The truth about my bipolar disorder and OCD
I might ACTUALLY get in trouble for my thoughts on this.
I have therapy on Monday mornings. Here is a snippet from my last session.
Me: I have been burning a lot of bridges, and I might also be in a state of hypomania.
Therapist: I just need to caution you to be careful of making decisions when you are in an elevated state.
Me: I appreciate your input, and I understand that that is your professional obligation, but I know what I am doing.
Therapist: I figured as much. Moving on.
I love my therapist. I think this is the direction that the mental health industry needs to consider as we fall forward in a world that is quickly disintegrating and growing evermore complex each day.
A lot of us are feeling like something is wrong because we are just not getting what we want out of therapy. There is good reason, and I am breaking down a few of them here. I want to shout from the mountaintop to the mental health industry the following things:
Please stop using “professional obligation” as a label to excuse yourself from actually relating to me as a human being.
When I tell you about my experiences with bipolar and OCD, I want to invite you to see me as a human being outside of all those labels. I know that your professional education has told you that having certain mental health conditions makes me less acceptable and less adaptable to society.
However, I want you to consider whether it is really me that is the problem or whether it is the culture of excommunicating our differences that is the problem.
Is it really me that needs to change in order to fit in, or is it the world that needs to change to make it safer for me to exist?
Perhaps the reason for needing me to change is that it is difficult to exist in an unsafe world if we do not change and mask our actual emotions. I honor that experience for some people. Some people require professional support in order to survive in the oppressive systems that we must operate under.
For me, personally, I have a lot of privilege. Which means that I can use this privilege to do my part in dismantling these oppressive systems. Which means that I will give myself permission to be different. I will use my privilege to expand my capacity to be different.
That is who I am at the human level. I am willing to experience the difficult. I am willing to feel like total ass. I am willing to drag myself through the mud if it means that I do my part in making the world a little safer. I can take the hit.
So please do not prescribe to me what is “appropriate” for me and my existence in the world. I get to decide the terms of my existence, and I need you to be curious about that first and foremost. Then you will be able to offer the support I need, which is to walk with me while I hold the complex emotions that come with having the courage to be different.
Please stop trying to heal me or fix me as if there is something wrong with me.
I have become increasingly intolerant of the culture of healing, which implies that we are wounded and broken to begin with. Well, fine, I accept that about me. I am certainly wounded and broken. But I have no intention of “healing” because my wounds and my brokenness are what allow me to walk with other who are also wounded and broken. When I “heal” that and make it all magically go away, I become less capable of relating to the humans I care about.
Why is it that being in relationship with the “healthy” is prioritized over being in relationship with those that matter to us as individuals?
I may attempt to be in relationship with the “healthy” or those who don’t share the ailments that I have, but I would not consider that relationship “healthy” because it will likely not be generative for me. What is generative for me, personally, is the opportunity to walk with those who understand my experiences.
That is why, if someone is alone, I would want to invite them to be alone with me instead of telling them “you are not alone!” I do not want to contribute to gaslighting them out of the truth of what they are actually experiencing.
Instead of telling me to be less alone, please get curious about what it is like to be alone and how that makes me human in my own way. I want to be honored as I am because I am sick of everybody pathologizing every emotion I have into oblivion.
So if our brokenness and wounds allow us to exist in community the way we want to and experience the fullness of our humanity, is it really something worth healing?
Please stop telling me that therapy and medication are somehow more required than all kinds of other relationships in our lives.
I need therapy to stop being the ultimate form of mental health care. There are just some things that cannot be witnessed through a 1:1 setting. There are parts of ourselves that require community care. There are parts of ourselves that require solitude. Sometimes we arrive at answers that are outside settings that were prescribed to us. Sometimes we arrive at answers spontaneously.
And sometimes, there is even greater beauty and humanity to be witnessed in the absence of answers.
I want humans to recognize and honor the way I want to be related to, and that includes therapists, partners, friends, acquaintances, and everyone else.
If I may be so bold, I would say that the mental health crisis is a result of our unwillingness and unskillfulness in the way we want to relate to human beings on their own terms.
