I wonder if mania is something that happens to traumatized people due to the after-effects of the trauma. The trauma has made their baseline emotional state ‘sad’ (perhaps also anxious, they might be ‘braced for impact’) and they are very invalidated. ‘Normal happiness’ is not an option for them.
They don’t know they are always sad, but then one day they accidentally stumble into some unexpected validation and become happy. It’s so abnormal it is very powerful and extreme and they are driven to try to get more and more of it.
They are already abnormally happy – somewhere between hypomanic and manic – and now they end up overtired and therefore also psychotic as well.
Maybe their baseline is ‘sad’ because their personality got fragmented as a survival mechanism response to trauma, and the happiness part got locked up – it is the probably the youngest part because all the uncomplicated happiness dates back to before the traumatizing events began.
It’s not usually safe for the uncomplicated happiness to come out, but the unexpected validation perhaps creates a safe space – leaves the gate open, lulls the guard to sleep perhaps? – and so it accidentally can come out.
Anyway – if this is all true then helping someone reunite their personality would unlock their happiness, making it accessible in a normal way. So it doesn’t need to be achieved only through mania. Addictions are fueled by our fear that if we don’t have this now we’ll miss our chance. We’re afraid there isn’t enough to go around. That there isn’t enough happiness for us. But if it could be unlocked then, it would be there all the time. We wouldn’t need to addictively crave it and cling to it when we find it, because it would always be there when we need it.
How do people integrate/reunite their personality? I think that sharing their difficult stories helps, because it is the shame & guilt (the false beliefs/bad programming) associated with them that keeps them separated. Children draw wrong conclusions about their responsibility for trauma (they idealize adults so they think anything that feels bad or wrong must be their fault) and so they feel inappropriate shame and guilt over it.
It’s hard even as adults to go back to what we feel shame and guilt about. Sometimes we are not even aware of it. But if we can go back as adults and find where the shame and guilt live, we can bring adult skills of interpretation with us and see that we drew wrong conclusions about our responsibility at the time. We will see that the shame and guilt was actually a misinterpretation, a lie, a false belief. The truth can set us free if we can be brave enough to look for the lies that we’ve believed about ourselves.
I didn’t used to believe that introspection was helpful. Now I believe it can be helpful but, only when it’s necessary because we feel stuck (or are self-sabotaging). Otherwise introspection can become one more thing to be addicted to, an escape inside from the outside reality when we don’t like our reality.