Copy Cat Personality [BIPOLAR]

I'm not certain whether this is truely common to bipolar sufferers, or just to me, but I'll illustrate it anyways.

People with Bipolar, we don't really have personalities.  We are the result of many overlapping layers of imitations of those around us.

Myself personally, if I'm suffering a low or medium functioning moment, I tend to emulate others more proactively, which is sometimes for the worse.
If a sufferer goes to a movie, and they identify with a character, or character(s), they will try very hard to copy and imitate the likeness, personality traits, and responses that they saw in the person on-screen.
If the movie is very action packed, then the sufferer might be tempted to act very foolishly, and do things they normally wouldn't do, putting them in harms way.
The trustee of the bipolar patient needs to be aware of this tendency, so they might watch for sudden and unexpected changes in behavior.
The sufferer needs to be brought back down to earth, as it were, and to try to act more normally, and leave the fantasy characters on the screen where they belong.

Now, this isn't to say that this behavior pattern is all bad, only if the sufferer acts very dangerously, or does anything of that sort.
If the sufferer identifies with the character and begins to emulate that character, they will more than likely continue to do so forever afterwards.
Adding a piece of another person to their psyche is not bad, because unfortunately, as I understand it, a bipolar person by themselves is lost without some sort of role model for their entire life, and every action.

There is very little of the sufferer's personality which can be called their own.
They are the composition of a bunch of people around them.
Before onset of bipolar, is the most original pieces of the person there are, but once bipolar has been determined and established, much of the remaining pieces of that person, are copied conciously and actively from their environment.

If they don't partake in trying to copy other people's good nature, and positive actions, then they can feel isolated and begin to self destruct.

This is a very complex and fundamental part of the sufferer, and is not easily explored here enough, I will re-visit this subject, and try to show this from more angles, as time progresses.

When the sufferer is very low functioning, their entire personality splinters and becomes only a thin shadow of what they once were.
If the sufferer has been unfortunate to have fallen to such a low functioning state, then they have to replace the missing or broken pieces of who they were, with what they see is positive and good as a replacement.
It's as if the sufferer was a house in a hurricane or other major natural disaster.
Only a few fragments of the person is left behind, and those so very few are the only things of the original person that will ever be there, again.
It is going to happen, that they replace missing parts of themselves with goodness from people, whether imaginary or real, and is healthy.

I am not trying to say that it is bad, just that recklessness can be mixed in, if the sufferer is not in total control of themselves.

Actions which the sufferer sees themselves doing, and are unable to resist doing, can use mental imagry, to regain control over their impulses.

My personal technique, is to imaging a large ant hill, and the ants coming out as the urges to do something I don't want to do, and often should NOT do.

I imagine a hammer, smashing the ants as they come one by one out of the ant hill.

If the ants start coming out in a stream, a very intense urge to do something I do not or should not do, I imagine a large piston coming out of the sky and landing on the ant hill, smashing the large swarm of ants, killing off all the negative urges in one large single action.

These visualizations will have to be invented and tailored to the sufferer on a case by case basis, and should be used to help them put a mental image, to urges and actions which they would rather have control over.



~7R0N!