Hey, this is Ken Jensen. I beat bipolar disorder in an all natural fashion back in the mid 2 thousands. And believe it or not, that’s not even the coolest part of my story.

What I learned through that process and what came next and how that applied to bipolar and why bipolar was ever even part of the process, was mind blowing to say the least.

Bipolar has hidden within its strengths. I’m gonna show you what I mean and how they’ve shown up in my life so you can do the same. Welcome of the bipolar Excellence podcast episode 78, The fixer.

I was part of an interesting world with an interesting man some years ago, about 12 years ago maybe. I don’t know. And This guy was 1 of the best people and 1 of the worst rolled into 1. He had a good heart, but he had twisted aims.

He had a need to be worshiped, found all this out much later after I’ve been working with him for almost 4 years. This guy had his hands on a lot of pies. He in his day job, He dealt with the disabled of all varieties.

And he had a business. He had a a like a he was a private entity of some sort and he worked for an official larger entity. He was like like a contractor. For what he did. He helped people find work or disabled.

That was 1 of the things he did and he was a big ideas guy. He was always meeting people and setting up deals. He kind of fancied himself a deal broker which he did do a lot but It always ended in chaos and destruction and loss.

But We had to deal with a lot of people because this guy kept us busy as a crew. I wasn’t the only 1. There was a there was a handful of interesting people who all became my friends.

Most of them anyway. And he drew an eclectic range of people to his side to help him and his employees and his games and his schemes and his, quote unquote, business ideas.

And whatever needed it be paid for, he had the money for it. So, you know, he always covered stuff. He he bought food and he was good and he was bad.

More bad than good, but when he was good, it was really cool. He was insane. He was a very specific kind of evil that’s insidious and under your skin and infect you before you know what’s happening.

And I miss him I miss him a lot. It was a lot of fun. Well, because of how he lived his life and what he was always trying to do, a lot of people floated our way.

He got a lot of things started that kept us busy maintaining and he made a lot of promises that we would have to fulfill on in his in his stead and and represent him, and it became clear after a while that When somebody started becoming unglued in any fashion, I was the 1 that had a way of deescalating of calming of soothing of reframing, of finding the silver lining for that person.

I hope to God, this sounds familiar to you about me at this point. But he called me his fixer.

And when we had somebody that was undergoing some kind of really big negative emotional reaction to some shit this guy kicked off or maybe 1 of us even didn’t do something quite right and somebody felt slighted somehow or wronged.

It was me that would go and talk to that person and get them to calm down and stay on our side and still do what it was we to them to do and I didn’t realize the bigger picture of where a lot of this led all all of everything led nowhere other than really awesome adventures and misadventures but The thing that I took away from that that pertained to me the most was the fact that he called me his fixer.

When somebody was getting really emotional, he’d be like Kenny, go go go go deal with that.

That’s you. Go do that. Probably about 10 years prior than that prior to that. When I was doing security work, so lashed bouncing in a very violent emergency room in a trauma center.

And on the psych lockdown ward when I had nobody to deal with in the emergency room, I did a I did a version of that then and that was before my brain actually broke. I I was still out and about in the world.

It Only about 2 years after that job, maybe 1 did I completely disintegrate and I couldn’t even hold any job anymore. Bipolar just took me out couldn’t deal with people, couldn’t deal with life, couldn’t deal with myself.

But anyway, before that happened at that job as a security guard, it became clear that I knew how to talk to people that were in wild, wildly diverse states of mind Usually negative, usually completely disconnected, violent, sad, scared, anxious, manic, whacked on drugs, piss drunk.

I had a way of getting these people and getting them to follow the rules so that they didn’t come to any harm because I’d be the 1 that would harm them.

That was my job. And even though I liked that job because I did and I was in a very dark frame of mind then III literally got paid to kick this shit out of people. It was very little money.

It was a it was an ugly and exciting little era my life, and I thrived on it for 2 years. I’d come in having a bad day and somebody come in into my face who think they could kick my ass and wanted to piss me off.

And I would thank them and then I would do to them what they thought they could do to me. I did that for 2 years. I fought many people at 1 time I fought side by side with the cops.

That’s something I never saw happen in my life. I’d been taken down by the cops a lot over the years. But I never fought side by side with them. That happened on that job. But all of that craziness aside, No longer I did that job.

Those things still happened all the way to the end, but they happened less and less for me because I got tired of just dumping the shit out of people as the only response. That’s what I was paid to do. That was what was expected of me.

I wasn’t against doing it even though I started to realize this ain’t always this ain’t right. This this ain’t right to have me do this to these people automatically for everything under the sun that made the staff unhappy.

There was times when it was unavoidable and it had to happen. For security and safety for everybody including the person I was doing it too.

Sometimes that’s just how it had to go but I got bored with it. As as broken as my mind was becoming. The academic side of me, the humane side of me, I still wanted something different in my life. Of course. Of course.

