FEATURE | A new way of looking at bipolar diagnosis

I believe that when we are born into this world, into this human body, we immediately begin the process of spiritual transformation that lasts our entire lifetime.

By CATHERINE DUCLOS | Gazette Contributor

Living with a bipolar diagnosis can be challenging, to say the least – but I think it’s important to share what I have come to learn and understand about living with this illness. I am hoping that my words here may help you or someone you care about.

I am a simple woman, 61 -years old and a single mother of two beautiful children. I was diagnosed bipolar 25 years ago, and I want more from the way I’ve been living since that diagnosis.

I have been medicated, several different kinds, for different reasons, because some meds didn’t work, and some still don’t — and some probably never will.

A few years ago, I began to read about alternative ways of thinking about mental health, not just eating differently, or other ways of healthful living, which all help, most definitely, but I’m talking about radically thinking about the origin of mental illness in a different way.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that what we call “mental illness” is actually a spiritual breakthrough.

When I was six years old, I was looking at a photo album my mother had put together of our family, and I was crying; crying because I knew someday that everyone in that photo album was going to die.

When I was six years old, I was looking at a photo album my mother had put together of our family, and I was crying; crying because I knew someday that everyone in that photo album was going to die.

I felt their mortality, and mine with it and I was overwhelmed by a profound sense of loss and loneliness that I had no words for, no expression for, no way of talking about to my parents, or to anyone else. I thought there was something wrong with me. It was a milestone in my early childhood and growth as an existential being.

Years later, I had an equally profound, yet different experience. Somewhere around age 12, I was walking with my family on a warm spring afternoon, right after the rain had subsided.

My sister and I were ahead of my parents, running and splashing around in the puddles, laughing and having so much fun. Suddenly the sun came out, streaming through the trees; I turned around to look at my parents and I was overcome by a penetrating sense of joy, even beyond joy; it was something like ecstasy.

I felt beyond myself, as if I was looking at my family from a distance and seeing them as they were from the inside out. I felt full of love for them…they were beautiful; everything was beautiful and I felt connected to all that was around me, at one with the world that surrounded me, that was beside me, inside of me, part of me.

Energy was coursing through my body and I felt truly alive – I was trembling with electricity; the light was brilliant and there were rainbow colors hovering around me.

The feelings were real, more real than anything I had ever felt. I felt whole; I was connected to myself, my family, to nature and to all of my surroundings in a way I had never experienced before.

I was free and full and deep and open and full of beauty and joy. That lasted for what seemed hours, but it was only minutes and then it dissipated and I felt bereft, as if I’d lost something precious, essential to my being. I felt confused and lost and lonely again.

It was the first time I’d experienced a kind of depression that came from the disconnection from joy and beauty and wholeness. Even this depression was part of the spiritual experience.

Why am I dismissed as simply
mentally ill and not treated as a whole
human being who is going through one
of the most difficult transitions of my life?

As I realized later in my life, all of those experiences I’d had were spiritual openings or as Christina & Stanislav Grof describe in their book The Stormy Search for the Self: A Guide to Personal Growth through Transformational Crisis, it was the beginning of a “spiritual emergence” for me:

“In the most general terms, spiritual emergence can be defined as the movement of an individual to a more expanded way of being that involves enhanced emotional and psychosomatic health, greater freedom of personal choices, and a sense of deeper connection with other people, nature and the cosmos. An important part of this development is an increasing awareness of the spiritual dimension in one’s life and in the universal scheme of things.”

Why am I dismissed as simply mentally ill and not treated as a whole human being who is going through one of the most difficult transitions of my life, as going through an “evolution of consciousness”?

Where can I find guides who will help me and not pathologize me and simply medicate me to stop the “symptoms?”

I have another way of looking at this process of spiritual transformation, from my own experience, that I’d like to offer as well.

In essence, I believe that when we are born into this world, into this human body, we immediately begin the process of spiritual transformation that lasts our entire lifetime. Being born in itself is a disorientation that forces us to deal with a whole host of elements of living – figuring out how to use our bodies, trying to make sense of the physical world we live in, creating meaning for ourselves so that we can move out into the world in some semblance of a functioning person.

In other words, I don’t think we have a choice about the transformation – that is the condition of our existence as living beings – it then remains HOW we deal with this in our individual lives that is the question and the challenge.

I will be writing more in future columns about the ways that I have found to not only cope with the “symptoms” of bipolar, but to thrive due to this new perspective and orientation to living with a mental health diagnosis.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Catherine Duclos is a Biddeford resident who says she feels a joyous connection to her new hometown. “Living here has given me a sense of peace and purpose that I have not found in other communities.”

Duclos has a life coaching practice, Wild Serenity Life Coaching, and is the mother of “two beautiful adult children and a gorgeous grandson, all of whom I am deeply proud of. So many joys in my life!” You may contact her at csdview@gmail.com

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