Braced for impact. Tyler Baltierra knows he’ll likely receive mixed reviews on this season of Teen Mom OG, but he wants fans to know he’s only human.
“I know I will most likely get a ton of backlash from viewers this season & that’s okay, honestly,” the 26-year-old tweeted on Monday, October 1, the day of the MTV show’s midseason premiere. “It will NEVER hold me back from being 100% real & honest! Loving someone through severe depression/anxiety takes a toll & I’m only one human being that experiences weak moments too.”
Baltierra tweeted that message alongside a Teen Mom OG clip in which he loses his patience with wife Catelynn Lowell’s struggles with depression. In that scene from Monday’s episode, his mother asks if those struggles are depressing to watch.
I know I will most likely get a ton of backlash from viewers this season & that’s okay, honestly…it will NEVER hold me back from being 100% real & honest! Loving someone through severe depression/anxiety takes a toll & I’m only one human being that experiences weak moments too https://t.co/R5kl1F0Yoo
— Tyler Baltierra (@TylerBaltierra) October 1, 2018
“No, it’s not depressing … It’s repulsing,” Baltierra responded. “Something’s wrong with me. I’m losing sympathy and empathy. I think maybe the empathy and sympathy is sucked dry. I don’t know. But I recognize that … I need to figure this out.”
The reality star — who himself is living with a bipolar diagnosis — revealed in a subsequent tweet that he did indeed figure it out. “I always do!” he added. “That being raised in a world that I perceived to be unjust, unreliable, & dangerous … just forced me to develop a survival strategy, which I learned very early on … that the only person responsible for my happiness, health & well being … is ME!”
He also shared a GIF of the couple’s 3-year-old daughter Novalee lighting up upon seeing Lowell’s face on Baltierra’s phone. “This will probably be the only episode I watch this season honestly,” he wrote. “Reliving Nova being upset like that is actually devastating…going through it felt really hard, but seeing her little sad face literally KILLS ME!”
Lowell, 26, sought treatment for her mental health in 2017 after a series of hardships. She and Baltierra placed their first daughter, Carly, up for adoption in 2009 after determining they were too young to be parents. And as Teen Mom OG viewers saw in an episode in February, she recently suffered a miscarriage.
The Michigan native, who’s pregnant with her and Baltierra’s third child, exclusively told Us Weekly last week that her anxiety and depression was taxing on their marriage. “What I went through put a lot of strain on a relationship, especially leaving him and him having to be a single dad for so long and running a business on his own. I have a lot of sympathy for what I put him through. I think that’s put a lot of stress on our relationship,” she said. “Right now, we’re hitting a couple bumps that need to be worked through.”
Like her husband, Lowell won’t be tuning into to Teen Mom OG this season. “I lived it, I’m not going to watch it,” she revealed to Us. “I feel like every couple goes through bumps in the road, especially as you’re growing up together like me and Ty have. I mean, we’ve been together 13 years now and married for three, so we’ve grown up together. I feel like, as people, you grow up and you change in certain ways, and it’s all about learning how to process that with your significant other and how do you go from there or how you change things.”
Teen Mom OG airs on MTV on Mondays at 9 p.m. ET.