This job was like a guilty pleasure. It was like it was like doing drugs. We all know we shouldn’t do drugs. I was doing them and, you know, damn the torpedoes full steam ahead. I didn’t care about the consequences of what I was doing.

But I was getting bored with just housing everyone that came in and you’ll get them up and strapping them to beds and throwing them into walls and all the shit I was forced to do.

And I started talking to some of them. That was not allowed except at this particular time that I had this job, the rules were were never in 4 first.

There were just sort of suggestions, and it became very clear very fast that I had a way of of getting into the psyche of the agitated and calming them down so that the other part of what I did never had to come into being.

I started thriving on the challenge of that and I found people’s situations very interesting and I and I was curious. I’d wanna know more and I got good at particularly people that were completely psychotic for whatever reason.

I found out I had a skill of talking to them that included matching their vocabulary and however the words were that they used to paint the world as they saw it I’d match that and would get them to listen to me and I could get them to calm down.

And then it got to be where the only people I fucked up were the assholes or the people that were so deranged that it stayed there was no reaching them.

So After doing this for a while I was to later learn that this was viewed as gifts since we were in a high setting. This was viewed as a non medical person giving medical advice.

That’s how it was looked at, which I still think that’s fucking insane. But that’s that’s how the rules were. And by allowing me to do what I did, it put the hospital in violation of liability to fucking I don’t even know what.

But it became expected of me all the way to the top when when in particular when a psych case would come up the hill in an ambulance.

AMulances would always call letting us know how far out they were so we could get ready at the back door to receive whatever madness that literally they were about to dump on our doorstep.

And in particular, so me and my guys, if I was working with any guys, usually it was just me, could be ready to deal with whatever happened because it was as I said, it was Fuck it was Uber, violent, many nights.

I never saw no shit like that even in my whole time in the Marine Corps to include the Gulf War. Never saw violence anywhere near as bad as what I saw in that hospital setting.

And I was deep in the middle of it for 3 years. But as the people come up the hill, the head nurse would tell me, Kenny, your people are coming up the hill, go back there and do you.

And it wasn’t it meant not to fight, but to get them under control physically, certain amount of fighting.

And then talk to them, calm them down, help them through tonight, keep them keep them from hurting anybody, keep them from hurting themselves.

And I really enjoyed doing that and it’s when I was younger to go back even, you know, way way deep in my youth.

I was a skinny little kid with low self esteem. I got picked on a lot and I and yet I always stood up for the underdogs. I could not stand to watch other people get picked on, which makes sense.

Right? And I’d inject myself in situations and I couldn’t I couldn’t do anything about but I just hated so bad watching other people getting bullied. And then, you know, I take a beating usually with them.

And that that’s how things always were for me. At least I got to about high school and then that that didn’t happen anymore. And when I came out of the marines, fucking forget about it. I mean, it’s anyway, I digress.

I’ve always tried to save people. I’ve tried to save people a lot. In the doing of everything I do with bipolar excellence and all the things that came before it, all the iterations of what I was that came before it.

And 1 of the cool things I learned because I needed to learn it and it took me many years to learn it.

You can’t save anyone. You can offer help, guidance, suggestions, motivation, inspiration, but you can’t save them. Not not at least not doing what I do.

Not doing it the way I did it all the years I did it. You can present yourself as the proof. You can motivate and be present and help calm people as they attempt to do the same or something similar, but you can’t get them to do it.

And you can’t have control over every single aspect of of what it is that’s got them to the state they’re in. To expect that you can is like, well now you’re now you’re fully yourself.

And I get a God complex. It’s not gonna happen. And you’re not gonna help them and you’ll do them more harm by by thinking that you can save them. They’ll cling to you more.

And I I share all this because I keep getting handed more more examples, more instances in real life of people wanting this from me and me making it clearer Making it clear in a way that doesn’t upset them that I’m not your guy for what it is you’re you’re hoping to achieve I I can’t give you what you want.

I can hand you things that help me get the same and tell you how to use them in doom and what I experienced. But experience has shown me Most of the people that come my way particularly would bipolar.

I can’t help them at all. With all the tools I have at my disposal and all my experiences, and all the third party resources I’m connected to for many reasons, I can’t help people at all fight fight and or beat bipolar.

So I’ve always known my bipolar story is the key to all that I am.

It’s critical. It’s important. It’s you just the most powerful part of my personality. My my being. Like not my personality. My being. What led to bipolar what happened while I had it?

How I got out of it? And what I’ve done with all of that experience since. Nothing is more powerful. Nothing has been more powerful in my life than bipolar. Because it’s fucking powerful. And it’s powerful what I did about it.

Because I didn’t expect it was impossible, but I can’t help other people do it. You’ve heard me talk on a show about how I’ve struggled with that. How III don’t want to mislead people I don’t want to give false hope.

I know I can’t help them. But I want but I do like that I provide, you know, all the background and tools that I that I use to to do what I did. It’s there. And somebody can use it and and do and do good with it. They can’t.

