Most of us are bipolar

Bipolar disorder is not multiple personality, but there are similarities. In D.I.D., there is an “alter” who is known or unknown to the “executive” identity (who, in my understanding, is also a false self), both conceivable either as aspects of one person or as an effective dichotomy. This is true of bipolar depression versus mania: A manic individual is a different character, essentially unaware of his depressed counterpart or baseline. I believe, working with my client today, that someone afflicted with bipolar may sense the trace onset of good or excited or euphoric or accomplishment energy and have some kind of chance to opt not to accept it. Even though his mania is such a beautiful experience of superpower ascendancy – a fantasy land of Olympian joy and achievement – he believes he could, if strong enough, choose the truth of his depression.

So I wonder if a multiple could do the same, if she could sense the escape to a better self approaching, and choose to stay in depression or devastation.

I think it is useful to look at bipolar mania from an entirely natural, human angle, not as a biochemical or brain dysfunction.

My casual theory features the belief that many infants-to-toddlers and some latency-age children have experienced moments of ecstasy, by which I mean pure limitless joy in certain moments. After that, what a pull to that bliss must remain locked inside! – locked away in the child and the adult who live a bleak or troubled life. There is, I believe, such a pull that waits for its moment.* Talking with my client, I recalled that while I’ll drink a beer or two less than once a year on average, when the “right” setting materializes, I will love to know the imminent effect of that beer. There will be a yearning for elevation. That feeling would be a jones and it would be beyond hard to snuff out. And were I to reject it, I would have to force in myself an enemy stubbornness that combatted this feeling: “Why in the name of Holy God am I torturing myself, am I willing to fall from this anticipa­tory chemical wonderfulness back to my typical self, by NOT having a beer?”

There is another client who knows, now, that she has lived in a rosy bubble of false happiness and dreamy motivational speeches since a fear-of-death experience in her early childhood. This is escapist, and is precarious like mania. She doesn’t deflate out of it to a darker identity, though: The precariousness and darkness are immanent. A Narcissist’s ascendance to perfection from a chaotic, never-grown little boy is also fragile. His “mania” must continually be inflated by supplies.**

I believe bipolar should be called the euphoric disorder or the hopeful struggle disorder, because the person falls upward to a better place which defies the gravity of his real life. It must crash, in time. Maybe nearly all of us are manic to some degree, where even in a depression we will invoke a small good fragment of our life and the positive chemistry of it. Even so with wishful thinking. That sounds like a necessary way to be, even a lovely way that should never bear a stigma.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Mania may come, of course, from buried forces other than childhood ecstasy. I knew a bipolar-diagnosed man whose occasionally awakening urgency was destruction. During periodic manias, he destroyed a condominium, a truck. He once committed quiet mayhem in a church. The underlying theme in all manias, then, would be escape to a core truth.

** Compliments, increasing wealth, rallies and the like.