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| Funny Bi-Polar Bear what you doing there! Eh? Alone again? - Naturally! |
Friends and family can't understand and with time quietly drift away, the distance between us seems to reflect my fragmented soul, its loss and lost sense of home.
Why does my heart set fire to my mind, those Icarus heights I climb, only to crash into the cold, cold sea. Isolation?
Sing now Harry, please sing! Click Here
"Baby's so high that shes skying, yeah she's flying afraid to fall, I'll tell you why Baby's crying, cuz' she's dying arent we all".
Oh, I've got something inside me,
To drive a princess blind.
There's a wild man, wizard,
He's hiding in me, illuminating my mind.
Oh, I've got something inside me,
Not what my life's about,
Cause I've been letting my outside tide me,
Over 'till my time, runs out.
Taxi, was the first Harry Chapin song I listened to when a best friend played it for me back in the early 70's, a best friend long gone in my classic bipolar journey. Music is the best friend that's survived a long and winding road, my fire and ice trial to become whole. In February 1980 the sting of real isolation and loss triggered my first episode of mania, and set me off on this journey of living with bipolar.
I remember those first moments of lift off, sitting on the end of our double bed, she'd left me you see. I sat there with another best friends guitar in my lap looking into the dressing table mirror, looking at me. I was 28 years old and my wife had left me the previous day and another family connection seemed to have failed, was I destined to be alone? In my childhood, before easy access to music, there were fairy tales and hero stories from the Christian bible to warm the heart of a birth traumatized and unwanted child. We all need attachment of some kind, its hard wired although of coarse I didn't know that as a child or a deserted husband. Back then I'd never heard of trauma or its powers of dissociation, didn't know I was birthed with it.
So I sat there looking in the mirror, at a loss and in deep need of new direction, I prayed, prayed to God. A God I thought I'd been sure I'd given up on during the striving of early adulthood. I prayed along with the associated memories of childhood, an out of body experience, a prayer during a soccer game when I was surrounded by the enemy, when I asked him to let my team win promising to show my true colors even if it meant a good hiding. By coincidence my team did win and I celebrated the victory regardless of the consequences. Needless to say such memories ripple through time, always whispering into the now, a yearning for attachment that perhaps stimulates the mystic, a connected cosmic oneness, lost during existential isolation.
Looking into that mirror, praying in earnest for a new direction, I promised I'd do whatever was required if he would just show me the way. Nothing happened for minutes as I sat there with firm resolve, looking at my own reflection, looking into my face. Then it began, a change at the top of my head and I felt it flow down slowly, through my face and into my shoulders, then down through my chest and into my pelvic area. I sat with a sense of "what is it? Wonder" although not in thoughts. It was so similar to my out of body experience when I was 12 years old, the descending calm was the opposite of the sudden elevation though, when I'd seemly left my body.
It was like I'd been sitting in bath of water that was over my head and someone had pulled the plug, I sat and felt the calm descending as the tensioned dissociation drained down and out, as if like water through my toes. I was suddenly refreshed, happy, excited and new. Wow! Had God just touched my spirit, was this a religious experience, or am I just relieved by a sense of being free, free of attachment, free of dependency on anyone but me.
Enter Uplifting Music Please! Genisis, Entangled Click Here
When you're asleep they may show you
Aerial views of the ground,
Freudian slumber empty of sound.
Over the rooftops and houses,
Lost as it tries to be seen,
Fields of incentive covered with green.
Mesmerised children are playing,
Meant to be seen but not heard,
"Stop me from dreaming!"
"Don't be absurd!"
What are you thinking dear reader? How can we capture the scene of my first mania, the mood swing, with its rising sensations of joy, as if casting off hidden chains and the soaring sense of freedom in a manic flight? Coming out of lifelong dissociation for the first time in such a way has a powerful affect! Was I happy or What! But of coarse I couldn't cope, couldn't regulate this profound experience of flowing emotions, I had no knowledge of my brains neural stimulation beneath these nervous system mediated, euphoric sensations.
I do now though and I stimulate those soaring energies of euphoria with music, like the Genesis link and sing along lyrics above. These days I practice a mindful emotion regulation, now I practice the mindful self control that would have made sense and helped me integrate that first manic experience, instead of having that awful sense of helplessness the disease concept of bipolar guarantees. A deep sense of helplessness that evoked an autonomic reaction of mood, despair of such a density, depression was an inevitable outcome.
Yet unlike the false dawn of promised relief my first bipolar diagnosis evoked, I've finally found a solid and lasting relief through identifying the culprit within, now I know its my unconscious nervous system, and now I can have a euphoric experience and simply let it go. I've learned how to regulate my affective states into a normal order, beyond my previous experience of affective disorder.
Affect Regulation is the very foundation of our sense of self, as Allan N Shcore describes to us in
Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development
.Affect! Was the fundamental element in my first manic episode and what is meant by affective disorder, and what looks like you can't control your emotions. Primarily, affect resides deep in the brain with its neural stimulation of the autonomic nervous system, its activity is unconscious, automatically maintaining organ function within a normal range. Affect regulation essentially means maintaining homeostatic balance, in what we consciously refer to as our comfort-zone.
The autonomic nervous system is also responsible for unconscious approach and avoidance behaviors, and is stimulated through the brain in what Stephen Porges calls "neuroception."
