Half of a Soul – Life with BPD – Page 7 – Borderline Personality Disorder from the inside out

DBT Technique: Opposite Action

Borderline personality disorder often goes hand-in-hand with a lot of bewildering contradictions (hence the term “borderline” in reference to the division of the personality):

-too-close emotional relationships versus far-too-distant relationships

-over-the-top feelings of love and sentimentality versus over-the-top feelings of rage and hate;

-feeling one way and acting another;

-thinking one thing and saying another; etc. etc.

It’s this contradictory aspect of BPD that made it very, very difficult for me to approach the dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) technique known as ‘opposite action.”

In fact, it took me months to even consider the concept: I thought it sounded far too similar to what I’d already been doing for years – lying, acting, performing, building a hollow exterior that I initially used as protection and later found to be a very real and effective prison for my emotions, my thoughts, my identity. I had no interest in learning to “adopt a smile” (as one of the DBT handouts suggested) when I felt rage or despair – I was already too damn good at that already, thanks very much. What a stupid suggestion, right?

However, what I would not have learned if I had just been reviewing the DBT sheets/info on my own, is that opposite action is actually NOT duplicity at all. It’s not ignoring what you’re actually feeling, nor is it acting or lying, and it should never be a performance for anyone – least of all yourself. I thought our group leader explained it way better than any of the DBT materials did.

In a nutshell, opposite action means doing what is most helpful, effective and healthy for yourself when you feel like doing what is harmful, ineffective and unhealthy.

It’s widely acknowledged as one of the hardest DBT skills to master – for anyone, let alone for borderlines – because it involves directly opposing the habits and instincts that have become second nature to us over many years. Furthermore, borderlines are so accustomed to feeling invalidated that any effort to do the opposite of what feels cathartic (i.e. not screaming in rage when you feel extreme rage) feels like a typical dismissal of our painfully strong emotions, which is exactly what caused and defines the condition (a key piece, as discussed in my last post on the utmost importance of SELF-validation).

Today I struggled with a situation I have encountered dozens, probably hundreds of times. Yesterday evening I felt I had exposed my feelings to a friend – I thought I had made it pretty clear how awful and invalidated I felt. That friend (my roommate, incidentally) didn’t say anything that felt validating, and they left no indication that the conversation meant anything at all to them. Ouch and ouch. A BPDer’s nightmare: making yourself vulnerable and feeling totally rejected and invalidated by the experience – thus adding to the extensive catalogue of identical experiences, which we keep an unforgivable grip on in order to feed the familiar and “safe” belief that no one cares, no one can help, and we might as well give up on everyone else as well as ourselves.

Typically, pre-DBT and before I knew anything about identifying harmful instincts let alone resisting them, I would have spent today doing two things: 1) being utterly miserable, depressed and furious with myself for being vulnerable enough to let something make me feel this way; 2) Doing everything I could to express and validate my pain to myself and, even more so, to “punish” the person who hurt me by showing how deeply they hurt me. I’d probably spend the day wallowing in bed, popping sleeping pills whenever I woke up, so that my roommate would see how horrible they’d made me feel yesterday, how horrible a friend they were to me. If I was feeling really down, I’d probably stay awake enough to let myself take a trip down memory lane – feeding my pain, my despair, my self-righteous anger with plenty of examples from the past that prove how right I am to feel that way. And those kinds of memories can get bad enough to lead to worse kinds of self-harm, working me deeper and deeper into a hole that takes more and more self-punishment to communicate just how bad things are. It culminates in an impossible situation: I feel so awful that I can’t let anything good or positive even enter my mind, because doing so feels like dismissing (and further invalidating) all the pain that will never be healed.

Just writing that made me feel a bit sick and in a pretty dark spot.

So, moving on.

Opposite action is THE exercise du jour for moments like these. I’m far from adept at it – in fact I’m actually kind of awful at it for the time being – but I’ve been specifically focusing on it for a couple weeks now to try to get my head around it. Aside from resisting pathways my brain, body and emotions have taken for over two decades, the other hardest part about opposite action is that its core motivation is self-care and self-love. Just removing – even for one minute – the conviction that you don’t deserve to feel better and you shouldn’t have to take care of yourself is a big deal and huge accomplishment for a borderline. Once you can accept that you need your own love and acceptance first, you can start giving it through opposite actions. Some examples:

-If you feel a harmful level of anger or self-destructive rage coming on, think and verbalize the realization: “I’m getting really angry and I deserve to feel angry about being hurt, but this is not going to help me right now.” Then (opposite action) ‘treat’ that anger with things that soothe and/or release it: videos or photos that make you laugh, a soothing meditation clip (on youtube or grooveshark), or a really long intensive stretch or workout session in which you focus on releasing anger from your body.

-If you feel stressed and overwhelmed about life, do activities that make you feel organized and in control: make to-do lists (and address each item mindfully, not worrying about all the other items but addressing each one with your full attention), finish some task that has been hanging over you, clean your house/room (this is a favourite of mine! I am big on the notion that a clear and tidy environment helps your mind feel the same way), cook something in bulk and freeze portions so that you are prepared for future lunches or dinners that week.

-If you feel worthless, choose activities that remind you that you have great worth: perform random acts of kindness, ask a good friend or family member to tell you what they like about you, or do something nice for your kids or pets if you have them (an extra long walk with the dog, building a little fort for your cat, or a special outing with kids) – there is no quicker hit of self-worth than the look on a child or animal’s face when you are doing something wonderful for them! *Disclaimer: ok, let’s be honest, it is unlikely a cat will deign to grace you with any display of gratitude, but you can probably imagine that they’re just hiding it well…*

-If you feel sad, pretend that someone you really care about has told you they’re feeling in need of comfort and then treat yourself that way: draw a hot bath, give yourself a long body scrub and moisturize, savour a delicious treat (but try not to give into emotional over-eating), watch a movie that makes you feel comforted, wallow in cozy clothes and blankets, read a book that makes you happy, or do anything else that absorbs your attention and comforts you without trying to mask or suppress the pain and sadness.

