Bipolar disorder is an incredibly individual experience. Often the symptoms get mixed together with other disorders, including anxiety, autism, and borderline personality disorder, because there is so much overlap between them. To be clear – every person who experiences any mental health disorder is experiencing it differently than any other person who has experienced it before. It’s just that bipolar has so much overlap with others that it can be misdiagnosed or overlooked.
Bipolar exists in a unique realm of its own. The experience of cycling can feel like it overtakes who you are and becomes your personality, rather than the true experience of your core self. It is not uncommon for people who have experienced the cycling into mania to fear treatment of bipolar because it will take away their “sparkle” as the popular meme references. Bipolar is a multi-faceted experience – for every manic episode where our entire house gets cleaned, there may be a depressive episode where we cannot take out our garbage for two weeks. For every manic episode where a week’s worth of work gets done in an hour and we meet up with friends and have the time of our lives, there may be a manic episode where we are awake for 5 days.
What treating bipolar looks like: understanding the window of tolerance and stabilization. As the nature of bipolar is so unique, so too is our work within it. There are many things within bipolar that can be linked to trauma so it is important for us to understand your window of tolerance (the window in which our brains are able to function the most effectively) to see what may trigger into a depressive or manic/hypomanic episode. We want to stay within our window of tolerance so that we are able to live life on life’s terms. Stability doesn’t mean not having ups and downs (not taking away the “sparkle”), but having more manageable ones.
I have worked with different bipolar diagnoses for many years now and always find something new to learn. If you’d like to explore more together, please reach out to me.