Bipolar Inquiry

Bipolar and here's your pills because we're not going to fix societies ills


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I'm seeing that it might be better to wake up earlier and do a video talk to myself earlier cuz lately the last week or so the traffic noise has really been bothering me especially the trucks with engine brakes but anyways I went to a recovery day yesterday and I was a member of the panel in the morning and afternoon sessions and shared a bit of my story and success with supported housing and how much that helped me and very happy to do that I love speaking about the aspects that are super helpful and that changed my life and saved my life and everything in between I guess I I struggle a little bit with the pathologizing aspect and also how they talk about recovery in terms of oh you can recover now as opposed to before when people were institutionalized but at the same time they're saying you went to the hospital we put you on meds we gave you a diagnosis that stripped away all your hopes and dreams and the medication suppresses you and then we put you out in the community and say but you can recover instead of receiving it in a totally different way so it's nice that at least there's a lot of programs to help people move on with their lives but our humanity is sort of stripped away in the psych ward experience and then it takes so much effort by programs and systems and human beings to get a person to feel like a human again luckily where I was placed that happened right away everyone made me feel welcome and I was just having a lot of fun and I was very lucky that way and part of it was I'd never really bought into the diagnosis I bought into all the things that would help me experience wellness and happiness and focusing on a diagnosis or symptoms whether it's true or not is not going to bring me wellness this is going to make me feel less hopeful and everything so I just sort of ignored that part largely and I remember being at a psycho education group that was a weekly group and thinking this was just a bunch of crap and I didn't really believe it but even if it was something believable it wasn't very positive even if it was sort of presented in a positive light it's like Herod we're going to give you all this jargon that you have to believe in that applies to you and now recover from that but never forget that this is what your problem is and that you have a medical problem you know it's not anything like it's lovely to say that in order to make a person feel better in a way because they're not feeling like oh I did this or anything but what I don't like is it it takes away all the responsibilities of society and how societies created to traumatize a good portion of people and then they maybe develop this symptom of mental illness and cycle here's your pill because we're not going to fix society and the weird thing to me too is that if people were never educated away from who they truly are and like even trained to go into a profession where they're going to help people we would all be co-creating a completely different world where we wouldn't have people enslaved to help people that weren't able to be enslaved to help people make products or whatever it is it's because we move away from ourselves that we need to create all that hoopla but I could go on and on about that forever and that's not something that's likely to change anytime soon and I would never want to take away anything from anyone that anyone found helpful I have found having a diagnosis helpful because it gave me certain help and I met amazing people along the way and I wouldn't change that but I also feel like it probably could have been avoided or received differently and maybe one day it will be maybe one day people will be asked well what do you think's happening for you and they'll say well this happened and this happened and this happened and all these terrible things happen and now this is where I'm at and a person won't be like well that means you have a mental illness just look at all the stuff that happened and so I've been fortunate because I've been because I have had amazing help and support along the way and it's been from human beings not from pills and programs and since I've been working in the system I've been not doing as well instead of just sort of participating in my community and they had a First Nations elder do a welcoming at the beginning end and his son and they did an amazing job and just some of the stuff they shared well their connection to the land and and some of the things they teach their children I was just thinking to myself look at that culture that's been destroyed by us and they kind of have the medicine we need to reconnect to the land and all those things and when then we have this mental health system that if we understood what the indigenous people understand we wouldn't even need most of this stuff I feel like if I would have been received by a native elder when I was in my crisis five and a half years ago they probably would have told me something different I don't think they would have understood it in terms of psychiatry and with all this mental health and mental illness promotion they're just trying to get everybody to see odd behaviors or distress as something that needs to be dealt with by some kind of professional they talk about their music and their songs and their drums as medicine and as prayer and the person who was the main organizer of the event or main speaker of the event i should say talked about how it needs to be a language of hope and optimism created and i think i might be creating some of that for myself with this self dialogue one of the things I'm sort of seeing lately is that by participating in the system it's a pathologizing system and I'm sort of saying to people while people that have this crisis and have a diagnosis whatever they need unconditional love they need understanding they need somebody to listen they need all these things yet at the same time the fact that people don't do that makes me kind of mad so then if I'm speaking to somebody who or to a system that has a different context than I do in a way I'm not being unconditionally loving and understanding of them so how can I say to them be unconditionally loving towards me when I'm in crisis but the fact that you don't understand me I'm not going to be unconditionally