-If you feel weak and beaten down by life, do and consume things that make you feel strong: eat well (lots of protein, B12, and iron, which are big components of energy levels), drink tons of water (you really don’t know real fatigue until you’re both depressed and dehydrated, trust me!), and work the wonderful body you’ve been gifted: lift soup cans while watching tv, explore youtube for exercises you like, or put on your iPod and run from your house as far as you can each day before walking home – start with literally 30-60 seconds run if that’s all you can manage. I am a lifelong enemy of exercise but I cannot deny that taking on even a tiny workout routine (I try for just 15 minutes a day of simple ballet-based exercises) and seeing the results build up over months has given me a LOT of strength in many different ways. To stay motivated and feel stronger, read, watch and think about things that inspire (not intimidate or depress) you – books or videos about any figure you admire who overcame adversity and persevered.

It’s worth noting that opposite action is obviously not the only technique or solution for dealing with difficult emotions: sometimes it isn’t called for, and it takes a lot of self-awareness to learn to recognize those times you really need to indulge your emotions (to an extent) in order to validate and release (e.g. them with a sad movie and a private sob-fest), versus the times you really need to resist indulging those emotions so they don’t turn destructive.

So, what am I actually doing today? Sitting here on a hot day in a long-sleeved shirt (opposite of thinking about cutting), watching a childhood favourite cartoon (opposite of focusing on angry, vengeful thoughts), enjoying tea with a few squares of dark chocolate (opposite of eating nothing to punish myself), and writing this post with the hope of helping others with this awful disorder (opposite of focusing on feeling cut off, lonely and pointless/worthless). Did I manage to do these things without indulging in a tiny bit of destructive emotions? No, and I now really, really regret the extremely bitchy text I sent my friend for what happened yesterday. Sigh. 😦 But I’m trying not to focus on that just now. Mistakes are inevitable.

It makes me cringe quite a bit to say this (God how I still hate this self-validation/self-care thing) but in spite of the slip-up furious text, I am pretty fucking proud of myself right now. It’s years since I could experience something as strong as the anger that comes from feeling invalidated and do anything but implode in various self-destructive ways.

Do you ever use opposite action? Please share any suggestions you have with me….

Cat Earnshaw xx

Self-validation and the Eff-Word

Nope, not that eff-word. I love that eff-word – where would we be without it’s delightfully releasing fricative force?

I’m talking about Facebook. Bane of my life and perverter of otherwise normal days into wasted little husks.

Reasons why I (tell myself that I) keep Facebook in my life:

1) The photos. I am a huge traveller and I love that most people post photos from their various travels. It’s a great way to get insight or inspiration when trip-planning. Similarly, I love being able to post my photos from trips I’ve taken so that my family and friends don’t have to sit down for a boring slideshow in order for me to let them know how my trip was.

2) Keeping in touch with people I genuinely care about. This is actually a secondary reason to the photos one, because I could obviously just shoot off emails to them. But of the people I’d like to stay in touch with on facebook, there are very few that I’d actually email (chances are I don’t even have their emails): distant cousins, childhood playmates, friends of your parents, etc. etc.

*shameful reason* 3) I’m terrified of being “left out” if I left Facebook. I’m not exactly a social butterfly anymore, so if I wasn’t able to see all the “group invites/events,” it’s possible people wouldn’t think to invite me to anything via other methods of communication. At least that’s my paranoid thought process, much as I hate to admit it.

The reasons I should leave Facebook are way too numerous to mention, so I won’t list them out. But anyone can easily think what they are. Aside from the sheer number of wasted hours you can spend with your eyes glued to a little screen taking in oddly addictive information that you don’t actually care about (ummm sadly kind of the story of the Internet, in general, for me), Facebook and all its stupid, stupid little trivial dramas can ruin my mood. Just shatter it. And I really don’t like the person I am when I’m in its thrall.

A very real and recent example: me logging into the eff-word to find that one of my best (albeit now far-off) friends is in touch with someone who hurt me very badly in the past. In fact, she’s evidently more ‘in touch’ with him than she is with me, as they were chumming it up in some recent photos while she hasn’t seen fit to return any of my emails for a few months now. Ouch.

My reaction? Delete. Cut out the friendship entirely in a very silly and immature way. This is someone who I feel deserves an explanation – but she hasn’t asked for one (so now I’ve added to this equation the stress of not knowing what she even knows!). If it weren’t for Facebook, sure I could have found out that my friend had ‘betrayed’ me from some other source, but there’s a good chance I would have found out from her, accompanied by some kind of explanation.

Aside from the unnecessary downer/drama aspect of Facebook, the comparison aspect kills me as well. Whether or not we’ll all admit it, we all know that Facebook’s primary reason for existence is to compare ourselves to other people – consciously or unconsciously. Examples:

“OMG they’re on their fourth kid and they have a body like Kate Moss!?!? How is this possible?!” (implicit thought process: I’m fat and ugly and I don’t even have any kids to justify it).

“OMG they finished that PhD they were working on and now they’ve bought their first home” (implicit thought process: I’m stupid and my life sucks compared to everyone else’s.)

Be honest: how many Facebook photos have you posted with the knowledge that “this will make people jealous of me/my life”? For me, it’s a lot. A hell of a lot. Admitting that disgusts me and fills me with deep self-loathing. I feel shallow and pathetic. I do not want to want to make other people jealous of me – which obviously smacks of insecurity. And the irony is, by engaging in this process myself, I should be realizing that people ALL do this on Facebook – including all the people I feel so jealous of sometimes. They ALL work to present a version of themselves/their lives that other people will be impressed with.

