Conversations with some clients and with my partner, along with reflections on my own condition three decades ago, led me to some new thoughts (for me) on severe mood swings. I'd also been watching one of Gabor Mate's videos, so was thinking about attachment, reward pathways, and addiction.
I'll start by summarising what I remember about my own mood swings, about the experience of 'highs and lows' which my doctor described as a sort of sub-clinical bi-polar condition. Not that that particular description helped me much. It certainly didn't lead to either an effective coping strategy or any optimism about a real solution ...
Anyhow:
When I was low, the despair felt incurable. I always felt that I knew what it was about - certain aspects of my current circumstances and their relationship with some acute childhood miseries just left me grief-stricken and feeling worthless & helpless. Also, I knew that any experiments with authenticity would probably cause a lot of pain to people I cared about, that taking steps towards things I needed in my life would hurt them more than I could bear.
When I was high, I could also think about these things, but when I did, the problems seemed possible to address, and I couldn't put myself back in the place of seeing them as insoluble. In fact, I was full of plans about how they could be addressed - detailed, long-term, 'optimistic' plans ...
Towards the end of a 'high' period, I would have one or two slightly 'glassy' episodes, in which these plans would begin to look transparent and uncertain - minor flaws would look like portents of failure, imperfections like disasters. I would know that I was about to crash - usually within the following twenty-four hours.
I still have these cycles occasionally. The swings are not so extreme, and I have a more self-conscious awareness of what is going on. The Covid lockdown has triggered one or two - being cut off from some activities and places that are important to me, plus a lot of opportunities for daydreaming, have led me down familiar pathways. One recent one, coinciding with a conversation with a client (no surprise ...) led me to wonder if there was a parallel that I had missed:
The optimistic plan-fantasies were comforting. Being absorbed in them made me feel happy. Even if there was nothing very practical I could do in the moment, the 'plan-world' was a peaceful place to escape to.
At the time when I was most in crisis, I knew, consciously, that there was something 'pathological' about this - that my need for this escape, and the nature of the escape, were evidence of something having gone badly wrong for me. I could see no way forward from it, though, and felt I would be crushed if I didn't have the 'plan-world' to visit. It was a holding strategy, but I didn't know how to unlock myself from it.
What occurred to me recently is how much this is like an addiction. A comforting habit that offers short-term relief from pain, but is ultimately destructive. The cycle of highs and lows mirrors an addict's dopaminergic slavery - from the 'hit' of the high, to the glassy strung-out period as it unwinds, to the despair of the low and the open-wound need that is expressed in desperate attempts to get high again, to return to the plan-world.
Just as with addiction, it is unhelpful to focus on the behaviour without addressing the problem that the behaviour allows us to manage. Also, the plan-world or 'fantasising' activity can be a place where we explore real possibilities. A client drew my attention to this quotation:
"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden: Illustrated (Evergreen Classics) (p. 205). Kindle Edition.
In a conversation with another client, a musician, I was reminded that the 'highs' are often associated with bravery and creation; that works of the imagination require imaginative effort ...
Building foundations and valuing outputs are ways of bringing the 'fantasy world' into contact with reality. Both were essential parts of my own development.
But I could also have retreated into fantasy. Just as someone who needs pain relief can progress to drug addiction, I might have given up on reality for the comfort of the dreams.
The parallel with addiction struck me very forcibly during my lockdown musings. Perhaps because I could not put my hand on some of the realities I had connected with, and because I was cut off from some of the interactions that might have directly rewarded creative enterprise.
And perhaps because an old part of me recognised a deep pattern, and wondered at its power and presence, faded as it was.
And so I offer it here. Not as an instruction to follow dreams or count blessings, but as a possible route to reflection. I do not know how valid or persistent my present track is. Maybe I wouldn't be writing this if I had taken another course - history may not always be written by the winners, but it is certainly only written by those who have the opportunity and motivation to write it down.
If I do return to the darkness, though, it will not be with my eyes closed.