loving towards you so it's this kind of contradiction in a way in and then my brain went to what I talked about before a long time ago about how one day I feel like people like me will be saying to people that are professional and very rigid and consistently it's okay it's okay to come out and play like loosen your tie so I sort of had this thought that one day I'll need to help them or will need to help them and so then I was thinking well I could almost do that now just go into bodying my mania in a way to invite adults to remain childlike or connect with their childlike nature ideally I would love to be able to help children not disconnect from their childlike nature and always be that playful and it's interesting this last week or so when I sort of had a bit of shift in consciousness like a trans consciousness where ego focus is more difficult or focusing on things that I don't want to focus on are not heart centered or not my path perhaps it's deflecting me away from that and then when I'm not focused on that stuff I feel pretty much fine but if I try to go back to that it's almost like it's not letting me and I feel to what happens is I need to become more and more simple and what I'm doing because it's almost like this the self-care or whatever self whatever becomes more narrow but I want to be out and about and I want to be around people so it's almost like I want to be relational and it's almost like it's telling me go out and about be random sit around here do this and that's something that somebody in mania would do is just go around well I'm not feeling and like complete ecstasy or anything like that but it's just interesting how it's not really wanting me to sit at home and work on a little document on the computer and I haven't been on my mini trampoline in the last while because i was a little bit under the weather for the last couple of days i have and when i'm on my trampoline with my trampoline playlist I feel slightly ecstatic so it's not like i'm unable to go into those states it's just that working on a document on my computer puts me in the opposite puts me like anxiety whereas being on my trampoline puts me in that ecstasy and if I think about how manic consciousness is trying to get us to be able to hold X to see if I do things as part of my daily practice if you want to call it that that helped me be more ecstatic it's going to create my body in such a way that I can hold more ecstasy and so I also had this thought that I need to move towards being my artist self and I had this sense when I was in the psych ward in April but then I got away from it because I had some recalibrating to do afterwards but I'm starting to get that sense again and I haven't been put in the psych ward so it's perhaps I need to step into being that artist self that embodied Matt I self or if I do things that are not that or that are in opposition to that it's going to create a state in me where I end up moving towards the psych ward so I kind of have this sense that it's time to move towards my dreams and not because it's like okay it's time on the clock it's like my body is saying no sort of like that Gabor maté a book when the body says no and I haven't really I don't read it even though I have it so it seems like my body is saying no sort of like if I accidentally touch the stove when it's hot my body's going to recoil it's like a reflex and it seems like I'm having this sort of reflex but to life certain things in life whereas other things are fine and part of that sensitivities is having that sensitivity and being sensitive to things that are not right for me looks like I'm gonna have to move go out soon the trucks are just a little bit much and Sean Blackwell says bipolar is I can't be me disorder well I'm starting to feel like I must be me I have to I think that's true for people that go through this trans conscious experience and then connect with their sensitivity they become sensitive to those things that aren't right yeah those are the things that society conditions us to sort of move towards like success and this and that like basically i'm walking away from a career possibly with the health authority if i was able to do well and I get the next position in the next position and and and that sounds cool but if I think about my life and I think about okay if I keep that job I need to spend the next year sitting on this couch looking at my laptop screen where if I choose to be my embodied manic self embodied mania the map the ground I'm going to cover with my feet is going to be vast compared to that I'm going to go to California I'm going to be all over the place and meeting all different people versus couch bed toilet kitchen couch bed toilet kitchen it's like being a rat in a cage and I don't know I just can't do it anymore and I don't want to be saying that to myself all the time I can't do this anymore because it sort of can be extrapolated to feeling like oh I'm talking about ending my life when really it's about ending that path of my life and that could be part of what happens when sometimes I get to the point where I think I need to end my life it's like no I need to end that path in my life and it's interesting how they talk about how we one of the things we value most is staying consistent so sometimes we'll almost like do something that endangers us or ends our life because we're trying to stay consistent and so it seems like I need to be consistently inconsistent or when I get to this place of consistency it will be interpreted as I need to end my life when really I need to end this pattern of consistency because everything is really symbolic like words are symbolic and and language can be interpreted in so many different ways so we can get ourselves into certain situations internally that have nothing to do with the external but maybe are symbolic or messages and I've talked about how there are special messages well one wanting to end one's life is a special message as well it means like do something else get out of here or change something it's a complete desperation and it feels like complete desperation and I've been in that state and that's why I have my zaps trap that you talked about a lexicon of optimistic language would be cool to create a lexicon like an alternative lexicon a lexicon for trans consciousness

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Bipolar InquiryBy Alethia