There are a number of recent articles on the explosion of mental health issues related to Facebook, and one I read made the excellent point that Facebook is a “best of” reel of each user’s life. It’s like a little movie we each work so hard to compile and edit (and edit and edit and edit) in order to feel validated by other’s people’s respect or admiration.

The problem is that all of this is a presentation. Like the beautiful but miserable celebrity head-case who is glorified as “naturally beautiful” after hundreds of dollars of fake hair dye, make up, plastic surgery and expensive clothes, you know deep down that it’s all just a presentation. And you can never ever feel happy or validated if all you’re exposing for validation is, essentially, a lie.

The only way to break the cycle is to present the truth – the whole truth. But Facebook is SO not the venue for that either! None of us want to be that sad-ass person who posts their every emotion and juvenile mood-swing on Facebook (or, for that matter, displays them in real life all the time either). That just reeks of an equally pathetic type of insecurity.

The real solution? Self-validation.

I am on the “self-validation” unit of my DBT group which is why this topic is particularly important to me at the moment. Self-validation is the answer to so many BPD problems – but it’s incredibly difficult and deeply counterintuitive if you’ve spend years looking to everyone else to make you feel happy/confident/safe/functional etc etc.

Self-validation means a quiet inner assurance that what you are feeling is real, logical, understandable and important. To say that in my mind – let alone out loud – is SO HARD. I don’t like myself enough to self-validate, and I simultaneously don’t like that feeling of “letting other people off the hook” (if you know what I mean) by keeping the struggle inside and not putting the burden of it on others’ shoulders. Which is clearly why self-validating essential and I have to learn to do it! :-S

Without self-validation, you’re overcome with the desire to “act out” what you’re feeling, at any cost, in order to make people realize and validate just how terrible things are for you. When BPDers don’t get “enough” of a reaction to how they’re feeling, they may purposely embellish the problems they have in order to manipulate that validation out of people: they may develop obvious self-harm mechanisms, or even make up “traumatic events” from their past in order to get the reaction they want to their pain. But by doing so, we’re caught in an even worse spot: now we only get validated for the lies/performances/tricks/manipulations we use, and not the actual emotions. And so, the more you have to rely on the lies and performances, and the less real/validated your pain feels, and on and on it goes.

Oh foolish, foolish borderlines, when will ye (or rather, ‘we’) learn?

The old me would have said “never.” The me of even a mere six months ago would have said that. But I’m tentatively being able to consider the possibility of change. I hate these patterns. I hate these coping “tools.” I hate the person that they make me and the effect they have had on my life. Now it’s time to transform that hate (negativity) into growth (positivity) by using it to spur me onwards in the daunting quest for change. I’ve written the following little mantra for myself *squirms with self-consciousness* when I start to feel horrendous emotions or my BPD mode kicking in as a result:

Every hateful and counterproductive BPD “technique” I’ve developed has developed for a good reason: to protect me. However, those techniques are not protecting me anymore – they are hurting me. As I open myself to start feeling emotions, I will take a pause with each one to remember that it is real, important and valid. I deserve to feel everything that I feel, and no one has the power to make me feel otherwise.

Have you ever vowed to give up Facebook? Or even succeeded? And do you self-validate? How?

Cat xx

Reward for completing therapy! More therapy!

That title is half snarky/sarcastic, half genuinely (albeit tentatively) enthused. Why? Because Canada’s healthcare system has a standard mental health program that means you have to slog through quite a bit of aggravating standardized b.s. to get to the “real” treatment: namely, 8 weeks of basic emotion regulation skills (group format), followed by months of DBT (group) until you finally get to see an individual therapist – yes, one of your very own – for 45 minutes per week to help with the DBT skills.

***Side note: for anyone who doesn’t know what Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is, it’s a form of psychotherapy developed specifically for BPD, and therefore a standard ‘prescription’ for the disorder. The program was developed by Marsha Linehan, a woman with severe BPD who engaged in self-harm and numerous suicide attempts for years before pursuing psychology and spiritual exploration (and the combination of the two) as a way to combat the disorder in herself and in others. I am a pretty big believer in DBT (and I haven’t even gone that far in it yet), mostly because it bloody works. If you are suffering from BPD (or know someone who is) please give DBT serious consideration: find a therapist in your area who has years of experience with it, and a track record of using it to successfully treat borderlines. There will be a LOT of posting on/about DBT in this blog, especially as I’d like to share many of the techniques it has taught me.***

So yes, I’d sat through the 8-week intro on regulating emotions (not that helpful but it laid the groundwork I guess), and then through another few months of DBT group sessions which mainly involved extremely patronizing discussions of how to “shoo away bad feelings” and “focus on the positive” (thank you, Captain Obvious!), and today was my first meeting with my individual DBT therapist.

She was an extremely nice lady – but much more excitingly/importantly, she was an extremely qualified lady. She asked me for my basic history in terms of mental health treatment. I told her. It included many standard reactions that borderlines can get from medical professionals – i.e., “Oh WOW, you’re fucked up! I have no idea what to do with you, and now that we’ve gotten into all your issues just enough to really upset you, I recommend that you go see *insert name of some other doctor with no specialty in BPD*”

So get this: my new therapist lady actually validated these experiences. That right there floored me. It was such a short statement, and such a simple thing, but just her saying that I was right to feel wounded by those reactions was a big thumbs-up in my head. “Opening up for help is hard enough for borderlines,” she said. “Opening up for help and not getting that help from supposed professionals? That’s medical trauma.”

I’m trying really really hard not to feel too invested/hopeful about all this since, well, you know how that often turns out when you’ve got BPD (when most people get their hopes dashed they can get irritated or upset; when borderlines get their hopes dashed they can get, um, insane or suicidal). But at the same time, acknowledging a positive feeling like hope is important when your brain’s pathways are very well worn in negative directions, but hardly broken in at all on the positive side.

