Bipolar is a funny word. It was chosen as a better description of the mental health disorder than its former name, Manic Depression...
Let's break it down, for we often use words without thinking deeply enough about their meaning, both overt and hidden, and so we risk becoming the skimming stone across the surface of the water, not aware of the depths beneath...
As a writer, I often head for the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) as the one source of truth for the meanings of words in the English language...
bi-: two; having two.
polar: relating to a pole or poles; directly opposite in character or tendency.
Now I don't know about others with bipolar, but my experience of it is a little more complicated than having just two things directly opposite in character or tendency. It is so much more than the binary option of mania and depression. It is all of the infinite confusing complicated mess in between those two poles, often much more than it is ever about the poles themselves...
As a man of science (I am an electrical engineer and a technical writer in my day job) I thought quite reasonably that I would be able to think my way out of my mental health issues... bahahahahaaaa... what a laugh... but hey, the scientific process is all about starting with an approach, and if that approach is found not to work, it has to be either modified so that it does work or abandoned as a dud... as scientists (and as ordinary human beings) we learn as much if not more from our mistakes as we do from our smooth sailing and our victories...
The problem with thoughts is that they never come as just one thought... it would be so simple (and quiet!) if we had just one thought at the time, and that was it... no avalanche of thoughts following on from that first thought... but over time, we have evolved and been conditioned to overthink, and some of us are much better at it than others...
The vast majority of mental health issues involve overthinking as a prominent feature. I believe that overthinking is both a symptom and a cause of our mental health issues...
Every time I had a bad or negative thought, using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and other related types of rewiring-our-thoughts therapies, I would challenge the thought and come up with more helpful ones to replace them. Don't get me wrong, this type of therapy is a very important step, especially in the early stages of our mental health recovery journey...
It's damn difficult to rewire the thought patterns of a lifetime. It's hard work to choose to use different words and wording in your own thoughts when you have been reinforcing those same views and beliefs and conditioning and programming for a lifetime. It is nigh on impossible to control the near-constant churning of emotions and moods that boil and bubble beneath the surface of our thoughts...
Thoughts alone cannot fix our mental health issues, but damn they can do a lot to improve our condition and make the fight so much easier... they can go a long way to changing the very disposition of a person, from negative to more positive, from angry to gentler, from despairing to more hopeful...
The words we choose in our thoughts do a lot to affect our moods, and our moods do a lot to affect our language... it is an important dual relationship... when I am depressed, I am monosyllabic at best; when I am hypomanic, I can talk underwater with a mouthful of marbles whilst Whistling Dixie...
The problem with focusing too much on thoughts is that it is the rabbit hole that never ends. The wordier you get upstairs [Silenus points to his head] the less peace and quiet you have, and we need peace and quiet to be able to survive and to heal... so we have a problem...
Having focused on making good thoughts to challenge the bad thoughts (which then goes on to spawn further bad thoughts that need further new good thoughts to challenge them), now we find that there is a constant inner conflict. The different voices of the thoughts in your head continuously argue back and forth, and the chatter becomes unbearable. You want to scream: "QUUUIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEETTT!!!!"
And then you have to change direction again, take another fork in the road of your mental health journey... you have to learn how to be quiet, how to still the inner word storms of your thoughts, how to broker a peace between the multiple fragments of yourself that are constantly bickering and arguing and calling each other names...
The conflict must come to an end... and then you think "But in order for conflict to come to an end, there must be someone who takes authority over all the others and says 'Stop fighting,' and all that does is to create another aspect of my personality that is trying to take charge and control all of the other warring parts, who will all then have someone new to fight."
Hahahaha... and that is when you realise that you just have to stop thinking...
That's where Mindfulness comes into play... it is the meditative silence of one's thoughts that allows one to be fully present in the Now moment... thoughts, words, they take you away from the appreciation of existence that lies beyond words, and that is truly a great loss...
And so, more hard work ensues to try and still the inner torrent of words to a trickle and then to silence... and as with CBT it is hard at first (almost impossible!) but it becomes easier with time and effort and practice, until it gets to the point where you have successfully reprogrammed yourself and the new patterns stick...
The next step is to realise that all patterns are somehow restricting our ability to live a truly authentic life, even the good patterns that we sometimes need in order to survive...
I think "Bipolar" is a small word with a lot of meaning...
Much love and respect to the community... thanks for reading another one of Silenus' Wordy Ramblings...
