My Anxiety Avoidance, essentially my instinct to avoid 'bad stuff' and its recursive nature, is what I term a Self Protecting Pattern. Some earlier attempt to communicate this to others may be found here, for example 'Keep Quiet and Carry On'.
What this mental mechanism is supposed to do, I presume, is to stop you walking in front of a car, or putting your hand into a fire. But in my case, and possibly this is a feature of some others on the autistic spectrum, it is too broad, and too sensitive.
Anxiety, Anxiety Avoidance, and Mania
Now to relate this to mania, two scenarios can lead to symptoms of mania, both quite different, both reached by quite different directions, though with the capacity of one to lead into the other. 1. Anxiety can drive mania; and 2. Freedom from anxiety can drive mania. Almost diametrically opposite, and yet your average psychiatrist will see the same thing, just mania, as if two instances of mania are two instances of the same thing.
If I cannot avoid sources of potential anxiety, that will push me towards one kind of mania, the anxiety induced kind of mania; if I become disinhibited from the anxiety, as if I find some way to break free of Anxiety Avoidance's influence, I become euphoric with the experience of profound freedom, and veer towards another kind of mania, euphoria driven mania.
But it gets more complicated: If in the second (euphoric) type of mania, 'meddling' mental health professionals become a source of potential anxiety, since my now manic brain sees going back into its shell as 'bad stuff' to be avoided. So the mental professionals are pushing in one direction, and Anxiety Avoidance is pointing in the opposite. The result of this is that a previously freedom-from-anxiety-driven mania becomes pushed into an anxiety-driven mania.
This of course then makes it near impossible to trust such people, in a crisis at least, and their presence and interventions can push things towards anxiety-driven mania: rather than remedying the problem, like pouring petrol on a fire, they exacerbate it. Perhaps they have no choice, but that doesn't prevent interventions from exacerbating anxiety and mania as it does. Moreover, the intense emotional experience leaves many mental and emotional scars, which create problems for the future.
Part of the problem, I guess, is that I can't live free from Anxiety Avoidance, no matter how much I long to, because I lack the means, time, space, and resources, to learn to live without it, assuming I could even find a way to live without Anxiety Avoidance's Walls that doesn't lead to mania.