Hell Hath No Fury (Like a Borderline Scorned)

A recent post on anger by the extremely insightful Life in a Bind really got me thinking about the topic this week.

Have you ever caught yourself feeling, as Life in a Bind put it (quoting another blogger), angry enough to die? Has it been over things that you know are crazy yet you can’t help but feel, well, crazy?

Anger is a huge motivator. It’s the ‘get up and go’ of our primal emotions. Its healthy role is to take something wrong and make it right. Unlike fear, anger should never make us freeze or shut down.

But until relatively recently in my life, that was exactly what anger made me do. Freezing cold fury is how I would describe it. Beneath my stony mask I felt angry enough to break shit, scream, hurt people, hurt myself – I’d find my mind flying through violent revenge scenarios, scenarios that involved me hurting the person who had ‘wronged’ me in any way that I could – often by killing myself, in these fantasies.

Let’s just pause for a minute and consider that statement.

Angry enough (at someone else) to kill myself.

Huh?

Somewhere along the line, many (most) borderlines participate in a bizarre kind of alchemy: they take anger – often extremely legitimate anger – and turn it into self-violence. They take the pain of being hurt and they hurt themselves. Does it make any sense at all? Well yes and no. No, it doesn’t make sense to the healthy brain, the one that puts the anger where it belongs – outside of self. But yes, it makes perfect sense to the borderline brain (particularly the introverted borderline brain, which avoids acting out at all costs).

I’m not going to go into the why’s and wherefore’s of self-harm here (as the topic deserves a much more extensive and expert treatment than I could offer) but undoubtedly, to hurt anything – including yourself – takes a tremendous amount of anger. However, for years I wouldn’t have even known enough to call what I was feeling ‘anger.’ I was so cut off from my anger, so suffocated by my fear of getting angry or communicating that anger, that I convinced myself I was simply insane rather than hurt or angry.

This week in therapy, Karen told me to focus on processing the anger of key past wrongs. I must admit I find it really hard to even know exactly what that means. There’s a big part of me that still believes “I deserve this” about many of those wrongs, when I know the answer Karen’s looking for is “I don’t fucking deserve this!” And I find anger a difficult emotion to re-capture outside of the moment. What am I supposed to do, just sit and be angry? I’m not really sure. But I do know that learning to externalize rather than internalize anger is one of the keys to my mental health and recovery.

Example: last week as I ate a piece of pie (yum), my otherwise intuitive, sensitive, wonderful boyfriend jokingly made a remark along the lines of “whoa, slow down, I don’t date fat chicks.” (Yes, even wonderful people can say incredibly idiotic, horrible things, it’s part of my new, non-black-and-white, non-borderline thinking to realize this).

I felt the familiar sensation of turning to stone and immediately visualized all the various hurtful things I would say to him for saying such a fucking stupid thing. What did I do/say? Nothing. My face registered nothing. My mouth said nothing (it said pie, in fact). I sat in silence until it became so obvious something was wrong that he asked what was wrong. “Nothing.” Argh. And so it continued until I really really rallied myself enough to say even a fraction of what I was actually feeling: “Why the FUCK would you say something like that?” etc. The wall was broken, and even though it sucked to have that conversation at all, we had it. I didn’t beat myself up for being too fat, too sensitive, too whatever. Instead I put the anger exactly where it belonged: not on me for enjoying pie, but on him for being an insensitive ass. Did he apologize for being tactless (understatement of the year) in his attempt at a joke? Yes. Was I able to forgive him – actually forgive him – without unresolved anger eating my insides? Yes, because I’d gotten it out.

This is obviously not a manual for how to deal with anger, and I’m not saying that everyone is going to handle hearing their faults/mistakes as well as my (occasionally clueless) boyfriend handled it. But I have a hard time believing anything can be worse than corrosive, self-directed and unexpressed rage.

xxxx

Author: halfasoul

I am a lot of things, but for the purposes of this blog, I am a textbook case of borderline personality disorder (BPD). My intention is that this blog give others with BPD - as well as those that care about them - perspective, insight, and hopefully, even a little bit of hope, help or comfort regarding the nature of this very strange and overwhelming disorder. View all posts by halfasoul