Part of the armour BPD pads us with is supremely negative thinking: if I expect the absolute worst, I can’t be hurt or disappointed (Yay, look at me in my incredibly cozy bubble-wrap of misery and low expectations!). This is an incredibly dumb line of reasoning for a few reasons: 1) It doesn’t work. How many times have you told yourself this, yet STILL felt hurt/disappointed (and then angry at yourself for feeling what you swore you wouldn’t feel)? 2) Countless studies have shown that thoughts form reality in a very concrete way; predict the worst possible outcome, and you stand a much better chance of getting the worst possible outcome. 3) It reenforces an existing pattern in your mind to lean towards seeing the negative rather than the positive in any situation = extra badness for yourself. 4) It reenforces the idea that anyone who IS working to be positive or improve is a stupid, delusional chump – when in reality, anyone who’s tried it knows that clinging to the fleeting positive moments in this life is a task of truly heroic effort and badass determination (at least it is when you’re coming at it from the total opposite direction).

So yep. The situation seems a little bit brighter at the moment: feels weird to say that. And I’m actively acknowledging the resistance to positivity, the fact that it feels weird to say that. One of my (many) past therapists said something really helpful when I was berating my terrible coping skills: “Maybe they are terrible, but you learned them for a reason. Honour them for that reason. They got you through what you need to get through at that time, but they’re not working anymore and they’re actually just hurting you.” For that reason alone, BPD therapists will differ from most therapists: they should never EVER be telling you to “tear down the walls” or “just let it all out” – that kind of thing works for some people, but not for us. The walls and boundaries and negative coping skills we have were developed for a reason, and they need to be taken down slowly or the only result will be a total meltdown.

Take one positive moment today to embrace whatever makes it positive. Acknowledge thoughts like “God I’m pathetic” or “Why am I fucking doing this?” Then picture yourself giving those thoughts a giant middle finger (or mooning… I prefer mooning, personally, it’s somehow more satisfyingly defiant) because you’re not giving into them yet again. This moment, and whatever makes it positive, is for you to enjoy because, come on now, you deserve to enjoy at least one moment of your time on this earth – doesn’t everyone?

Cat xx

Sits on ass… waits to feel better

Today my grand achievements include:

a) feeding myself (not particularly well, included pizza and not nearly enough water)

b) caffeinating myself (not particularly helpful since the energy I hoped it would produce was totally misdirected)

c) watching a movie I haven’t seen since I was about 7 (“Watcher in the Woods” – Disney’s foray into horror; I recommend it if you feel like sacrificing “good” for awesome/nostalgic/cheese, which is to say… it’s actually great)

d) Finally posting this even though there’s nothing more annoying that useless whining about being useless.

I’m not crazy depressed, I’m not feeling all ragey or particularly BPDish in any way – just frenetically aimless. So. Annoying. It’s the feeling that (for me) always accompanies the knowledge that there is a LOT to do… eventually. Once you simply cannot procrastinate any longer, some part of your mind kicks in and makes you miserably stressed but incredibly productive. Prior to that stage, however, you just kind of laze and mope and vaguely worry about what’s coming up. Almost every thought is “I should be doing this, I should be doing that, I have to get this over with, etc etc.” Yet stupid tumblrs have never been so inviting – nor have pointless advice columns and articles, old SNL clips on youtube, and every other way the internet absolutely sucks up my time while simultaneously doing NOTHING for me… argh!!

The point is: I’ve wasted virtually an entire day doing fuck-all, but I refuse to beat myself up about it – thereby committing the smallest sliver of productive activity since that’s a relatively new achievement for me.

Everyone has days like this and a good way to snap out of them is to be accountable to someone; hence, the logging on here and writing this frightfully dull (for anyone who is not me) post. Apologies. Needing to see the words to commit myself to: doing a quick workout, taking a shower, and getting some much needed house-keeping in. Then it’ll be a short mindfulness/meditation track on grooveshark and *cries a bit* group therapy tomorrow morning. 😦 Thinking that is part of why today was full of nervous but pointless/lazy stressing….

Cat Earnshaw xx

Identity and BPD: so many angles, so little mind…

Lately I’m overwhelmed with ideas to consider/write about/explore in relation to that all-consuming topic of my life: BPD. I know that it’s actually much more important to LIVE a life rather than just spend it looking at life from every possible angle in your mind. Looking at it, analyzing it, considering it from every possible angle is just too exhausting for anyone’s mind, let alone a borderline’s. However, that’s what this post is going to be, in the hopes that venting some of these constant buzzing thoughts regarding the inner life and identity of BPD gets them out for the day (or hour at least).

It hardly needs to be said that, as borderlines, we spend so much damn time thinking this out (well, trying to), questioning everything we do/have done, trying to come up with solutions when ultimately, we don’t even know if we want to be ‘solved’ – after all, most people with BPD grow to see the disorder as their ‘actual’ identity. This is tragic but completely understandable – and, in fact, inevitable – for a variety of reasons:

#1) BPD lasts.

Untreated, it’ll last decades – for some people, a whole lifetime. If you make it to your 40s/50s (given the 1/10 BPD suicide statistic), you may be one of those people lucky enough to have the symptoms simply dissipate on their own: yep, some studies have shown that, inexplicably, many of BPD’s symptoms will lessen or soften with four or five decades of ~~horrific self-abuse~~ practice (hip hip hooray??). However, for the borderline right in the throes of this disorder (20s and 30s), it’s now defined the vast majority of your inner existence. That’s a powerful sense of identity when not much else had lasted in your life; because, of course, your BPD has likely damaged most of your core relationships, robbed you of your hobbies/opinions/passions, and caused you cut ties with anything that gets too ‘close’ to prevent the painful situations you anticipate. Ironic result? The problem destroying your life is all you really have to define yourself by.

