“And the Lord said unto Satan, ‘Whence comest thou?’ Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, ‘From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.’”— King James Bible, Job 1:7
My Trauma
Here’s my mythic story.
A boy grows up as an only child of a distracted and absent mother, and a frustrated and overworked father. The boy is looking for approval and engagement but never finds it in a balanced or adequate supply. He takes it personally.
As a man, he finds a mate who is loving, appreciative, and creative. They are attracted, sensual, and ecstatically happy. Shortly after they have a child her mood darkens. She spends more time away and flirts with strangers. The man provides whatever she asks for but she becomes a ghost of her former self and leaves.
Looking into my ex-partner’s history, I found this cycle happened twice before I met her. As we remained connected for child care, I witnessed five subsequent, similar relationship cycles of adoration, commitment, betrayal, and collapse. Each time the different men were left angry and heartbroken.
The males shared similar states of distress while my ex-partner appeared dissociated and disconnected. Each breakup was traumatic, and it’s the pain we focus on, but the pain is only half of the picture.
These were not manic-depressive cycles, and it’s unclear how much my ex-partner was solely responsible for them. But, as with manic depression—which we now call bi-polar disorder—there were highs and lows. Here, the highs were fulfilling love and the lows were emotional despair. The highs get much less attention than the lows and also, as with mania, they pass more quickly.
We know mania cannot be sustained, but we’d like to think that love can be. We are similarly optimistic about other happy states of affairs such as peace, health, comfort, and security. We don’t call these manic states.
Relationship Cycles
This relationship cycle is unusual. Partners in failed relationships tend to learn, they avoid repeating the same disasters. Future relationships may be difficult, but they’ll have different difficulties. There is no shortage of new lessons to be learned.
The depression that follows a collapsed relationship is made worse when there is an ecstatic phase preceding it. Heartbreak can almost be defined as the collapse of one’s highest hopes, and it can be life threatening.
In bi-polar syndrome, depression is reported three times more frequently than mania. That’s partly because the depressive phase lasts longer, but also because mania feels good to the person experiencing it, so why report it?
One friend had an episode of euphoria as he smashed his glass chandelier with a pool cue. If he had been angry we might have understood, but he thought it was funny. We took him to the hospital before he got started on the windows.
Another friend’s episodes would take him and his sports car on 3-day, high speed tours around the country. The problem isn’t the happiness, which is exuberant, it’s the lack of judgment. It’s the failure to recognize what’s destructive.
Our highs and lows don’t constitute bi-polar disorder, but we focus more on the lows than we do on the highs in both cases. Extreme emotions are aspects of emotional instability. We all want happiness, but extreme happiness isn’t always healthy.
We all have personal vulnerabilities, and this is normal. We all experience trauma and deal with depression. We complain about the bad things but not the good things. Are these good things real, or are they excursions into unsustainable positive emotion?
In my case, the heartbreak was partly a consequence of love hypomania, if it was love at all. It sure felt like love, and I insist it was love, and that it was real, but I don’t think it was real for my ex-partner. Nevertheless, I recognize that what I’m seeking makes me vulnerable.
What about other emotions we feel? Do they come in pairs, and must we accept the lows as counterbalancing the highs? Do we not insist our goodness deserves reward without having to suffer ill fortune? Can we make a reasonable case for this, or is it just immaturity?
We’re actually obsessed with this question. It’s the subject of endless stories of romance, tragedy, success, and failure. It’s the question asked by the emotionless Dr. Spock in the Star Trek franchise. Is his superior performance due to his being immune to the whiplash of emotions?
Mental Illness
Emotional dysregulation is a mental illness. Emotional stability keeps us from becoming clinically depressed even in cases of physical trauma. Any depression that goes on too long, regardless of its cause, is dysfunctional.
The above heartbreak stories highlight how our emotional stability relies on our self-esteem and self-worth. If you think of ecstatic feelings as a kind of hypomania, then the possibility of depression is not far away.
We overlook the dysregulating effects of a positive phase in other situations that may correlate with minor depression. The sad fact is that if you’re sufficiently unbalanced, almost anything can make you depressed. And even though relationships involve couples, heartbreak is a dysfunction we experience individually.
Getting a new job, buying a house, or starting a family are examples of major life episodes that amplify positive emotions. We accept typically exaggerated episodes and call them “the honeymoon phase.” When things go poorly we blame the job, the house, or the family, but it might be more accurate to blame our exaggerated expectations.
You might dismiss my concerns as whining about the bouncy ride of life, but there comes a point when we should all be concerned. Cars need shock absorbers and people do too. Being skeptical of your highs may be more proactive than waiting for your wheels to fall off.
Stability and Balance
I used to think I was a very stable person since I’ve been to wild places, endured privations, and tolerated insufferable people. And this is true, and it’s part of what makes me a good counselor. I can empathize with my clients’ highs and lows without losing sight of our emotional ground. Despite this, my childhood traumas have left a chink in my armor that I have been incautious in trying to fill.
There is a myth that the left sides or our brains are rational and the right sides are emotional. The truth is more detailed, but the myth provides a good analogy because our thoughts seem to be a contest between one side or the other.
Too often we excuse our emotional instability as momentary lapses in judgement, slips in rational control. We don’t realize that emotions underpin our judgment, and small lapses in emotions can lead to big problems for our rational mind. Your judgment doesn’t control your emotions; your emotions control your judgment.
I have never had a client come to me overcome with happiness. Why would they? Instead, they come with various struggles. I hear about what brings them down, not what brings them up. While this seems natural enough, I think it’s unbalanced. If I’m to help people become happy, then I need to know what happiness means.
If happiness means hypnomania, then we have to examine this. And sometimes this is true. I think many people with substance addictions are addicted to the hypomanical mental state these substances induce. Many of us may also be looking for hypomania as what we feel happiness should be. The very idea that you can find happiness in material things or another person’s love is suspicious from the start.
I think my ex-partner is addicted to the hypnomanical state that romantic infatuation induces. No one seems to complain until it disintegrates, and by that time the origins of the crime are lost or overlooked.
What Makes You Happy?
To find more happiness, schedule a free call and we’ll talk about it.
It may border on the paranoid to be suspicious of things that make you happy, but how can you tell the difference between things that are and are not healthy unless you examine them? It may not be Dr. Spock that we need to become, but rather to be more discerning. Perhaps this is why it’s important to be self sufficient, something that comes with experience.
I suggest we are overlooking our different states of happiness, and we are not appreciating the great differences between them. And because we don’t discriminate, we are jumping to consume kinds of toxic happiness over more enduring varieties.
We tell ourselves that this kind of emotional discrimination comes with maturity, and that maturity just happens to us. We’re certainly not taught how to mature, and most of our role models are not.
Rather than learning emotional balance, we’re attracted to whatever flame life provides. “Like a moth to a flame,” as they say, but this is not a good model. A better model would be more sustainable.
We need to remember that some of the things that please us are neither healthy nor sustainable. Not all that glitters is gold, and maybe you shouldn’t be looking for gold anyway?
While there is nothing wrong with needing to breathe, there is something wrong when you’re desperate for breath. What you need should be a regular part of your life, not an ecstatic or occasional experience.
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