So I went to individual therapy extremely frustrated last week. Not only had my therapist cancelled last week (cue angry abandoned borderline feelings), but recently I feel like I’m getting nowhere concrete. Even though I do find myself able to think of things in a better light most of the time, all it takes is one really horrible day – even one really horrible moment or mood – and I lapse so easily into bad old habits and thoughts: nothing is ever going to work; nothing is ever going to change; something is wrong with me, etc. etc. I decided I was going to try and be up-front. By which I mean I wasn’t going to lose it, but I wasn’t going to mask my every emotion and self-invalidate by saying everything was fine. Here’s how my initial dialogue with Karen went:
Karen: How are you?
Me: … not great.
Karen: Why, what’s up??
Me: (SIGHHHH) You said you’ve successfully treated borderlines.
Karen: Yes.
Me: How? What did you say? What did they do? How did it start? I want this to stop and I feel like all I’m learning to do is adopt some relaxing breathing techniques that pussyfoot around the actual problem.
Karen: What is the actual problem? The “I hate you, don’t leave me” intensely irrational feelings?
Me: YES. Exactly. That. I don’t want to feel like that. I don’t want to think of that as the real me – this crazy bitch who flies off the handle when she perceives the slightest invalidation or abandonment.
Karen: Why do you think you’re so sensitive to those things? Why do you think you’re so prone to feeling abandoned?
Me: I don’t know… I’m pathetic and needy?
Karen: It’s time to come to the core of this. It’s because you’re abandoning yourself.
Me: No, that’s not… wait… Whaaaaaaa????
Karen: You have emotions. You just called yourself pathetic and needy for having them. You just called yourself a crazy bitch for having them. You’re not even there for yourself; your logical conclusion is, why would anybody else be?
Me: *stunned silence*
Whoa. That conversation, and particularly that phrase, really hit home. REALLY hit home. I’ve been turning it in my mind for days.
You are abandoning yourself.
Do you ever get that goose-bumpy feeling when words really resonate because you know, deep in your gut, without having to analyze or intellectualize it, that they are true? That’s how I feel when I think about that phrase.
You are abandoning yourself.
It was like a veil – or at least a corner of a veil – had been pulled back. I’m working on self-validation and all the DBT stuff that I should be – but I’m so far from genuinely knowing how to “be there” for myself. When I’ve been angry at people for not meeting my crazy expectations, I’ve said hollow things like, “Forget about it – you can’t fix me.” But I didn’t mean it. I never meant it. What I desperately wanted was exactly the opposite – someone to mend all my internal chips and cracks. It never worked. It never would have worked. I know this, but I didn’t know it – not really, not deep down. Now, I feel like I’m starting to get it at last.
You are abandoning yourself.
As far as I can tell, it’s not like half of me abandoned the other half. It’s more like, most of me abandoned certain parts I didn’t like as I got older and gained the ability to control (i.e. suppress) my emotions.
When you have emotions as intense as those of a borderline, its not hard to see why you’d abandon them. They’re the reason people (horrible people anyway) attack you. They’re the reason you can’t live up to the expectations you’ve set for yourself – or that other people have set for you. They’re the reason you feel weak, stupid, abnormal, ashamed and vulnerable. You start to think that the people who invalidate you are right – after all, who would want to put up with someone so contrary, so needy, so difficult to control? As a result, the older I got, the more I separated from the parts of me I couldn’t handle.
When I was 8-10, I was only (“only”) suffering stuff like random anxiety and trichotillomania. By 11-13, I was pushing into kleptomania, anorexia and self-harm. But then something happened over the next couple years, to my total surprise, that I could never explain until now: all of those outward manifestations of pain started to disappear. It seemed effortless. I never needed help with them. They just left. It just happened. Numbness set in instead.
Now I realize that Grown-up Cat got bigger and stronger than Child-Cat. As most of me matured, I got the upper hand on the “immature” parts of myself. Success! (or so I thought) No more of that nonsense. Sure it’d crop up from time to time, but only at the very worst times. And feeling numb wasn’t so bad compared to the constant agony of adolescence.
This is pertinent because Karen asked another question that struck hard because I’d never, even thought about it: “How old do you actually feel when you’re depressed or upset?”
