Increasingly, we have to meet people, whether in therapy or in ordinary everyday life, whose eyes are on fire. It would seem, what could be better? A fountain of energy, unkillable optimism and the belief that the whole world is about to be conquered, isn’t this the dream of those who feel depressed and powerless? However, not everything is so simple when it comes to the swing of mania and depression.
The fact is that some people are saved from depression with the help of mania, in which a person really has a “glare”. But the problem is that mania is a loss of balance, and sooner or later a person is forced to fall into the opposite pole of depression with all its hard and unpleasant experiences. Then omnipotence turns into powerlessness, energy is replaced by lethargy, optimism becomes pessimism, and instead of conquering the world, you just want to stay in bed in the morning. One gets the impression that the modern Western world is betting heavily on mania. They learned to sell it, wrapping it in a shiny wrapper for courses in positive thinking or personal success. People on such programs are artificially pumped up with energy, sometimes taken out of the usual state of consciousness, and, of course, feeling euphoria, such people really feel “happiness”. The problem is that they were pushed to one side, but the manic-depressive swing will certainly return them to the opposite state, from which they so fled. Worst of all, in mania, a person absolutely loses sensitivity to oneself. It often happens that the success that seduced the person turns out to be alien and toxic to him/her. But a person does not have time to understand this, since he/she does not know how to immerse in oneself in order to really understand in silence and on low energy what his/her personal recipe for happiness is.
As always, the truth lies in the middle. A person who is equally accessible to both poles of experience does not bring oneself to the extremes of mania or depression. He/she just knows how to be happy and sad, to work and rest, to feel where there is strength and where is powerlessness. But the main thing is that he/she does not betray oneself, since he/she does not lose the feeling of one’s uniqueness and originality.