This is what it feels like looking back – on love (‘love’) through the lens of borderline personality disorder…
Like the only air in the room came from between your lips.
Like every cell in my body had hands that were reaching for yours.
Like nothing would be okay until I knew we were breathing our final breaths together – only then would I know that you cared enough.
No love without death.
The darkest of fantasies, played out in the daylight. Ugly from every angle but one.
How could I have called it love? Or was it? Maybe I was right to use the word. Though now, all it reeks of is obsession. Desperation. Fear. Breathless and dark and smothering.
It felt like I could take all the blows life could lay on me – as long as it was you giving them to me.
He hit me and it felt like a kiss.
And now.
What a load of fucking bullshit.
He hit me and it felt like… he hit me.
And the darkness didn’t make it real. It just made it dark.
And the love/hate didn’t make it romantic. It made it exhausting.
And the games didn’t make it fun. They made it petty and cheap.
And our whole culture keeps buying into it. Love hurts. Love scars. Love wounds and mars.
Love does not hurt. Love does not scar.
Love feels like the rock beneath your bare feet.
Like the roots of the lone tree still standing after the storm.
Like spring’s buds reaching for sunshine after an endless winter.
Light that may be covered but never goes out. Not really.
Love builds and stretches towards the sky, ever higher.
That’s love. And you and I never had it. Thank you for showing me what I need and what I don’t.
Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.
You’ve been stony for too many years. Try something different.
Surrender.
-Rumi
I know chances are that I don’t even have to say/explain this if you’re reading it, but BPD has pretty much made me very anti-love for the majority of my life. As in I hated relationships, hated affection, hated intimacy, hate hate hate it. All of it smacked way too much of all kinds of things that frightened the hell out of me, from trusting and relying on someone, to experiencing actual happiness or warmth.
Again, this would probably seem so bizarre to most non-borderlines, and yet I’m assuming its totally “normal” and intuitive behaviour for you if you’re bothering to read this. Anything wonderful, especially love, can be snatched away so easily, lost so quickly for the borderline, that to have those things is to be in constant state of terror about when the good feelings will disappear and the darkness will flood back in, stronger and darker than ever.
But in line with my recent post on actively working to capture and internalize good memories (since we’ve certainly got no problem internalizing the opposite), I wanted to go out on a limb here and describe something that I hope brings even a little bit of good to someone else’s day, the way it brought a smile to mine.
The new relationship I’ve started has moved fast – too fast (a part of me would argue) – and its really scary. I try to slow it down, reign it in, keep the brakes on, but in reality I am just more and more blown away each day by how wonderful this guy is. It’s crazy how much I want this to work – not just “work” in a BPD way (read: you play the hero, I play the victim, and you save/care for me every minute of your life), but really work in a full-on adult relationship kind of way, which would be totally new territory for me.
Recently, a subject came up between us that really triggered me. My instinct was just to get out of the conversation. I started to get upset, which for me, means I started to dissociate and “leave” the scene even before I managed to mumble that I was actually leaving the scene. But he told me to stay and held my hand and just kept saying the kinds of things that I couldn’t believe someone without advanced therapy training would EVER think to say. Things like: you’re so strong; you can change this; you’re not alone; you’re here now and I won’t let anything bad happen to you. Without pushing at all for more information he made me feel understood. Without playing the parental or hero role he made me feel cared for. Without any professional training he made me feel better in my worst moments than any mental healthcare professional has.
Then he said there was something he wanted to show me and he went and got a small, flawless black beach pebble to give me. In disbelief I heard him start to explain how he kept it on his dresser where he could look at it as a reminder to stay focused entirely on the detail of the moment, and not drown in worry or regret. It was mindfulness from someone who (to the best of my knowledge) had never heard of “mindfulness,” didn’t know anything about the years of therapy I’d had in the concept, couldn’t imagine how much what they were saying resonated with me. Even more astonishingly, this is someone I would have seen as thoroughly “normal” while I was firmly in the “crazy” camp. Funny the lines our minds draw, and how false and misleading they can be. When I told him I would have seen him as the last person who needed to work at staying mindful or positive, he said, “I think I work a lot harder at it than you think I do.” Huh.
There are people out there who are going to understand. They’re not perfect, and my BPD really really wants them to discount them for that. But they do exist. Kind of terrifying. And kind of amazing.
Although I remain extremely cautious about jumping into this whole love thing headfirst, I am willing to step into the water. I’m hoping with everything I have that it turns out to be as good as I think it will be.
Cat xxxx
EDIT: To anyone reading this now (over three years since I wrote it), I just thought I’d include a note to say that this man and I have now been married nearly 8 months. For real. I’m not going to lie and say everything is ‘happily ever after’ all the time, because it’s not. We’ve had (and continue to have) a few difficulties, and a lot of them have to do with my BPD-esque background/ingrained behaviours, but… a lot of them don’t. I might be the only newlywed who feels excited when we have a stupid fight, because guess what? THEY DON’T END WITH ME WANTING TO DIE. We may fight, we may say hurtful things, but then we say that we’re hurt, and we apologize and make up. AND IT’S WORKING. When I look back on some of these posts, I realize why I feel so excited about those “dumb fight” moments. They are proof that I have changed. A lot. In a way that makes me feel happy and strong and hopeful (not fake, empty or “different” like I once feared). And if I can change THAT much, trust me—anyone can. ❤
So often I think the key to living life with BPD is to just untangle (or avoid) as many messes as possible. If I avoid so-and-so, if I don’t talk to what’s-his-face, if I move and change jobs and ignore my family, etc. etc. THEN I’ll never turn into crazy BPD person. How many times have you had the “I’ll change my name and move to another country and re-create myself” fantasy? How about the one where you go live in a cabin in the woods and commit to being a full-on hermit? They’re some of my favourite fantasies when I just feel like my life is too fucked up to fix and I can’t face it anymore.