The answer came so fast it was startling. For me, it’s about 14. Right about the time I started to be able leave that uncontrollable and suffering part of me behind. That freaked me right out. Mostly because it clicked; it made so much sense in a tragic and horrifying way. She’s still there. She’s right there where I left her, at 14. Abandoned and miserable and all the rest of it – just more and more gagged and imprisoned with each passing year.
And of course, she’s not really under lock and key the way I think she is. When anything happens that elicits a strong emotional reaction – there she is, as I found out when trauma struck in my late twenties. Emotionally, I’m about 14 years old.
That’s a lot to take in. I feel like I’m wading through years and years of unravelled, unconnected thoughts and feelings, trying to put them back together in the right order.
But the main thing I feel is… horrified. I feel shocked and guilty and horrified. For so long I’ve thought of my suppressed emotional self as crazy – in fact, I’ve literally casually named her Crazy Bitch, as I posted just a couple weeks ago. That was what I called the part of myself that could still feel and hurt: a crazy fucking bitch.
Not only did I abandon myself, I’ve been absolutely eviscerating myself, calling myself things that I would never, ever let someone else call me. Treating my emotions like they’re insane. Treating my pain like it’s nothing. Treating my thoughts and desires like they’re wrong and screwed up. Treating a whole crucial part of myself like it’s broken, diseased, and in need of amputation. Holy shit. No wonder this hasn’t gone very well.
When I was a teenager, something happened that immediately came to mind as I thought about this. I was once a big-time diarist. I’d kept all my diaries since I was about 7 years old under my mattress. My little sister and I, much to our constant chagrin, shared a room for most of our lives. One day, I realized my diaries weren’t quite in the spots I left them. I eventually got it out of my sister that she had been reading them. Were the diaries particularly incriminating? No, I had done nothing remotely scandalous or interesting by that point in my life. Were they likely to get me in any trouble? No. But I was so filled with shame and self-loathing, so angry and disgusted at the idea of anyone knowing my true thoughts and inner self that later that day, I dumped them like a murdered corpse and never kept another one. I slowly stopped playing music even though I had loved it for years. I stopped painting or drawing. I stopped expressing anything – pleasant or painful, minor or intense, unless my BPD took over and I exploded. Even now, as I start to slowly edge back into acknowledging and expressing my feelings by writing in this blog, I know that it would fill me with terror and rage if anyone who knows me in “real life” read this.
Could I be sending a stronger message to the vulnerable and emotional parts of myself? You’re embarrassing. You’re something I’m ashamed of. You make me feel pathetic. I don’t want anyone to know about you.
I know that based on a lot of blogs I’ve read, borderlines seem to have a really hard time with a fixed identity (as I addressed in an earlier post). This is why. You are abandoning yourself. Some borderlines are so distant from themselves, so ashamed of who they are, that they can’t even voice a preference for a particular type of music or food. You have abandoned yourself. Until you can stand by yourself through good and bad, intense and awful and wonderful and embarrassing and everything that comes with a human being – you have abandoned yourself, and every perceived invalidation from someone else will hurt like hell because it’s only reinforcing what you’re putting yourself through.
It’s hitting me that this is going to be horrendously uncomfortable. I feel ill at the thought of facing my unleashed 14-year-old self, and even more ill at the thought of all the self-love and touchy-feely compassion that’s going to have to happen to make her okay. But honestly, I’ve run out of options. I’ve suppressed and self-loathed til I can’t suppress and self-loathe no more, and it’s never ever worked. I’ve made enemies out of so many people I considered soul mates and best friends that I can’t go through that anymore either. It’s destroying my faith in people and my hope for any kind of future for myself.
I’m not entirely sure about the “how” but the “what” is clear: it’s time to stick with myself and stop vilifying other people for what I’m actually doing to myself.
Half of a Soul - Life with BPD 
I’m not sure how to start my comments anymore, as I don’t want to sound like a broken record with ‘this reminds me so much of me’ every time!!! But it does….
