Dark Heart,

Thanks for exploring this with me. It does help to discuss my own personal experience and in my teens especially I used to get really artificially blissfully happy. The bliss is still there but I have feelings more of major irritability these days. I am also scared of the bliss because of a fear of it going away.

The reason I posted about defense mechanisms and my story is because there is some evidence about this especially with reference to BPD and Cyclothymic Disorder as well. The quote below is interesting:

''Most psychodynamic theories postulate that the development of cyclothymic disorder lies in traumas and fixations during the oral stage of infant development. Freud hypothesized that the cyclothymic state is the ego’s attempt to overcome a harsh and punitive superego. Hypomania is explained psychodynamically as the lack of self-criticism and an absence of inhibitions occurring when a depressed person throws off the burden of an overly harsh superego. The major defense mechanism in hypomania is denial, by which the patient avoids external problems and internal feelings of depression.
Patients with cyclothymic disorder are characterized by periods of depression alternating with periods of hypomania. Psychoanalytic exploration reveals that such patients defend themselves against underlying depressive themes with their euphoric or hypomanic periods. Hypomania is frequently triggered by a profound interpersonal loss. The false euphoria generated in such instances is a patient’s way to deny dependence on love objects and simultaneously disavow any aggression or destructiveness that may be associated with the loss of the loved person.''