How can I describe to you how unconscious neuroception works? If this was your writing I was reading, I would need to sense my primary motivation in scanning for threats or opportunity. I would try to be aware how I was wary of any symbols (words) that might trigger my reactive energies and instinctively urge me to turn away, get angry and click the next link or stimulate critical thoughts. Next I'd try to be aware of scanning for resources, anything I could use to enhance my sense of self, maybe a typo error or a poorly explained concept.
Neuroception can explain how we are not really conscious of our motivation and how the mind does not have primary control despite our postured ego. Other research shows that the motor cortex of the brain and mirror neurons have far more control of our daily interactions than we are consciously aware of. It is unconscious neuroception and the autonomic nervous system that were responsible for my lifelong dissociation, and it was a lifelong neuroception of threat with its over stimulation of my auto nervous system that was reset during my experience sitting on the end of our marital bed. That tension draining away through my toes was the over stimulation of my nerves, and the release had a powerful affect on my mind.
Anyway back to the story, two weeks later I went voluntarily to a recommended psychiatrist who pronounced me schizophrenic in ten minutes flat. For readers who have been hospitalized with a mental illness, you known the drill, two weeks further on I was discharged confused and bewildered as the medication side effects kicked in and ..... you know the medical scene?
Well, thanks to our kindness and skill
You'll have no trouble until
You catch your breath
And the nurse will present you the bill!"
Living with bipolar is having experiences of affective disorder, which can't really be captured by writing down words here or reading them. My bipolar affective disorder is an experience of affect/emotion and its stimulated thinking. You may perhaps feel more than think about this experience by listening to the music that helped stimulate my euphoric states while you read through this article. With a mindful awareness of your own stimulated sensations, perhaps you can appreciate that this is what I've learned to regulate, in living with bipolar.
Essentially what I'm trying articulate through this blog is the unconscious nature of nervous system activity, and how bipolar disorder is an adapted response to an unconscious sense of threat. It was a lifelong sense of threat that had stimulated my fear based comfort-zone prior to my first manic episode. A comfort-zone that needed to be re-adapted - re-wired with the shock of abandonment and the challenge to find a new comfort-zone and way of life, by replacing fear with joy at the very core of my experience.
The systemic feedback loops between brain/body that are the core of our experience, are not an easy thing to explain in black and white writing. Our conscious mind insists on a cause and effect awareness, as it frames a minds eye perception of a this or that thing, in its essential need for an external awareness. Yet as the top theorists like Allan Schore and Stephen Porges are now showing us, our internal reality is a lot different to our conscious awareness and is better understood through systems theory rather than cause and effect objectivity.
Sensing the reality of my own feedback based comfort-zone, has required a change in perceptive awareness with a full recovery from my previous affective condition firmly based on feeling not thinking. Insights into how my brain/body works and a steady daily practice of mindfully tracking my sensation experience have been the keys to re-conditioning, re-wiring my brain stimulated nervous system, in what is popularly know as brain plasticity. Education has changed my self awareness with solid insights helping me to alter my experience of life, an experience no longer grounded in fear, but joy and wellness.
Practicing awareness of my unconscious reactivity has allowed me to slowly yet surely change it, to re-condition the trauma stimulated conditioning of my autonomic nervous system with new experience. In "Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self" Schore describes how critical early life experience is to a still maturing brain and nervous system. The distress of traumatic birth conditioned a over-active nervous system, establishing a mind grounded in heightened dissociation beyond the normal range of dissociation that the mind essentially is.
A new awareness of the "affect" of early life experience on our maturing sense of self is part of a shift in human perception that will grow and slowly reach a tipping point when everyone will suddenly say "I get it." An example is the raised awareness that everything is connected in ways we cannot see, brought about by the global banking crisis, such events stimulate our cause and effect logic into a wider systemic view.
I chose the Polar Bear picture for this article to represent the power of our evolved FREEZE response and its unconscious role in what we call dissociation. After reading objective descriptions of what dissociated behavior looks and feels like, I eventually needed to look beneath these objective descriptions to the biology of what dissociation is, with its complex systemic interaction within my brain/nervous system. The process of insight gaining education and its experiential integration does not lend itself to an easy objective description, its a bit like the fermentation process of fine wine, a chemical process similar to the mind.
For the kind of insightful education that may lead you to the wholeness and wellness of a free flowing heart, please read Healing the Body-Mind in Heart-Centered Therapies by David Hartman, MSW and Diane Zimberoff, M.A.
"Entangled" complete lyrics:
When you're asleep they may show you
Aerial views of the ground,
Freudian slumber empty of sound.
Over the rooftops and houses,
Lost as it tries to be seen,
Fields of incentive covered with green.
Mesmerised children are playing,
Meant to be seen but not heard,
"Stop me from dreaming!"
"Don't be absurd!"
"Well if we can help you we will,
You're looking tired and ill.
As I count backwards
Your eyes become heavier still.
Sleep, won't you allow yourself fall?
Nothing can hurt you at all.
With your consent
I can experiment further still."
Madrigal music is playing,
Voices can faintly be heard,
"Please leave this patient undisturbed."
Sentenced to drift far away now,
Nothing is quite what it seems,
Sometimes entangled in your own dreams.
"Well, if we can help you we will,
Soon as you're tired and ill.
With your consent
We can experiment further still.
Well, thanks to our kindness and skill
You'll have no trouble until
You catch your breath
And the nurse will present you the bill!"