t necessarily understand that asking for help is that strong.
Today, being a mom motivates me to stay honest about how I’m feeling.
We have a super-open household.
We talk about mental health. We talk about addiction. This is part of our conversation.
I’ll never go back to those crossroads again.
I’ll use my care team. I’ll use the plans and emergency plans we have in place.
And my daughter is growing up in a home where, whatever battle she faces in the future, we are equipped to support her through it as she continues her journey and as I continue my mental health journey too.
Even with medication and therapy, you still experience mania and depression. What does “stable” actually mean for you, and why is that distinction important for how people think about recovery?
This is one of the most important messages I try to share and that I want people to really understand.
Whether you have bipolar disorder or you love somebody with bipolar disorder:
Stable does not mean symptom-free.
For a long time, I believed stability was something I could finally arrive at.
Like this gorgeous Emerald City, so to speak.
If I could just do everything correctly, then I would be able to arrive there.
I was taking my medication.
I was going to therapy.
I got sober.
I learned DBT skills.
I tried neurofeedback.
I did ketamine therapy.
I was—and obviously still am—so proactive about my mental health.
And yet, like I mentioned, in 2024 I fell into a severe depression that lasted almost eight months.
That experience redefined my understanding and definition of recovery.
Stability, for me today, means knowing myself well enough to recognize when something is shifting—whether that’s toward mania or toward depression—and then having a plan in place for what to do next.
That could be calling my psychiatrist.
It could be calling my therapist for another session.
It could be working toward a medication adjustment.
During my eight-month depression, we added a second medication. That’s what ultimately helped me get out of it and has prevented me from having another depressive episode since.
Sometimes stability means reducing commitments.
Sometimes it means leaning into my family.
Sometimes it simply means allowing myself to stop performing.
That Type-A performer is still part of who I am. Sometimes I have to stop, scale back, and focus on getting through the day.
I no longer measure my recovery by whether I experience mania or depression—or how often I experience mania or depression.
That’s not the measurement for me anymore.
I measure my recovery based on my commitment to balancing what I’ve identified as my Six Pillars of Bipolar Stability:
1. Medication
2. Therapy
3. Sobriety
4. Lifestyle — things like nutrition, sleep, and stress
5. Emotional regulation — which is a huge piece of this for our beautiful bipolar brains
6. Nervous system regulation
The key is responding differently to those six pillars depending on what symptoms or red flags are popping up for me.
So stability doesn’t mean you’re never falling—or flying, in the case of bipolar.
It’s knowing what to do when you start to experience it.
I continue to live with bipolar disorder.
I will always live with it.
It’s never a chapter I’m going to finish, and it’s never going to be exactly the same.
You have to constantly learn how to pivot and grow with it.
Tainted Love traces years of searching for love and stability in the wrong places. What would you tell somebody who is still asking, “What’s wrong with me?” instead of, “What do I need?”
For a lot of my life, I started to grasp this belief that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
I could never quite fit in.
I describe myself as always peering in from the outside of a window, looking in.
So I searched for answers through love—and what I thought was love—achievement, work, alcohol.
I was constantly trying either to become the next version of myself or to blend in with an existing identity of something or someone around me.
I thought if I could just find the right person, if I could find true love, if I could get that white-picket-fence life, if I could achieve enough, then maybe achievement—or becoming “better”—would finally make me feel whole.
But the more I chased and the more I tried to achieve, the deeper the hole became.
And the higher I would fly.
Finally, in 2015, receiving that Bipolar I diagnosis did not fix anything.
I actually rejected the diagnosis for quite a long time.
But what it eventually gave me was language for my experience.
It still didn’t answer one of the biggest questions I’d had my entire life:
Who am I?
I spent so many years—even after I was diagnosed—wondering:
Okay, now who am I that I have bipolar?
Where is Louise? Where does bipolar begin?
Are all of these life choices and catastrophes me?
Are they symptoms of my bipolar?
How does all of that fit together?
Ultimately, I kept coming back to:
What the heck is wrong with me?
Getting the diagnosis and beginning to accept it slowly shifted me away from judgment of myself and toward curiosity.
The question stopped being:
How do I fix myself?
How do I get better?
And instead became:
What do I actually need today to take care of myself?
Instead of:
Why am I like this?
Why did this happen to me?
What’s wrong with me?
It became:
What do I need right now?
And the answer changes.
It’s always something different.
Sometimes it’s the psychiatrist. Sometimes it’s medication. Sometimes it’s therapy.
I sound like a broken record, but these things are so important.
Sometimes it’s rest.
Movement.
Connection.
And sometimes it’s actually leaning into what I’m experiencing.
If I feel myself moving toward mania and I feel protected by all of my resources and my care team, maybe I’m going to dive into some of that creative ability.
On the flip side, if I’m in a depression, maybe I can lean into that opportunity for profound reflection.
That’s how my book even started.
I was in the middle of that eight-month depression.
I had stripped away all of the things in my life that I was doing to produce.
And I started journaling.
Sometimes, the less you resist and the more you lean into these different extremes, the more you’re going to understand yourself.
And the better you become at answering that question:
What do I actually need?
Is there anything else you want people living with bipolar disorder to know?
Being bipolar comes with a lot of baggage.
Most of us have a big backpack full of shame, guilt, and embarrassment.
And probably one of the hardest parts is working through some of those past experiences.
The best guidance I can give—and one of the best ways I’ve found to work through shame and guilt—is through vulnerability.
That’s going to look different for everybody.
For me, I chose to write a book.
I chose to talk on public platforms.
For you, it might just be writing in your journal.
Or telling one close, trusted person.
But I’m a big believer that:
Our collective stories will create survival guides for one another.
Choose your person.
Choose your platform.
And if you can, even in small doses at a time, start sharing your story.
Because I believe that’s how we begin working through some of the shame and guilt we’ve carried for far too long.
xoxo
Louise
Want to read the published article? HERE
At The Educated Patient®, we believe healthy living starts with informed choices. Our experts create articles and resources to help you ask your doctor and pharmacist the right questions, learn about treatment options, understand medications and therapies, and feel more confident in making health-based decisions. We're part of MJH Life Sciences®, the people behind trusted resources for doctors and other health care professionals. For 25 years, MJH's digital, print and continuing educational media have shared knowledge that professionals explore with peers at virtual and in-person events, and implement in their own efforts to improve lives.
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