Change in Action: How One Person Got Their Life Back From Bipolar Disorder | Ep. 10

This is an interview you are not going to want to miss. Welcome to the get yout Life Back podcast. If you or anyone you know has ever struggled with bipolar disorder, you know how debilitating it can be on your health, your relationships, and even your finances. You don't know what to do, and the option from your doctors is to go down the list of medications and hope for the best. If you resonate with any of this, then this is the episode for you. We're going to sit down with Jared, a bipolar warrior diagnosed with bipolar disorder, type 1 rapid cycling. Jared was hospitalized over 30 times in 12 years and is one of the most inspirational warriors that I know of when it comes to this topic. Jared started down an integrative path for healing himself six years ago. And on that journey he has identified strategies to stop and prevent manic episodes from occurring, pursue activities that give meaning, and he's now studying to be a cognitive behavioral healer himself. How did he do it? That's what we're going to talk about today. How to identify patterns in mood changes, create your force field strategies, going beyond your diagnosis, beyond your label, and everything in between. This is going to be a life changing interview. So let's get started.

Hi, this is Dr. Nicole and I'm with Jared. And we are excited to have a conversation with you and we decided to record it to share with you guys Jared's story, his story of hope, and to give you a little bit of an inside scoop on just one warrior's journey. And so, Jared, I want to tell you how grateful I am that you're here. Thank you for sharing and I'm excited to jump in with you.

Oh, thank you, Dr. Kane. It's an honor. You honor me, so I thank you for that. But you know, I wouldn't be where I am today without you. So it's exciting. It's been a journey. We've been at it almost over six years now. Can you believe how long it's been? I did some research.

I love reflecting on how I met people and how long I've known people. And so I think back to the world that was Pre Jared and Dr. Nicole six years ago and how far we've come in all of this time. It's amazing.

It really is. It's astounding, exciting, and I'm grateful for the journey we've had. I look forward to the journey. We're lifers. You're stuck with me for life.

I was going to say the same about you. You're stuck with me, too. I'm not going anywhere.

Good. I love it. I love it.

I love it.

I love it.

Yeah. And you guys, when you see in the warriors group, you'll see Jared and I saying that back and forth. It's basically the magical way that we communicate.

Yeah, yeah. Since we're both trained in opera, you know, that's true.

That's a fun fact. And so a lot of you guys don't. I was trained to be an opera performer in college. And Jared, I think that's one of the first things that you and I connected on originally is both of us.

Yeah. Because opera backgrounds. I was trained for four years as a vocal performance and opera major by one of the most prestigious men I've ever met in my life. He was at the Metropolitan Opera. But, you know, we could go on and on about that kind of stuff, but, you know, so that's what we mean when we say love it in the comments.

It's our fun fact. So you can add the voice to that. Read it. Read it in your mind with the falsetto, the vibrato, and all of the magic.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. I live for it.

I was hoping that today what my goal in our time together is to share a story of hope. My mission is to help people to understand, realize, and start taking the steps to. Towards writing their next act. I think about how we've been carrying all of our lives, this saga that's been basically directed by the culture, our traumas, our biological interactions with the environment. And so many people, they find me and they feel like they are just so weighed down by this heavy saga, and they feel like they're put into a corner and they have no answers besides. And while I think that pharmaceuticals can be life saving and they're amazing that we can put a comma at the end of the sentence and that there are things that we can do in addition to that, and that there is hope. And your story of hope. And I was hoping that you would be open to sharing a little bit about your story.

Absolutely. I mean, I pride myself on being an authentic, genuine human being for. For most of what we see from society nowadays, everybody's very fake and vain and vague and, you know, they don't want to commit and this and that and the other. So I had no problem sharing my story at all. Where should we begin is the question.

I would love to learn about what your experience was when you didn't feel like you had empowerment over your story. And then we could kind of talk about the steps that you took to turn the page. The steps that you took to get your life back, the steps that you took to help with the sticky factor so that you're not just put into a corner with this label slapped on you and this terrible tragedy playing out. I would love to hear kind of the juxtaposition if we start what it was like in the beginning.

Sure, sure. So I am 30 years old. I will be 31 this August. Just to give you a time frame of when this all decided to conspire. Not conspire, transpire. Forgive me. So 30 years old. At 18 years old, I had gotten into a little bit of trouble. I ran away from home. And in running away from home, I decided to pursue a lifestyle of just hard, fast, you know, drinking drugs, cigarettes, smoking weed. Like there was just, there was no limit to things I wanted to try because I felt so traumatized in my life by what I thought was kind of like a noose coming around my neck. I thought my parents were trying to control me when they weren't. And so I said, well, I'm gonna go live my life and I'm gonna, I'm gonna do what I want, you know, and what I want is not necessarily what the best is for me. And so in discovering what I want at 18 years old, because everybody's, you know, mature at 18 years old. Everybody knows exactly what they want at 18 years old. Not. And so I decided to do all of those things, you know, kind of test the waters, have kind of a rum springer, you know, if you, if you follow those teachings, you know, whatever. I was going to just go sell my oats and I came in from that completely psychotic. There was no, there was no fixing what I had going on. I was, I was out of my mind. I was strung out on God knows what. I was at somebody's house. I somehow got in touch with my father on a cell phone that I, that I swiped and just called him and he picked me up in Hammond, Louisiana. I'm from New Orleans, by the way. A little disclaimer. And so Hammond, Louisiana is about a 45 minute drive from where I lived in New Orleans with my parents. When they, when they, when I moved back in with them after I went through all of this. And the first thing they did was they put me into a mental hospital because I was just psychotic. I was far gone. And psychosis for me shows up as a very hyper spiritual, very. Wasn't violent at first, but over the years, violence became a thing. So I got diagnosed in this mental hospital. It was very traumatic for me they didn't give the best care. It's almost like people were there to just collect a paycheck. They weren't there to really help anybody. They didn't have a passion for this. They just, for whatever reason, got stuck doing it, I guess, you know? And that, to me, just. I still. As we're talking about this, I'm flashing back to the memories of the very first hospital stay that I had. And it was very traumatic in a negative sense. And so that's when I began to hold on to these things. And I didn't know who I was. I didn't know who I should be. I didn't know what to do. All I know is that I somehow got a hold of something that made me go crazy. You know, actually, the thing that kind of sparked this was dxm. I don't know if you remember that. Dextromethane, We've had conversations about that. And basically cough syrup or cough pills, you get high off of those, you know, and you start seeing things that definitely aren't there and hearing things that definitely are not there. And that was the cause of this first psychotic episode. And over the last 12 years, I have been hospitalized over 30 times. I'm gonna let that sink in because that's a lot. That is a lot of trauma to go through. Because each stay at a hospital, as I've grown in years and as I've grown with this diagnosis of being diagnosed bipolar disorder, type 1 rapid cycling, I will say the care has gotten better over the years, but each hospital stay, I can remember vividly, some more than others, and they come to me and these. These thoughts, you know, sticky thoughts, like you like to say. And so I just. It's. It's been. It's been a journey through the last 12 years of trying to find who I am, and it hasn't been until this year, 2020, as I. Oh, and I always said 2019, I'm like, 2,020 is going to be my year. It's going to be my year. I'm going to do well. I started my own company. I was flourishing. I was growing the company. And then all of a sudden, for six weeks in a row, I went to four different hospitals. I totaled my car. I lost everything. And I am now.