I remember a similar occasion in therapy when D said something about the way I was feeling being a reflection of the desire to be special and unique, to which I responded something along the lines of ‘but that feels wrong/self-indulgent/cringe-worthy/stupid/childish’…..to which she unfortunately didn’t say anything remotely mind-blowing, but that’s a grumble for another time! But it does mean I can relate to the feeling of slating myself for having certain emotions/thoughts etc….
As for goose-bumpy feelings when words resonate – I’ve had a few of those, and yes, it’s an immediate gut-wrenching feeling that something has just hit the mark, spot-on, and in some cases I can’t believe I haven’t spotted it before. Similar phrases/examples for me, included: reading in ‘Stop walking on egg-shells’ how, in their search for identity, being a ‘victim of bpd’ sometimes gets taken on by a bp as their identity (and I vilified myself for that one too); that my obsessive relationships and lack of faithfulness had been a ‘coping mechanism’ of sorts; that now that my life has changed and I’m married with kids and a job, I no longer have the same easy access to the coping mechanisms of the past, and so self-harm has replaced those mechanisms (which might explain why I hadn’t used it until a little over a year ago) etc etc….
And what an excellent question from K regarding how old you feel when you’re upset (says she taking another pot-shot at D in her head for not asking similar ‘get at the heart of it’ questions…..it’s something I have been painfully aware of for a few months, but didn’t really know what to do with the realisation, or what to make of it…..I often feel very young when I’m very emotional/upset/depressed. In my head, or when I verbalise it, I say that I feel like I’m twelve, but I’m not quite sure why I’ve picked on that age. It’s when I moved countries/schools etc; it’s when I had my first panic attack. In terms of finding it hard to settle in at school, it’s probably when I started shutting emotions off on a daily basis, although I had already done that (at least in relation to death) in a fairly major way when I lost a close relative at the age of ten. But I have definitely observed that in some therapy sessions I feel very much like a child, and in some I feel more of an adult. I was discussing with D how my previous therapist might represent a sort of idealised mother figure, and in that context I realised that both the child-adult and the adult-adult relationship that I had had with her in therapy sessions, were both much more the types of child/adult and adult/adult relationships I would have wanted to have with my own parents.
I have also noticed that when feeling very upset, and particularly with certain people who seem to be to be ‘motherly’ or ‘kind authoritative’ figures, I feel so childlike that I have to keep reminding myself that that is not how they see me. I feel like I must look like a child to them, but I know that I don’t. For some reason the wife of the vicar at church evokes that quite strongly in me, and bizarrely, now that my eldest has started school, I feel like I’m back at school again (needing the teacher’s approval, encouragement, caring etc), when I’m around his teacher, which I find completely bizarrely and even rather creepy and abhorrent if I’m honest, but I guess that’s just another example of not accepting my own feelings about something.
I love writing (can you guess? ;)) but was never very good at keeping at the motivation in terms of keeping a diary. However, I know to the letter the feelings you had about your own, when it was discovered. To this day I have immensely strong feelings about a time when I was convinced my parents had read mine (and as I was older, the content was rather less innocent, although all of it was in my head, rather than acting-out). Nevertheless, the shame and anger and disgust were immense, and I have never been able to bear the thought of anyone reading stuff I’ve written (one of the many reasons I’m ‘Still Hiding’ as it were). Although I shared more with my previous therapist than with anyone, I still sat there in horror once, and intense discomfort, as she took out a letter I’d written her and started reading bits of it in front of me…..
As for fixed identity, my life seems to be littered with the musical and literary tastes, beliefs, fashion statements, career goals etc of someone else…
But this where I start to diverge from you, because it sounds as though you really HAVE had a mind-blowing realisation, which i’m still waiting to have. Or rather, I know it, but I don’t REALLY KNOW it, deep down, in a way that actually affects how I feel and think about things…..
Because my bpd thinking, still strongly tells me this. I accept that I may be abandoning myself. But part of me says, ‘so what’? Surely that makes it _more_ important for others to validate/not abandon/rescue etc, rather than less? If I’m only loveable if I love myself, why should I bother in the first place? I know that none of this is ‘attractive’ thinking – it places far too much responsibility on other people for making me happy, but it’s a very difficult way of thinking to get out of. Yes, it makes me paranoid that they won’t see anything to love either, but it also sets the expectation bar even higher, because the ‘caring deficit’ they somehow have to make up for is my own, as well as theirs……how very screwed up indeed…..
