Can you give me your comments and/or share your personal experience?

Some of the “Psychology” of Bipolar Disorder

I am in a place that I do not understand.

Well. That is normal, actually, because we do not understand all the infinite variables of life that brought us to where we are.

But this is different for me. I guess I realize that 99% of the time, I do not really question how I got to where I am, and I don’t care (in that sense). But I am hurting (suffering) right now, and I am scared.

I do not know how to get out of this place, and that makes me scared. Consequently I ask myself, “How did I get here?”

Normally, I don’t even care.

So I seek help, and we begin to try to put a label on my situation or condition, and then, worse than that, we try to put a label on me.

But why are labels what we seek? It is because we work within the concepts of thinking, most of which are developed from and interactive with language.

And language could be seen as a formula standardized by images or sounds, that we will agree, represents, or “means” that thing we try to conceptualize.

And so, those standardized images or sounds become our codes, our language.

So we throw out hypothesis after hypothesis regarding the unknown. It shall be called “manic-depression” we say.

But that sounds so terrible that we assume a more neutral (and descriptive) clinical wording, “bipolar disorder”. So does that help us?

Yes, it probably does, in many ways. (We will start to interact with our language constructs, and we will change them, and they will change us. They will become part of our new reality.)

So now, after seeking external (or “other person or entity or knowledge) help, I find this language applied to me. My first reaction is shock and horror, and I descend into despair.

The more they try to explain this concept to me, the worse it gets.

They tell me it is a “hereditary” condition. That makes it worse, because I am beginning to feel “doomed”, like there is no escape from it.

In fact, they even tell me that I must begin to “reconcile” myself to “it”, and that it is a “life-long” condition, and there is no “cure”, but it can be “managed”, and it may be possible for me to live a “somewhat normal” life”, but I will need to take medications forever.

In fact, I must not ever quit taking the medications that they prescribe for me, because, if I do, even if I am feeling well and don’t feel like I need them, I might have a “sudden relapse” or “episode” and become severely agitated, anxious, depressed, or something they call “manic”.

And I do not know what all these words mean. So they try to teach me (at $150 per hour, or, if I am in crisis, maybe $1000 per day in their hospitals).

And throughout this process, they try to, essentially, make me feel better.

And they seem to be confused or bewildered as to why continue to feel worse and worse.

But, in order to develop my story line, without losing you, the reader, I will jump to my conclusions (at least, the ”conclusions” that prompted me to sit down and start writing this).

They are this (and I say “conclusions” because I am searching for some “common denominators” for this “condition”. I have a strong feeling that I have caused my condition.

And that may sound bad, but I only say “caused” in a positive sense, in that it if I caused it I can also “uncause” it, i.e. “escape” it, or possibly even “eliminate” it from my life (i.e. make it stop bothering me).

We can debate all the causes later. My point for now (to you, and to myself!) is this: I caused it, and, partly though this “positive” realization, I also have the ability to escape it or make it go away.

But I want to just back up one step from “I caused it”. How did I cause it?

I caused it by losing control of part of my reality. And what does that mean? I probably caused it by somehow, some way, in some place in my life, I adopted a behavior of desperation.

I became desperate to, for example, succeed. And the flip side of succeed is fail.

I also, to varying degrees and intermixed with my desperation to succeed, became desperate not to fail.

Further, I did not realize I was doing this. It developed slowly inside me.

At first, my “psychology” was strong and resilient, and it did not hurt me.

But gradually, it became stronger and pervaded more and more of my mental and emotional landscape.

At some point, I kept “pushing on myself” so much to succeed and not to fail, that I affected myself physically.

I began to get nervous, tired and had an increasingly hard time sleeping.

My “breakdown” came when I had increasing trouble sleeping and, consequently began to be unable to get the rest my body, mind and emotions required to remain in a healthy balance (healthy ”circle” of behaviors).

I may have added to this downward spiral by assuming other ultimately harmful behaviors.

So now my life has become a complicated “mess”, and I feel miserable and hopeless.