I’ve experienced something totally new within the past weeks and it feels good, strange, foreign and sometimes uncomfortable. Most of my life has been about feeling one feeling at a time or becoming completely overwhelmed with too many feelings coming right at me at once.
Just in the past few weeks, I had a breakthrough. I felt good and anxious at the same time and, again, even though it felt strange to me, I managed it and continue to manage different versions of it daily (feeling pretty good and frustrated, not feeling good while feeling love for my husband and child, etc.).
Having bipolar disorder can feed into this model easily and that is a reason to be a bit hypervigilant about this new way of being, in terms of my mood increasing to a level of hypomania or falling into a state of depression. If that does happen, I’ll work with my therapist to, hopefully, catch it in time and work with her and my psychiatric APRN to monitor these possible changes. Some feelings can so easily reach out their tentacles to take away the good and bring me down to a level of depression very quickly and while the opposite is true, it’s not as often. It’s historically been about being dragged down into a clinical depression. It’s a lot of psychological work and I feel I police myself a bit too much, but I don’t want to lose all of the work I have accomplished with the help of my therapist.
I will work hard to not allow those dark tentacles take away any of the good feelings I have, which is a rather substantial change for me, so it will take more time and more work. Right now, I am trying to experience this new phenomenon, including the strange and uncomfortable parts of it, with curiosity and interest. That feels right. That feels safe.
Risa's Reality 