Thanks again for another great post, and apologies again for another far-too-long-comment….
StillHiding, I know exactly what you mean – all of it. I will post more on this soon but I’m still kind of uncomfortable about bombarding the internet with giant self-involved novels every few days haha Re. the BPD “logic” that says other people should make up our internal deficit, there really is only one way to realize that’s never going to work, and that’s… to realize that’s never going to work. So frustrating. It still frustrates me to no end, despite having had a couple “break-through” moments. Something will resonate with you in a very personal way that suddenly “clicks” and you get it, when before it was just words. For me, it helped to realize that there are “parts” of everyone, but mental disorders erupt when you yourself hate/invalidate certain parts of yourself and force them to separate from other parts of yourself because you dislike them so much. Most people do not take it that far, hence the lack of personality disorder. Maybe they’ve got a temper, for example, but it’s not something they hate so much they turn it into a separate part they can hate/hurt/ostracize within themselves: we do. And that equals a divided person, which equals serious badness. Does this make sense? This has come up in my thinking a lot lately and the “answer” (so to speak) is a very complex one but I’m starting to see that it exists. With extensive therapy of a specific kind, I think I can see how it would be possible… Sorry to be so cryptic, I’ll work on the actual post about that therapy and see how that goes!
Thanks so much Cat! I do very much believe that it’s a case of something ‘clicking’, that’s very personal for each individual – that suddenly turns your whole worldview upside down. A bit like suddenly realising that the sun is at the centre of the solar system. In a way I’ve had small versions of that before, many years ago, that have helped me get through certain ‘episodes’, but I’m still waiting for the ‘biggie’ as it were! The most significant example I’ve had over the last couple of years was actually an example ‘in reverse’ as it were – it was the moment that self-harm suddenly became the most logical and sensible thing in the world, and the obvious way to solve a difficult problem….it will be an interesting ‘revelation’ that turns that ‘realisation’ on its head!
As for divisions of self, I was always sort of proud of my ability to compartmentalise myself, and saw it as a good thing – what another great example of skewed thinking! But at the same time, boy has it helped me survive – it’s the reason I can function and do well at work, and maintain good relationships there…..It’s good to know that even once I ‘get it’, there will still be moments of frustration, and that that’s normal…
Rachel Reyland (pseudonym) who wrote her autobiography about her recovery from BPD, spoke about one of her ‘getting it’ moments being when she truly realised what effect her illness was having on her children. I keep wondering why that hasn’t happened to me – _surely_ I should want to get better for my children’s sake? If that’s not going to motivate me, what will? What on earth does it say about me as a person, if it doesn’t or can’t motivate me enough? I had an incredibly distressing dream a few weeks ago in which my youngest child died, and although I didn’t wake up fully, I woke up enough to remember thinking that the most important thing was that my children are alive, and I’m incredibly lucky to have them, and I would waste no more time ‘wallowing’ and would just make the effort for them, and get better, and things would be fine. Did the memory and the power of that feeling live on until the morning? Sadly not. But _why_ not? I know that I find it very hard to remember feelings/fears etc when I’m not in them, and the whole BPD object-constancy thing is very true for me, but surely something as important as that would have an effect on me?
Anyway, enough of that….
Hope that with time, you will start to feel more comfortable about posting on here, and not fearing that you’re ‘bombarding the internet’! I know that BPs can find it just as hard to cope with praise as with criticism, so I’ll try not to lay it on too thick or be too sycophantic 😉 (!) but it’s true to say I really look forward to getting email notification that you’ve posted again, and it’s a real highlight to read your posts. Knowing that someone understands, and to have things resonate, is so valuable – and your posts have real insight (thank you AGAIN for sharing such hard won insights through your therapy), and are very thought provoking. Nothing should make you feel pressured to post, but I hope nothing makes you feel pressured to refrain, either….Take care, x
Reblogged this on Amygdala Waltz and commented:
This has really opened my eyes. I’ve tried to abandon my vulnerabilities. I feel ashamed to have emotions, I’ve spent half my life trying to not feel like me/feel like something better. And weirdly enough, I still feel. Bad.