#2) BPD (and all the shit it brings with it) just feels “realer” than the rest of your life.

I’m not entirely clear on the mechanisms at work in this one but one thing is very clear to me: pain, loss, sorrow, darkness, agony, anger are all very “real” words in my vocabulary. Happiness, peace, love, calm, joy, laughter – not so much. I mean they’re real, of course, but they are inextricable from a sense of falseness or transience in my mind: that is, I know (or BPD makes me “know”) that they will never last – so why pursue the pain by acting like they will last? “But that’s just stupid,” non-borderlines will point out. “Why dwell on sorrow and pain and anger and all that dark shit when they don’t last either.” True. And yet, in the BPDer’s mind, they are the ones that last – primarily because (largely unconsciously) we make them last.

Research has shown that you make pathways in your brain just as you do in a landscape. Those that are well-trafficked become those that are ‘real’ – your mind understands them, it’s used to travelling them, and – as a creature of habit just like the rest of our human parts – it wants to keep going down them because they’re familiar. The pathways that don’t get much use become exactly how you’d expect an unused path to become over time: overgrown, treacherous, scary, daunting. The mind resists the work of forging those new paths.

I first came across that information in my initial counselling for post-traumatic stress disorder, and it really excited me in a way. For one thing, it made so much sense. Our brains and bodies are built out of repeated connections and patterns. Make certain connections a million times (i.e. love isn’t real, love never lasts, I don’t trust it and it’s hurt me), and your brain is a friggin effective learner: it will help to reinforce the “knowledge” that love is not a path to go down, so just stick to this lovely little venue of miserable loneliness instead.

Even as I’m bloody writing these words I can actually feel my well-worn brain patterns resisting what I’m writing (seriously)! “No, no, no, NO, Cat, don’t even think things like this, deep down you know you should stick to what you’ve always followed, you know it’s true.” But the fact is – and it’s taken literally a few years just to get to this point in my own head – I do not have a good sense of what is “true.” I really don’t. I’ve got a very strong sense of what my BPD believes to be true. And that’s never worked for me. In fact it’s sucked so bad at guiding my life that I’m now willing to do god-awful things like sit through the required group therapy (the horror… the horror) just to combat its influence. I know BPD is just a part of the picture and not the “real” picture, but I’m still struggling to apply that knowledge to my life in concrete ways.

#3) BPD’s symptoms can be very similar to the actual parts of your identity that it grew from.

Picture this: Take a creative, sensitive child with a propensity for drama, passion, story-telling and spontaneity. Now subject him to all the conditions that create BPD, including a genetic predisposition, a family that’s not comfortable with emotions or punishes them, a traumatic event that produces overwhelming feelings which can’t be expressed, and a peer group that rejects and belittles his ideas, emotions and identity. Gradually, the creativity and storytelling traits become duplicity and a talent for lying – even when it’s not necessary. Suppressed, the propensity for drama and passion become violence and uncontrollable emotions whenever they do burst out. The spontaneity become impulsiveness – promiscuity, gambling, self-harm, drug abuse.

In this way, BPD takes certain aspects of your being and slants them in a self-destructive direction. But because those aspects really do represent parts of your personality, you’ll feel as fiercely attached to them as if they were parts of you. How many borderlines meet their BPD diagnosis with anger, defensiveness and disbelief (*raises hand*)? “It is NOT a mental illness, it’s just who I am.” It’s an absurdly common reaction to any mental health diagnosis, and it was certainly mine. I was sure that I didn’t have a problem – everyone else just had a problem with the way I was. I was sure that I’d always had an association between love and pain, or love and violence: that’s just me. I was sure that I’d always had a habit of lying, or an inability to handle strong emotions, or a lean towards self-destruction. The resistance in me was insanely strong: THOSE THINGS ARE WHO I AM AND IF I GIVE THEM UP, I CEASE TO BE ME!!!!!!!

I still feel like that when I get in really severe BPD mode (i.e. depressive or raging low points). But by exploring and validating who I really am, I’m finding it easier to let go of the ways that BPD has defined me. It’s not easy, to say the least. I mean it’s been defining me, and telling me that’s how I have to define myself, for over 20 years now. But the cliche is true: behind every horrible person was (and sometimes still is) a ridiculously sensitive and damaged person in need of love and validation – the kind that only comes from within (please don’t fucking fool yourself like so many borderlines into thinking someone else holds that key).

Note: the very phrase “self-love” or “self-care” still my skin crawl instinctively. I’m not even remotely comfortable with it yet. But as I progress through therapy, I’ll be sharing a lot of techniques to facilitate the ability to “self-care” while I attempt to work on them myself too.

In conclusion, no matter how long it’s been going on, how bad things have gotten, or how many past examples you’ve built up to make your point: don’t be so sure that being horrible, evil, bitchy, manipulative, violent or destructive is your “true” nature – even if you’ve gone to great lengths to prove it to other people until they wholeheartedly agree.

That’s BPD’s identity, not yours: you owe it to your true self to put in the hard work it takes to separate the two.

Cat Earnshaw xx

The world premiere of “Border_” FULL MOVIE

The world premiere of “Border_” FULL MOVIE.

Living in the middle of nowhere, as I do, my rural internet options are absolutely atrocious (we’re talking $80 a month for basic internet, with virtually no downloads, videos, streaming, etc.). As a result, I haven’t watched this yet, but I’m dying to! Next time I’m in a coffee shop and taking advantage of their free wifi I’ll definitely make it a priority. 😉

In the meantime, take a moment to watch this and let me know your thoughts – particularly if you have BPD: do you think this video is accurate? Unbiased? Can’t wait to check it out…

Out of the darkness, but not into the light

Last week I posted about being in a BPD black hole, namely because I was right in the middle of one. I can feel that sensation receding now, day by day. It’s interesting to me to track the times that those pitfalls occur and how long they last, etc. Well, I say “interesting” but that’s far too clinical and detached: what I really mean is, I’m swamped beyond all interest, curiosity, or any other active or positive emotion while I’m in them, and then when they do recede I kind of sit up and go, “… OK what the f**k just happened?”

