A link between Bi-polar and empathy
This is complete conjecture on my part, and these are the random thoughts that go through my head at 4:30am when the alarm gets me up.
I have an outsiders perspective of being Bi-polar, my mother was that way, my ex wife, my wife, possibly a few others in between.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that someone that is Bi-polar seems to need to have more attention payed to them than someone that doesn’t have the condition. The amount of attention depends on the person, where sometimes it’s a little more than average, sometimes it’s requiring more attention that you can possibly give any single person to include yourself if you were in a sensory deprivation chamber.
There is a common link though; it’s the interpretation of how that person empathizes with the world around them. Maybe that’s the silver bullet so to speak. I sort of checked this with my ex-wife a couple of times, being overly and abnormally happy in the morning to see if it would change how the rest of the day played out. It typically went well, though it was exhausting for me to keep that up. She fed solely off of my emotional state to determine hers. My wife now does the same thing to a lesser state, though I notice it a lot more. She does feed off of her perception of me first thing in the morning, and even if I look grumpy or have stand-offish body language, and not say a word, she feeds off of that and she’s in an instant bad mood for a while. It doesn’t matter what kind of mood I’m really in, it only matters how she perceives my output.
Maybe those mirror neurons in the brain are over-active in a Bi-polar person. making them even more sensitive to the surrounding environment, and feeding their emotional state. It does make sense that my wife seems to have her moods more effected by the environment rather than a singular event, and the more chaotic the house is, the more her mood dives…my ex-wife, she would swing in greater magnitudes of order to any given situation, if something was done or said that could bring up or down a mood, her mood would seem to swing about 10-50 times faster and greater than it really seemed expected. My wife, I would say that she does operate with higher magnitudes of order but not nearly as severe.
More or less, I think there really may be a connection with the higher activity in the mirror-neurons, the monkey-see-monkey-do brain cells, that sends reactions to the rest of the brain for emotional or physical response in someone with Bi-polar disorder. I’m not trying to be critical here, but more think critically. If this is the case, then even though I’m not the one with the disorder, it may be me that really does feed the mood my wife has. It could be that I also have the same problem, just the complete opposite, where I feed less off of the emotional state of the environment, helping me gain my moniker of being the heartless bastard.
Only an MRI can tell…
