The Bipolar Game Changer: The Essentials of a “Re-Uncovery” Approach
In his book “Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently,” neuroscientist Beau Lotto said, “The next big innovation is not a new technology; it is a new way of seeing.” I propose that what psychiatry calls bipolar mania is an energetic catalyst towards “a new way of seeing”—to innovate, adapt, and evolve human consciousness—a punctuated equilibrium of rapid change ensuring neuroplasticity, spontaneous behavior, and an augmented language instinct.
As such, and possible mechanisms aside, mania is universal and can happen to anyone at any time, though certain factors potentiate it. There will always be 1-5% that experience at least one mania and blast through any congealed and programmed mental models. While the current dominant paradigm focuses on suppressing the risks through tranquilizers, electroconvulsive shocks, and ice picks (oh wait, they stopped that evidence-based best practice), we who live with experiences resulting from a diagnosis still have the opportunity to harvest, practice, and embody our adjacent possible selves. But we aren’t taking it. Why?
In a nutshell, gaslighting, or “psychological manipulation” designed to make someone question their “perception of reality” leading to “dependence on the perpetrator” (Wikipedia: Gaslighting). One often-repeated talking point is the dismissive “He/She/They lack insight into his/her/their illness.” Translation: “I’ve paid good money and spent thousands of hours of my life getting trained not to take the time to really listen to you—to only gaze upon you with a clinical lens.” You know what? I’m over this “risky risk aversion” (Ron Unger).
In 2016, after my third re-hospitalization in 14 months, I gave myself permission to try to understand my extraordinary experiences. The psychiatrist tried to put me on a high dose of medication, and I felt powerless. I found a way out of her “care,” and I needed to ensure I wouldn’t be in that situation again. I no longer trusted myself to call for “help” the next time psychosis came knocking. In desperation, I started a dialogue with myself. I wrote down insights, spoke them aloud, elaborated, and then watched the video, and wrote more insights. I continued the process for three years, recording 700 hours of dialogue and watching all 700 hours along the way. I became my own compassionate witness.
Although I still had many crises, I talked myself through them. For three years, I avoided the hospital and only went once in six years. I talked myself into my dreams. I traveled to California for six months just three weeks after the first crisis I had after starting Self-dialogue. I wrote “The Bipolar Game Changer: Harvest Your Special Messages, Glorify Your Superpowers, and Re-Uncover Your Mania to Level Up Your Life” to present the possibilities of a Self-dialogical approach to making sense of, learning from, and understanding extraordinary states of consciousness in retrospect.
The book sketches out a scaffolding for “Re-Uncovery,” a process for looking back at our non-volitional extraordinary experiences to uncover what they brought to our aware attention, but in small doses. Though an unquestioned taboo, it’s essential to give oneself permission to shine a new light on mania to perceptually step outside the psychiatric revolving door, pathography, and anti-stigma reinforcement.
Since we are looking with fresh eyes, Re-Uncovery embraces a meaningfulness approach. It’s up to us to find, better yet, create meaning retrospectively. How? The intentional Self-dialogue process outlined reopens our internal brain-mind-subjective capacities of curiosity, wonder, and possibilities. In brief, we enter not only a meaningful dialogue with our experiences but also a broader field of meaning in general.
In contrast to reductionism, Self-dialogue works through “expansionism” via “Triple Extrapolation,” which, in short, involves writing down insights and recording oneself talking to oneself about them, and then listening to them to harvest more meaning. Basically, we are drafting and crafting our consciousness. It is up to us to infuse the meaningfulness part from the inside out because we are the only ones who can. We can’t do it when we are taught to live in fear of our brain. Why is this important?
The brain is designed for learning. When we do as we are told and fear ourselves, the stress hormone cortisol blocks the ability to learn. Putting the DSM on the shelf, “The Bipolar Game Changer” builds bridges to insights from the frontiers of science, human potential, metaphysics, positive psychology, and spirituality. And guess what? These discoveries apply to us too. For example, neuroscientist Beau Lotto said, “We are adapted to adapt.” His talking point is grounded in years of scientific research, and guess what? It applies to us too.
By harvesting meaning through Re-Uncovering our extraordinary experiences, we reinitialize intrinsic learning and build a mesh of context that creates “herd immunity,” immunity to what we’ve heard about what our experiences mean. Not only that, when new surprises pop up, they don’t carry a scary charge because they fall somewhere within our own self-authored understanding.
When the memes have influenced our genes to build the neurophysiological and embodied neuro-musculature of meeting life moment to moment, we are adapted to adapt to heightened states of consciousness. When you re-mission your life, what were called symptoms, like neologisms and hypergraphia, are re-contextualized into superpowers. We’re adapted for the energy.
So go back and collect your harvest. Included in the book is a template to facilitate sorting your discoveries. Build the skills in consciousness to weave the container that is the new you. In the age of accelerating information and technology, we must be able to be present with what arises and craft meaning subjectively on the fly. Though critical of psychiatry, medications and the recovery movement are still essential for slowing the chaos and buying us time to figure things out through the Re-Uncovery approach.
Maybe we are human meanings. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll find out that we can birth who we meant ourselves to be as a child. Through it all the meaning I’ve Re-Uncovered, I trust in my ability to adapt by learning and understanding iteratively from what is evident in my moment to moment experience. For that, I need no outside evidence. I wish this for you.