I want to know more about them because they basically define BPD for me. Without them, I feel like I’d be a functional, ‘normal’ person. Many times in my life I’ve thought, oh yay, they’re gone and now I’m okay! The truth is that for a variety of reasons, things would be going well enough that I didn’t fall into them, but the minute any emotion/situation arose that required my good ol’ coping mechanisms – *WHAM* they’d descend on my life like a murder of particularly ominous crows.

In fact, one of the trickiest things about BPD is that borderlines can be so damn normal a lot of the time. They’re often (seemingly) outgoing, friendly, positive people with lots of great stuff in their lives (Marilyn Monroe is famously rumoured to have been BPD). Unlike straight depression or anxiety or many other disorders (although those can definitely crop up in the life of a borderline as well), BPD can often co-exist just fine with a superficially great life for years and years – even decades in my case. I spent most of my life succeeding in ways that indicated to everyone who knew me that I was on top of everything: I had lots of friends; I had worked my way up to studying at some of the world’s most prestigious universities; I worked, earned money, spent it in normal ways; I enjoyed normal hobbies like music and travelling. But the few people closest to me (and for me that meant romantic partners and a couple best friends, as I am quite emotionally distanced from my family) were forced to see the parts I kept from everyone else: the cutting, the starving, the periods of depression, the OCD, the uncontrollable emotions that would culminate in me verbally or even physically attacking them (by the way, I don’t know why I’m using the past tense because, yeah, this is still how it goes… optimism I guess?).

My blackest depths last, on average, 5-7 days, and, like a pressure-releasing valve, they go off about once every couple months. I’ve had them last as long as a couple weeks but rarely. I’ll usually be down, depressed, tired and/or mopey after they hit (current feelings of blargh), but the real crushing point is usually a matter of days and not weeks. During those days, I feel inconsolably – and I mean utterly inconsolably – frustrated, furious and suicidally depressed. Everything and everyone that attempts to help gets attacked. There’s a vague sense that I don’t deserve or want to feel better – but I don’t know why. Sometimes there’s a sense that if only someone would do the perfect thing at the perfect time exactly the way I want, THEN I’d know that someone really cares. It’s a sort of trial by telepathy that – big surprise! – never, ever works out.

I understand that my worst periods are brought on by any strong negative emotion – even if it’s something as seemingly innocuous as disappointment over someone not saying “I love you” when they normally do – but what I don’t understand is how to give myself or the other person permission to move past them. It feels like moving on or letting go (i.e. the normal healthy thing to do) would be giving up, accepting what I know to be wrong and unjust, letting someone get away with murder – in other words, total anathema to a borderline. Once emotions ARE released, they simply cannot be moved past or it feels like we’re accepting the invalidation of our emotions that so scarred us in the past.

It is not a pleasant feeling, to put it mildly.

I’m glad to be gradually moving out of it. The problem is that each time one of these things happen, they leave a wake of pretty serious destruction. I feel permanently less trustful of the person who (I feel) hurt me, or maybe I’ve hurt them, or smashed something I really wish I hadn’t smashed (goodbye, favourite coffee mug), or said something I wish I could take back, or hurt myself so badly I can’t wear a tank top and it’s really hot this week, or blah blah blah. You likely know the drill.

And of course, for most borderlines, there’s always the threat that one of those episodes will cause the one action you really can’t take back – the one that you practice over and over and over in your mind, both as a kind of comfort and a masochistic fantasy.

This is quite the rambling post so I’ll leave off for now in order to get some more of the good stuff (sleep, water, healthy food, exercise) that helps me recover from these black spots.

Does anyone else have any insight on these awful times? How long do yours typically last? And how often?

Black Holes and Revelations*

As a borderline (or someone who knows one), how often do the ‘black holes’ come along for you? How long do they last?

When I say black holes, I mean the kinds of situations that everyone can immediately call to mind if they are/know a BPDer. I don’t have to define them because you know what I’m talking about, but I’ll try in case anyone does not have a huge catalogue of them on file in his/her mind.

The black holes of BPD are the lows of chronic depression, the frenzy of withdrawal, the ache of isolation, and the boiling hatred and rage that precipitate all serious violence committed by human beings. To fall into one is to lose all sight and memory of what it is like to be happy – or even to live tolerably inside your own skin and skull. Existence feels crushing, infuriating, pointless. Every effort to help only inflames every negative thought and emotion at war inside you. Nothing is good enough and anyone who tries to come close must be savagely and instantly pushed away, at any cost, for reasons that you don’t even understand. When the screaming and vitriol do exactly what you’d expect they’d do – i.e. drive everyone away – the borderline can sit back and stew over everything they were already upset about, but with the added pain of abandonment and the knowledge that they were right: no one can help and no one cares enough to try.

Sound crazy? Then you’re probably reading the wrong blog.

For me, reading a description of typical BPD rage for the first time was terrifying because it made so much damn sense. It resonated in ways that made me feel cold all over. I feel like that all the time, I thought.

In fact, the real truth of it is (I’m trying to be as honest as possible in this blog since I have a long and destructive association between my BPD and mandatory shame/dishonesty about it): I’m feeling like that right now. I am right smack in the middle of a black hole – but the difference is, this time, I’m searching for a revelation.

How did it start? When did it escalate and why? How is it similar to ones I’ve had in the past?

These are questions I ask myself every time I feel like this but I never feel closer to treating the cause, even if I do come closer to identifying it (perhaps?).