Therapy is simply one of those channels. In order to address the mental health crisis, we need to raise the standards of human interaction at every corner of our culture. That means challenging oppressive systems, expanding our capacity to do so, being aware of our privileges, and using our resources to care for one another on our own terms.
Honoring each other’s sovereignty. That begins with honoring our own sovereignty. What do I need? How do I want to be related to? What do I really want?
I want space for me to inquire about those questions about myself so that I may offer that same level of care to the people in my own ecosystem.
The question not just for therapists but for all of us is: how am I taking care of myself and my ecosystem? How do I want to be taken care of?
Please stop telling me to “regulate” my nervous system so that I can be more “functional.”
All that regulating has done is try to tell me that “dysregulation” makes me less valuable and even less human. As if I do not have the right to exist and make decisions when I am in a dysregulated state.
I don’t agree with this.
Sometimes, the decisions we make when we are in the least regulated state is when we finally find permission to make the kinds of decisions that we’ve actually wanted to make for so long but felt like we couldn’t because our “sound” mind and body told us that that makes us less “adaptable” and “valuable.”
Making decisions in a dysregulated state is, in some ways, where we find and experience real freedom. Because our emotions allow us to feel a little less inhibited in expressing our truth.
Perhaps we will lose relationships. Perhaps we will lose opportunities. But were those relationships and opportunities even real if they were not going to hold space for who we really are?
Is your need for me to be more regulated a reflection of my incapacity, or is it more of a reflection of your lack of confidence in being able to walk with me in my uninhibited state?
I want you to instead honor exactly where I am, as I am, and be able to inquire about the freedom and the realness of what I am experiencing at the moment. That is how you can facilitate how I honor my own humanity. It is how I can embody a sense of permission to feel more belonging in my body regardless of how acceptable or unacceptable it is.
I want to feel human, just as I am, outside the binary of acceptable vs. unacceptable.
Please stop telling me that death is the worst thing in the world.
Death is part of the human experience. We are killing each other for the sake of preserving our own lives, and that is destroying entire pockets of humanity. What is causing this individualistic pursuit is the shame we feel around death.
Obviously I am not saying that we all need to die right now. But I am sick of being told that dying is somehow the ultimate failure of life when it is the most necessary and natural consequence of life that every single person experiences as a human being.
When someone told me “I’m so sorry for your loss” when my grandfather died, I just felt like they were just telling me a formality without really being curious about what I experienced as a human being and what my grandfather experienced.
You don’t know if this was a loss for me or my grandfather. I saw my grandfather’s eyes and held his hand in the days leading up to his death. He was ready. He was in pain, but he held me for the last time knowing that it was the last time he was going to hold me. It was as if he knew what he was doing. To me, his death was his ultimate acceptance of the fullness of his humanity. A willingness to complete and release the aliveness he experienced through the breaths he took.
A “loss” was the least of my experiences. I witnessed my grandfather’s death as his most powerful move yet. It allowed me space to let die everything else in my life that was taking away from the aliveness I felt through my own breaths. I experienced another dimension of my humanity touching his cold chin for the last time in my life. He had bequeathed to me the embodiment of what it really looks like to honor my aliveness, including the grief I experienced parting with him and the delight of making space for the new.
In fact, it made me less afraid of death because it was the power of death that helped me experience my own aliveness even more deeply. Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty around death, but that only means that I have this entire life to expand my capacity for uncertainty. In fact, I have been doing that all my life.
The reality of death drives our decisions and our aliveness. It makes little sense to demonize it.
Our relationship with death is a reflection of our own agency. We get to decide how we interact with death. I am sick of being told to hate death and fear death and avoid death.
It is because of the standardization of our relationship with death that we are being told to “fix” all kinds of things so that we may avoid death and uncomfortable feelings when it is the concept of death that allows us to have capacity for the uncomfortable feelings, which are also essential components of our personhood and aliveness.
I want no part of that.
As always, I am no authority. The only thing I will ever have authority over is myself. I invite you to do the same for you, if not already. What does it look like to honor your agency when we’ve been constantly been force-fed the need to relinquish our power to other individuals and institutions?
This question is available to you only at your pleasure.
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You can find more of me at angela-han.com.