Saying Goodbye to the High
Over the last year, I’ve been asked more than a few times about coming to terms with and healing my relationship with bipolar disorder. When I was a grad student of counseling psychology in the late 90’s, this disorder was still (lightly) being referred to as Manic Depressive disorder. That’s a term I most closely identify with, as the cycling from the high of the manic state to the crash of the depressive state was how it most manifested in my body. That - and the detachment from reality - were the most devastating parts of it for me. As I do now, in my 20’s, I steered away from labels professionally. I was concerned clients would get a label and believe they were flawed due to it’s inherent pathology. Perhaps, it was the rebel within my youth state, but using psychological labels hit a very negative cord with me. Something inside of me knew there was a deeper, more perfect version of who we all were. So, I personally never accepted any of the labels I was diagnosed with, nor did I choose to take any psychopharmaceuticals. I am not promoting this path, it was simply my path.
It’s been almost 10 years that I’ve been free of the extreme cycling states. To this day though, I still have whiffs of the symptomatic manifestations. However, as I’ve been in a universe-imposed cacoon-state for the last 2 months, it feels like I’m having my last draw with this befuddling disorder. The symptoms tend to show up when I’m faced with a task, which, by the way, can be mundane. I begin to feel the anticipation of an excitatory energy take place: my heart begins to race and an urgency-type of power starts tugging at my sleeve, wanting to take over my entire being, like being pulled into a tunnel. In the past, if someone interrupted me during this phase in the cycle, I would likely snap at them. What I realize now, is that if they interrupted me at that phase, they might potentially disrupt the high I was going to eventually get. I’d chalk it up as being in “a creative state.” And, yes, it might have been such, but it was fueled by a very selfish - even narcissistic - craving for the high. Like a groveling junkie, I was hellbent on making my way down the road, to the corner, where the dealer dealt to get my high.
As I’ve been recently pulling up the unconscious pieces of my psychological history, I now see how my dad had a more extreme version of manic depression than I’ve experienced. Like many with this disorder, he used substance to cope with the overwhelming cycling states and energy they produced. For whatever cosmic reason, I never went the substance route to cope. I was an athlete most of my life and I tended towards positions that put me in tune with a one-pointed focus. In my 30’s, I found yoga to offer the same discerning quality. I imagine this saved my life, as substance would have been a slippery slope for me. As we all know, drugs immediately do the job of numbing the pain. Pain - both physical and mental - were constant companions for me throughout my 20’s and 30’s. So much so, that I contemplated suicide on many occasions. To have an immediate reprieve from that torture would have felt heaven-sent.
Furthermore, I see how my dad’s extreme moods and behaviors imprinted a trauma response that, “something terrible and catastrophic is going to happen…something is going to disrupt this moment and cause disarray and confusion.” I call this an “Impending Doom” complex. I also experienced unpredictable physical abuse from him, which added another layer of sediment to this complex. So many of us with relational trauma know this feeling all too well. This deep and unconscious neuropathway loves to rear it’s ugly head at me, attempting to sabotage the completion of the task at hand.
Up until about 6 years ago, ADD like symptoms would usually show up at this point. My opinion of ADD/ADHD is that it’s one form in which the freeze response presents itself. Freeze was the dominant survival response my body choose to cope with any excitatory state. I over-coupled all excitatory states with this Impending Doom Complex (over-coupling is another common trauma response). So, having my body go into freeze was like having the parent I’d always yearned for, come and save me from the abuse. The freeze response allowed me to disassociate from my body so I no longer could feel the emotional chaos nor the physical abuse. I recall the disassociation becoming so ingrained that I began to levitate over my body.
Now, at 47, I’m moving through feeling the sympathetic responses (fight and flight) to their completion. As a child, these biological responses were given little to no time or space. Especially for a child, healthy fight and flight are ways to feel into and express aliveness, power and freedom. When I feel the granular nuances begin, I immediately connect with my breath, I ground deeply, and I slow the process of the sympathetic responses down, telling my terrified little girl within that she’s safe, protected and out of harm’s way. Moving through these states to completion takes a great deal of capacity within the nervous system. The grief that has been pushed down for decades seems to come out in tumultuous waves in the beginning stages. I’d highly recommend working with a 3rd party when starting out in resolving relational trauma. It can be gnarly and dangerous to attempt alone.
The good news is that we can heal these deeply fractured, fragmented and exiled parts of our being. It is the very impetus of the work we are doing at AoH. If I’d had these tools and practices when I was in my 20’s, it would have saved me decades of cycling and pain. I’m so very grateful to have them to share with others now. I do believe this is my dharma.