The Relationship Between Bipolar and Anger / Aggression

Jessica, I speak from experience when I say you need to get yourself and kids away from your boyfriend asap before someone gets hurt. He has verbally threatened you and that is illegal. In my experience, when the police came, he just denied the whole episode and he was more angry that I'd called the police. The very best thing you can do is leave. I know that's not always easy, but please focus on finding a place to go with your children. My life was destroyed by my husband's bipolar anger because I didn't get out soon enough. Good luck to you.

I believe my boyfriend may have bipolar because what ever me and are kids do he really gets mad at us with fits of anger fits of yelling fits of cussing and making threats like the kids made a mess in are bedroom and he told me that i better get of my f**king a** and clean the bedroom or else he is going to do something to me and he didn't care if the cops were called he's
Been calling me bad names and talking very bad about me behibehind my bacback too and he's always in a crabby mood like 24-7

I have bipolar disorder and most of the time I'm angry. My doctor says that it's part of a bipolar cycle. Even though I'm taking a mood stabilizer this feeling stays with me all the time. It's beginning to scare me because I don't know that I'm having an aggressive episode, were I'm screaming or being obnoxious, until after it happens. And once I'm in that mood it's very hard to calm down. Sometimes if I keep going off on someone (doesn't matter who it is, family or stranger) I realize what's happening in my mind but I can't control it. I totally identify myself with Anna because it's though it's an out of body experience. I've had anger management therapy but it hasn't helped me at all. So I would definitely add anger and aggression to the list of symptoms of BD.

My spouse is bipolar. I get so sick of all the support being for the patient. My spouse and I went to marriage counseling and although the counselor knew my spouse is bipolar, he treated us as though we were the same. Bipolar disorder and how it destroys relationships never came up. My spouse was not held accountable for his disorder.

would like more newsletters about bipolar illness.

I have bipolar.
I am generally a very calm and patient person. Recently though I have sabotaged a relationship due to my rash anger. I am not saying it was unprovoked or violent, it was thoughtless though and very regrettable. The thing is in the moment it was completely rationalize and at this moment still is. I find myself at many times outside my own body and mind when I am having "episodes". It is almost like an adrenaline rush. It is unlike my core personality, yet it comes from me..it is hard and has in this case destroyed a friendship.

For me I sense waves of anger just prior to having a bull blown manic episode. It doesn't always happen that way, but mostly it does.

I am living with BP2, and have experienced surges of unexplained rage. For me, these episodes would start out as feelings of restlessness and a desire to run away into the great unknown...of course, the realization that "No, you can't do that you have dinner to make" would really wind me up.
I'm not certain that it's a bi-polar characteristic per se, but it seems to be with me....
-Edward

Hi, I've been diagnosed as having Bipolar I. I remember being so angry that I would exhibit outbursts of foul language or obscenities directed at random people on the street and those I know. This resulted in me being attacked by these random people and nearly disintegrated the relationship between my parents and I.
I've always considered enhanced irritability to be another way of thinking about anger even though I don't recall a doctor ever directly indicating that my anger specifically was a symptom of Bipolar I.
Although I appreciated studies conducted by mental health researchers and ideas presented about Bipolar Disorder by mental health professionals, I do get the sense that there is much more that needs to be understood.

Hi
i also have bipolar1.i have a very hard time controlling my anger towards thoughtless people

Hi catsrgreat,
I've also doubted the heritability of my bipolar disorder, given that none of my ancestors had any kind of mental illness. And was it caused by an inherent sensitivity to stress? Or was the apparent sensitivity part of the bipolar, which was then responsible for more stress?
I'm also with you on the pyschological studies. Most of them, even studies that are considered landmark and important, still leave a lot to be desired. How can anybody truly objectively observe human behaviour? Even if you could isolate someone in a vaccuum, it wouldn't be the kind of behaviour that we need to know about. However science can still have an important role to play. Knowledge is essential if we are to improve our lot in regards to mental illness. But I guess compassion has just as important a role to play.

I'm bipolar, and I think we ALL should have to take a Dialectal Behavior Therapy course. The DBT course helps with coping skills, year class, and helps so much. Buy the book on Amazon if you can't get in a class, these skills work if you want them too.

I was diagnosed with Bipolar II. I don't experience anger or agression towards others, but towards myself. I've always said I beat myself up more than anyone else ever could.
As far as outward anger...nope...not me.

I wonder if bipolar itself is the main cause of these emotional outbursts. Most people with bipolar have had some serious challenges in life, more than their share. Folks like to call those challenges the stressors that brought out the genetic risk of bipolar. I dunno about that, and not going to get into a discussion of heritability. Given the severe stressors that many folks with bipolar have had, I question if it was really possible for the study to control for comorbid conditions, given that the "healthy controls" probably couldn't be psychologically healthy if they went thru the hell that many people with bipolar have. Perhaps these bipolar patients weren't as bad off for trauma history, since they weren't recruited inpatient. And the "healthy controls" had more history of trauma than the average person. Looks like only the abstract is available.
I guess I'm just fed up with garbage medical studies. Who knows what's going on? Researchers see what they want to see. My training was in the physical sciences, and these kinds of studies would be laughed out of existence.
I did not have anger problems until I got onto psychiatric medications when I was about 30. As I mentioned in a couple earlier posts, I got off medications about 3 years ago, after many years of fruitless treatment that only made me worse, and the anger outbursts are gone. I did have to re-learn how to keep my temper under control, but without the akathisia (or whatever it was) grinding away at me, it became POSSIBLE to keep my temper under control.
Something that did keep it down is that I feel it's not ok to have emotional diarrhea all over other people. By thinking of it that way, I did minimize it in spite of the akathisia. But I kicked a lot of holes in the walls, broke doors, broke computers. It was horrible.

I suffer from Bipolar I and have major anger/aggressiveness issues. I have taken an anger management course which was good but no too helpful for me. It focused on techniques to step back when becoming angry. However I go from no anger to full anger in an instant and then do not realize what I am doing until later. Recently my anger got me into big trouble and now I have to find some more therapy for this or I may be looking at prison time.

I remember the one time I was in psychiatric hospital (I was 16, and diagnosed with depression - that diagnosis wasn't revised to BP2 for 13 years), I had anger management sessions. They didn't seem very relevant to me - I don't get anger, except these weird paroxysms of rage (in which I can get violent) that I'm not sure correlate with any of my mood episodes (of course, that's all hindsight, which is a bit flawed with moods - I didn't know I had bipolar, after all).
The anger management sessions I had didn't seem to address me at all. They were great relaxation exercises, but my principle nurse told me they were concerned that I didn't get angry enough - and this was maybe why it came out in violent paroxysms. Thing is, nothing in the sessions addressed the avoidance of repression of anger.
I haven't had enough experience with the new self-knowledge of bipolar to really be sure how it affects my anger. I experience frustration when hypomanic quite often, certainly, though not so much with people. At least, not with the person I have most contact with - and I have a fair amount of frustration at other people being slower than me, mentally, when I'm not hypomanic, but again, not with the person I have most contact with.