Can we recover? Can we learn to cope better and find healing, find peace of MIND? There are hundreds of thousands of personal stories like Mary's all over the world. Watch and feel hope. You can learn to cope, you can feel the senses of your soul, they are your body, not just your brain. Is Bipolar a disease or dis-ease?
For two decades I accepted the mainstream view that I had a mental illness, a brain disorder, a disease.
I no longer accept that main stream view, one I feel is born from limited knowledge, a lack of awareness of how the brain/body/mind works.
Being told little more by psychiatrists than I have a 'chemical imbalance,' I felt 'infantile,' like a helpless child.
'You can't take care of yourself - just take the pills.' Such advice only left me feeling bewildered, disorganized, helpless and direction-less.
I'm a man, not a child, I can and do, want to work for my recovery, I don't want an easy, lazy answer, I don't want a magic pill anymore.
I want to learn. I want to educate myself about what and how I am, as a human animal, how my millions of years in the making 'instincts' inform my very recently evolved human emotions, and how my amazingly linguistic left hemisphere of my frontal cortex modulates my body's energies, helping me to not over react by distancing me from core feeling's.
I loved wordy explanations, rationalizations, and gorgeous intellectuality, until I came to understand how that helped me to avoid my own sensations, my feelings.
'There is nothing to fear, but fear itself'
Because it's a sensation within, projected onto something 'out there,' these days I can't believe just how much habitual resistance I had to feeling the sensations of my body, my dis-ease.
These days I'm slowly coming to understand the feedback loops of my nervous system and how the nervous system cannot be seperated from the chemical balance of the brain, perhaps my first episode of mania resulted from denied emotions like fear and the habitual posture I had adopted to contain deep feeling of fear, even terror, who knows.
Perhaps my 1st episode was an accident waiting to happen because of habitually poor brain/body regulation, the way I held myself tight against some unseen threat, as Winnicott said in his book "Human Nature" "some babies are born with a 'braced' disposition towards life itself," Perhaps this speaks of 'birth trauma' and an 'affected' autonomic (animal) nervous system.'
Perhaps I always had an unconscious perception of threat, one that came from within, one that was conditioned by experience, and cannot be perceived by the conscious mind.
In researching 'autism' Stephen Porges suggests that perhaps the autistic child is trapped in a state of unconscious 'terror' mediated by the autonomic nervous system, and he has coined the term 'neuroception' to show how we may be motivated by a perception that is below the awareness of the mind.
For more info on this new awareness of how the brain/body works visit
http://www.lifespanlearn.org/documents/Porges-Neuroception.pdf
Live more Freely: Educate yourself about yourself.