It started as many of mine do: I felt disappointed. Disappointment, for me, is a massive trigger, and I’m certainly not alone in that among BPDers. Why? Because when you feel disappointed, you acknowledge that you did not get something you were expecting. In other words, you acknowledge (or maybe you don’t, but a part of you knows anyway) that your expectation was a vulnerability, a spoken or unspoken request that made you open to rejection. That rejection in a state of vulnerability – and I cannot stress how small or misunderstood the “rejection” can be and how large a BPDer can make it – exemplifies everything that lies at the terrified heart of borderline personality disorder: abandonment, exposure, betrayal of trust.

Almost everyone with BPD has one particular instance in their mind of their ultimate betrayal, the ultimate rejection that “made us” the way we are more than any other. Among all the instances that we gather and hoard and chew on, there is usually one primary figure looming in the middle. For me, the memory is of the only person I ever really loved rejecting me when I was most scared and vulnerable. He completely misread my fear and desperation, mostly because I was no good at expressing them, but also because he was a Grade-A ass-hat, as I got to realize at that inopportune moment.

Result: my BPD/inability to express certain feelings meant that my need for comfort (the vulnerability part) turned into a traumatic emotional eruption (the rejection part) that I still struggle to come to terms with.

Classic, right?

In this way, the black holes of BPD are seemingly inescapable. They get bigger and deeper each time you return – easier and easier to fall into. You tell yourself you’ll simply avoid the edges – in other words, reject all vulnerability so nothing can reject you. But part of you knows that as long as you’re a living and breathing human being, you’ll never be able to do that. Not completely. Even the worst numbness or emotional lock-down breaks eventually, as I can confirm. I worked so hard for years and years to steel the soft parts of me – the vulnerable parts that I taught myself to loathe – that I no longer had to work at it: it simply became natural. Now I have to deal with that hardness, that resistance, on top of the pain that it (usually) covers. It’s exhausting and, I’ll admit it here, totally ineffectual.

No matter how hard I wish it, those parts of me are not dead and they never will be. All they are is incredibly dangerous because I’ve starved and beaten them until they are constantly fighting to escape and run wild.

One of my icons is Johnny Cash, and every time I hit a black hole, I think of his heart-rending cover of the Nick Lowe song, ‘The Beast in Me’:

The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day
And by night rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me.

I don’t feel unique in being able to relate to it, but I don’t feel comforted by any sense of community about it either. The very nature of that beast is that it is a solitary creature and not even the shared experience of it brings any positivity, any knowledge, understanding, insight or connection with others.

Or does it?

I don’t know right now.

I dragged myself out of bed, unshowered, pyjama’d and gross, to write this – to do something. That’s more than has resulted from most of my black holes. But it hardly counts as any kind of revelation?

-Cat Earnshaw

*No copyright infringement intended, Muse.

Why ‘half’ of a soul?

The title of this blog comes from one of the strongest features defining borderline personality disorder: gut-wrenching, heart-gouging loneliness/emptiness.

BPD, as I’ve mentioned, has many, many different features and forms, which is part of what makes it so complicated to deal with; but one uniting and dominant factor of the disorder is a constant or intense feeling of “No one understands” or “No one cares.” You can see why many people dismiss BPD as ‘childish’ or as normal teenage angst. Everyone feels those horrible moments of despair and isolation, and most people will only allow themselves to feel them during adolescence – i.e., before the adult reflex has set in that silences those feelings as pointless or weak. Unfortunately, in our (western/developed) world, there is a definite tendency now towards associating intelligence, or maturity, or general ‘adulthood’ with the dismissive, the critical, the overwhelmingly black perspective. That means those who voice feelings of loneliness, depression or emptiness will definitely meet with plenty of responses along the lines of “no one fucking cares, get over it.” Particularly in the online forum, where no one is accountable for the idiotic and hurtful things they can anonymously get out of their system.

Argh.

Anyway, having BPD can feel just like the title says: having only half of a soul. You don’t feel normal or complete. You see everyone else as these functional, whole entities and yourself as some hack-job desperately trying to cover the parts that are missing. The endless quest is for someone to flesh out those missing parts of our psyches – someone who is willing to join us in an extremely destructive and unsustainable relationship that tries to make one person out of two very damaged ones. Pretty bad math, but it makes sense to the BPDer – at least, emotional/short-term sense.

I will post a lot more on this concept and why I think it has developed (and over-developed) in those with borderline personality disorder. But for now, I just wanted to take a moment out of my rather crappy, lonely day to reflect on this fact, which I totally lose sight of at my worst times:

I am a complete person and a complete soul, even if I don’t feel that way all the time. No one can finish or complete me: I am my own remedy and my own reward. I can choose to hold or let go of other people and other things, but I cannot be them and they cannot be me. Even when I am alone, there is a whole world of life, imagination, possibility, strength and wisdom contained in my being. Like a tiny pebble in the ebb and flow of the world’s oceans, I may be carried to places I don’t recognize, and my surface may be changed or damaged – but my essence and identity remain the same through the ages.

If those words help someone having a moment of crushing isolation, please take a moment to let me know – even if it’s just so I know I’m not the only one who needs to hear them sometimes.

BPD: What the Diagnosis Meant to Me

Without intending to be dismissive to any one of these conditions, if depression, alcoholism, anorexia or self-harm can be considered a “can of worms” to deal with, borderline personality disorder (BPD) is like a whole swamp of worms – many of which you’re not even sure ARE worms but you are sure as hell they’re all trying to get a good grip on your neck and strangle you. BPD is one of the most controversial and difficult diagnoses you can receive, and if you’ve recently received it, it can feel like a death sentence – particularly when many health professionals themselves view it as some sort of toxic substance. That’s why I thought I’d start with this post regarding receiving the diagnosis, rather than attempting to define or really go into detail about the disorder itself – it’s just too complicated and I’m pretty confused myself as to what it is, what causes it, etc. But in the meantime, if you’d like a rough definition/list of symptoms to see if you identify, see here.

So. The diagnosis.