They’ll they’ll do well. I just it’s not my place to actively try to help them do that. Or even wonder if they can and it it kill it it was killing me in the process over the years trying to do the reverse, trying to think I could.

That’s that’s not my job. That never was my job. It just took me a while to see it. Then I didn’t know what the fuck my job was because I also got sick of talking about bipolar entirely. I beat it.

I’d rather do something different with my life and and with what it is I talked about on a day to day basis with anybody for any reason, like, a fucking sick of talking about bipolar other than in some anecdotal fashion to prove a point or even make jokes.

It was good for telling stories. It was good for giving context to things to help other people and I still use it that way now.

But this show is not about helping people fight bipolar. It’s about what a bipolar person, in my case, a former bipolar person can do with all that bipolar did to him, what it turned him into.

How I use that now for for good, how I’m using it to scale up my life and make my life greater. How I’m finding other people who have nothing to do with bipolar at all who wish to do the same.

I’m still the fixer it’s just changed changed shape in my mind as to what that actually means. And if I look back in my history except for the rare instance here and there I never fixed anybody.

But it was there for them and there was things I could provide that maybe 1 day they could work with And in 1 dramatic way as I found out I was used as the beacon of hope that what the system was telling people can’t be possibly true is true that you can survive this.

And in some cases, you can beat it entirely. I did. I’m coming up on 20 years now. It’s just not a thing. Hasn’t been a thing in forever.

Well, in 20 years. Okay. In 20 years. There’s nothing about me and hasn’t been for 20 years that you can call bipolar. There’s little pieces of anxiety that I had dealt with for many years, but that’s anxiety.

It was all by itself. Just anxiety. That’s anxiety. That’s not bipolar. Bipolar is such a sweet, sweeter so much sweeter larger cornucopia of of fucking pain and agony than just anxiety than just depression.

I noticed sounds fucked up, but if all you have is anxiety and all or all you have is depression. I know you will you will never feel the the the worth of what I’m about to say, but you’re getting off light. There’s far worse.

There’s far worse that could hit you if you get the full blown fucking version of bipolar inside you. I always laugh when I talk about the awfulness of it and I’m never sure why other than I think in part it’s a it’s a I shit you not.

I just figured it out while sitting here talking to you guys. It’s a celebration that I did it that I got out particularly when I didn’t think it was possible. It was never my aim to get out when I put together the system that I did.

It takes guts to live well. I didn’t know I was building the system. I just wanted less pain. That was all I dared hope for. And and really when I started building the system, I hoped I’d live long enough to see some kind of benefits.

I didn’t I didn’t really think I was gonna make it much longer and my last doctor said I definitely was not. I was gonna die by cop in 6 months or less if I didn’t figure something out.

So I laugh in celebration because I’m not kidding. Sometimes when I think about what I went through because I do talk to it talk to myself about it a lot more than I do with other people. I’ll laugh with tears on my eyes.

Because it’s just I walked out of insanity somehow. And it hurt and it was relentless and I didn’t think I’d ever get out of it. I didn’t think I’d ever even get it to just quiet some, little and walk all the way out of it.

So I fixed me, but I definitely would never say I can fix you. If you go to bipolar excellence dot com, look up on the menu and click on courses. I sell all my courses in a bundle. 1 of them is the wellness course.

The other course is what came next. What I started doing with my life after I built the wellness course and then experienced all that it had to offer. You get to see all of that even if all your ad is trying to get better.

You get to see what came next if you get that bundle. And then the third course is really just a great big old box of every resource I’ve ever used and still used to run my life.

And when I got enough time I’ll add more things to it because the list keeps growing. So I just wanted to make that clear tonight. Again, I cannot fix you.

Commotivate you. I can inspire you. I can give you hope. I can give you tools that I used. And there’s more tools than what I use. There’s plenty of people that have done the same damn thing I did, didn’t go the way I went with it.

Beyond some of the standard things you’re supposed to do to, you know, live well to treat your body well. There’s a lot of shit out there.

Talk about giving you hope. There’s a lot of shit out there for fighting this illness that you will never hear about in a doctor’s office or on the news or in any magazine. You’ve got to dig and turn turn over rocks.

In the bottoms of quarries you’ve never walked into before. You’ve got to dig and search and seek and find and pester in question. And think and ponder and be introspective and be retrospective.

You’ve got to turn this thing over like 1 of those Rubik’s cubes that has like 27 fucking tiles to a side. You’ve got to keep spinning and twisting and flipping this fucking thing and looking at it from every pops direction you can.

And even then, I would never say you could be fixed, but I’m telling you there’s things out there that could help you.

Move the dial a little further in the direction you’d want to go than it is now. Wanted it to go than it is now. Don’t give up.

Don’t give up. Keep fighting. If this is you, keep fighting. No. You’re not alone. Know that there are people that understand this most fucked up of diseases. I know that there’s at least 1 guy that walked out of it Be well.