Happy or Manic: The Recovery of Emotions

“Art, not psychology, is the language of emotions.” Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958)

—Walter Kaufmann

For a long time after my first manic episode, I feared my emotions. The mania I experience is devastating. It is like having lightning in your veins. You are on cognitive fire.

Burning to create, consume, and destroy. It is the feel of being God.

You are the epicenter of all that is and ever will be. And that feeling is not centered in your cortex as some sort of abstraction. You are flooded with psychotic power, your thighs as manic as your skull. Your skin soaked in serotonin. You breathe in the full power of the universe with every breath. 

So when you leave a hospital bloated with antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, buried in your own body, you experience an entirely different environment.

Post-hospitalization, I slowly became aware that I had lost everything. Lost a marriage. Lost a stepdaughter. Lost my home. Lost my mind. Lost my feel for this life.

The despair and anguish were so great that I knew only one thought, and that was to end this life. To kill the “self” from which I could not separate myself from moment by moment. To stop drowning in self-hate.

The first phase of my recovery only dealt with not feeling emotions that were torturing me. But that is not a life. You cannot live only trying to not be something.

As I finally started to remain stable for months, my sense of humor came back, and I could find joy in limited things. But I still feared really letting go and laughing around my family. They had suffered their own traumas watching my episodes, and I could see how any flash of emotion made them uneasy. After a loud laugh by me, I would watch them look at each other and eventually ask me, “Are you O.K.?’

That question always hurt and still does. It brings me instant shame and makes me want to shut down. Early on in my recovery, it made me so unsure of my own moods, I wouldn't let myself laugh again for weeks.

It is a miserable state of existence to associate bliss with sickness, joy with disease.

A few years into my journey, my older sister had a baby while I was going back to school. She needed childcare and I was available between classes.

It is here my entire life changed.

My nephew and I spent every day together for months. I would walk in the door, pick him up, and feel absolutely connected to something/someone for the first time. I would look into his tender brown eyes for hours, waiting for some sense of the repulsion I felt for myself, but it never came.

He needed me and relied on me, and most importantly, he loved me.

One morning, I picked him up and held him close to my face and told him how afraid I was of this life. How I didn’t understand what had happened to me. How I didn’t really see a way I could survive. I meekly wept and kissed his innocent cheek while the pain and sorrow of my life stampeded through my body.

He just watched me. And with infant care, he moved his hand to my cheek and wiped away my tears. My nephew was smiling from ear to ear.

I felt a heat in my chest. I felt de-centered. I felt love.

I felt alive.

From this experience, I realized I need an emotional connection to my recovery goals, and the loss of love and connection need to be attached to any discussion involving medications, diet change, sleep hygiene, and side effects.

In the Pearl Jam song “Alive,” a question is asked about whether “Do I deserve to be” still alive, and if so “who answers.”

And after that initial moment of safety, vulnerability, and intimacy with my nephew, I deserve to be the one who answers, and my answer is…Yes.

As a clinician, how do you address authentic emotional integrity with your clients?

How have you, as a therapist, found ways to create the safety for your patients to be vulnerable with their fears?

Are questions of intimacy and love part of your treatment? 

Eric Arauz, MLER, is an international behavior health consumer advocate, trainer, and inspirational keynote speaker. He is a faculty member at the Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Department of Psychiatry, the Vice-Chairman of the current New Jersey Task Force on Opiate Addiction in citizens 18 to 25 years old, and a person with the lived experience of bipolar I disorder, PTSD, addiction, and suicidality. He is the SAMHSA 2012 "Voice Award" Fellow and the author of An American's Resurrection: My Pilgrimage from Child Abuse and Mental Illness to Salvation. 

The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the blog post author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psych Congress Network or other Psych Congress Network authors.