First and foremost: I can’t recommend strongly enough that anyone who receives this diagnosis get a second (and/or third, fourth, etc.) opinion, if possible. For obvious reasons, mental health care is, in general, extremely complicated and misdiagnosis is rampant. Doing a bunch of research online might lead you to your own conclusions, but getting at least a couple medical opinions is essential – otherwise you can literally spend years ‘treating’ the wrong illness, which is frustrating and pointless. If both you and your doctor(s) feel BPD is a pretty clear-cut answer in your case, consider the fact that millions of people go undiagnosed or refuse to acknowledge the diagnosis: by pinpointing and facing the problem, you’re already about a hundred steps ahead of that… so take heart (seriously).

In the vast majority of cases, BPD (like so many disorders) overlaps with a ton of other mental disorders and diseases: depression, bulimia, anorexia, anxiety, bipolar disorder, PTSD and many personality disorders like narcissistic personality disorder, multiple personality disorder, etc. For some people, BPD is the nexus of all of these problems and a very useful way to address many, many different issues; for others, certain criteria of BPD just don’t fit, in which case further research should be undertaken before settling on a treatment.

For me, “getting the diagnosis” was mostly a self-driven process. I am still kind of angry and hurt that the healthcare system in my country took almost two years to take my textbook symptoms and turn them into something concrete – which is especially odd given that I am what one could call “classic” BPD: I fit just about every single criteria of it and every single criteria fits me. Is it possible someone with extensive education and experience in mental health could have maybe realized/mentioned that before, in total desperation, I stumbled across it myself on the Internet? Hmph.

ANYway, yes, when I put forth the idea to my therapist at the time, she leapt on it – “Oh I’m SO GLAD you think so; I didn’t want to say it but that’s what I’ve suspected all along.” When I rather testily asked why she couldn’t have given me some clues as to what she had so long “suspected”, she replied matter-of-factly, “Well no one wants to give or get that diagnosis. It’s a last resort. I mean 1 in 10 BPD patients ultimately kill themselves.” WOWZERS what a fun fact to open with.

So right off the bat, I had some rather horrendous associations with BPD. For months I sought out a therapist who would diagnosis me as something – anything – else, and then I decided I didn’t want to think about mental health at all because everything seemed pointless and everyone I talked to seemed useless, so I gave up that too. I didn’t want to admit I had it, and I didn’t want to look into it let alone treat it. It sounded horrible, and the gist of it seemed to be (based on the oh-so-objective and informative Internet world) BPD = childish, whiny, self-centred brat who likes to pretend they have “real” mental problems (more later on why this perception is so rampant – hint: BPDers can hurt people who love them. Badly. There are a LOT of anger-filled people who have been left in the wake of a destructive BPDer and a lot of them love venting on the Internet so take care what you read.). Which is exactly what I felt like so that really just completed a cycle of feeling lower and lower: feel whiny and pointless, attempt to address it, realize many people think you ARE whiny and pointless, feel more whiny and pointless… etc. etc.

So the BPD diagnosis was hard enough to hear, but accepting it was yet another hurdle. Admitting that you have any kind of mental disorder/disease is awful. I felt: a) Guilty, like I didn’t ‘deserve’ to have a problem (everything is fine! I live in a first-world country! I’ve never been raped or abused or starved or beaten, how dare I have the gall to be unhappy?); b) Angry, like it was completely unfair and ridiculous that I should have something so wrong with me; c) Terrified, like I was one step away from the kind of full-on crazy person who people throw change at and look at with something between pity and disgust; d) Isolated, suddenly branded and removed from the herd, cut off from all of the lucky people who get to think of mental patients as totally foreign and something to write horror movies about; and more than anything, e) Utterly bewildered. How could this have happened? This couldn’t happen to someone like me. I was a classic overachiever who had (or liked to think I had) everything together. I had three post-grad degrees, including a masters’ from one of the top schools in the world. I had a big family, dozens of friends, plenty of extra-curricular activities. I’d had boyfriends and best friends and lots of good jobs. I had no problems that anyone would consider out of the ordinary – how could I possibly be this fucked up all of a sudden?

Of course it wasn’t that I was actually fucked up “all of a sudden.” I didn’t like to think about it at first, but behind all the resistance and negative inner reactions listed above, a tiny part of me was actually so relieved to find out YES there was something seriously wrong with me and it had a name. There were certain aspects of my life – aspects I’d always convinced myself were just little things or not that important – that were screamingly wrong, but I’d always downplayed them as “difficulties” or normalized them as “angst” rather than mental problems: relationship difficulties, anger difficulties, self-harm and eating difficulties, drinking and drug difficulties, klepto (petty theft) difficulties, lying difficulties…. suddenly all these “difficulties” rushed to the forefront and gathered under one big bad banner to confront me: BPD. It was terrifying. Well I say was, but it’s more like is. I shouldn’t pretend any of this is past-tense for me, even if I’m writing in the past tense for clarity’s sake. I only got this diagnosis about 6 months ago and I’m still considered to be in the very early stages of treatment. Argh.

I’d like to wrap up this post on a positive note, but the truth is, there’s not a lot of point to ending on a positive note just for the sake of seeming positive. I’d rather this blog be something real, something that others with BPD can read and go “yes, my GOD, yes, I’ve felt exactly like that” than be falsely optimistic. Sometimes I feel optimistic, don’t get me wrong. But most of the time I really really don’t. And that’s one of the many things that dealing with this involves. If I were to aim for an optimistic conclusion, I’d point out that I’ve been experiencing severe and extensive symptoms of BPD for about 25 of my 30 years on earth – and I’m still here. And I still have the drive, some days, to do things like start a blog about it in the hopes of helping/comforting someone, somewhere, at some point (perhaps that someone could even be myself in the process). Does that count as hopeful?

More soon….

Cat Earnshaw

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