The truth is that life just is a bit of a mess and it always will be. If it’s not, chances are you’re not really living. When I think back to times that everything has gone as smoothly as I could possibly make it go, they were really boring times. Really boring. No deep relationships. Lots of boring work of some kind or another. No important responsibilities or goals or happiness or despair. Just smooth going. Those times pretty much fell under “subsisting” rather than living.
I know it’s obvious that the “cure” for BPD is to learn how to face these tangles in life, not avoid them. But I at least want the control of choosing when I’m going to come across a tangle, and of course I don’t even have that option.
Right now I really do my best to avoid “drama” – I mean unnecessary crap that involves gossip or fights or whatever. But regardless, some stuff comes up that just makes me feel about 14 years old and want to shut out everyone all over again rather than be dragged into the messiness that is normal life.
One of my closest female friends has had a torch for this guy for several years. As of this week, he has declared a bit of a torch for yours truly (?!). Now this is just classic. Welcome to my life. I try to get on my own two feet, have therapy, be okay, hold down a job and whatnot, and interpersonal stuff just flies up in my face being like, “ha HA, you thought you outgrew it, didn’t you??”
a) I am terrified because I actually sort of kind of think I like this guy back and I swore I’d never date anyone again after my disaster relationship five years ago (gahhhhh but he is so sweet and cute, you don’t even know *becomes giggly child about this*). b) I am terrified of losing this friend or hurting her; I really care about her and her friendship and I don’t think I can handle being rejected by her over this guy. c) This whole stupid roommate situation is STILL ongoing, which means I’m living at my parents’ place (!?) and feel like an out-of-control, unstable teenager already.
So. Messy. So. Frustrating.
What do you guys think? Do you try to avoid drama as a rule, or do you embrace it and find that you grow through these experiences?
This is an article I came across on a great site called Tiny Buddha – some of you may already be familiar with it and for all I know, I’m way behind the game when it comes to loving it?? Anyway, it’s a fantastic site. If I had one complaint about it, it’d be that it can be a bit formulaic/all the posts and writers are incredibly similar in terms of age, race, background, experiences, etc. But that’s my cynical/bitter side talking so don’t put too much stock in it.
Although this article pertains to relationships and expectations in general, it is REALLY pertinent to those of us with BPD. I am finding one of the most difficult things about this disorder to be my “normal” expectations (normal to me, absolutely ridiculous/unhealthy/irrational to everyone else) with respect to those close to me. Some things about this article made me think, “Yeah right, easier said than done,” and others made me think, “Hmm I should give that a try.”
It’s sad that mental illness can be a source of division rather than unity even among families.
Today started as one of those “wake up in the middle of the night and start thinking and never get back to sleep” mornings. Never the best of beginnings. Dream life, and the consciousness that lies right on the fence between waking and sleeping, is such a mystery. Sometimes you dream about things that you thought were long “sorted” and then realize a part of you which you don’t even really know about is working through stuff on a full-time, under-the-table basis. When I first started therapy, I was terrified that it would immediately involve being forced to meet my subconscious self. That’s someone I really didn’t want to get to know any better. Not because she’s necessarily evil or nuts, though she may well be (and often seems to be), but because I can always sense that she is there, dangerously hurt, out of my control, feeling everything a thousand times stronger and deeper than I can stand to think about. For so long, I kept funnelling every emotion I couldn’t handle straight through to her, closing my eyes and plugging my ears as it went past my conscious self. All gone. All better. Oh wait, except not at all. Unsurprisingly, deep and essential parts of yourself become a festering dumping ground when you use this method, a sewer of unpleasant feelings. And when the sewer starts backing up, you’re forced to pay attention.
Which brings us back to now.
At about 5 a.m., I found myself instantly transported from zzzzzz to grrrrrr without knowing why for a full 10 seconds or so. Processing, processing, processing…. oh yeah, that family argument when I wish I’d said that and then I didn’t and now I can’t let it go. WHY am I thinking about it now? Why was I feeling it before I even knew what I was thinking about?
I still have an okay relationship with my family. Which is to say, to all appearances, I have a great relationship with every member of my immediate family. In reality, it usually seems we have terrible, if not non-existent ‘relationships’ in our family. Anyone know what I mean? Based on the fact that BPD seems to have a very typical “breeding ground,” I’m guess I’m not the only one with this kind of background: everything’s normal on the surface, but growing up you often felt things that were terrifying, confusing, painful and horrible, and no one said a fucking word about it. Even when all of it started to manifest as “bad” behaviour that made you feel ashamed and had your parents wondering what on earth was suddenly (“suddenly”) going on with your wacky adolescent self, no one did anything – least of all the caring or validating thing. Emotions were understood through a lens of judgment, criticism and an emphasis on rigid self-control. Real understanding, caring, compassion, or emotional honesty were in seriously short supply. Sound familiar? It was my first two decades in a nutshell.
I used to (and periodically still do) get so frustrated with myself and ashamed of my pain because technically, nothing “that bad” had happened to me. Nothing – at least nothing that I can remember – fit the stereotypical bad childhood that would have allowed me, and others, to easily explain my emotions and resulting behaviour. I was never beaten, mistreated or abused in any of the widely recognized ways. My parents weren’t alcoholics or drug addicts, we weren’t poor, and we were never harshly punished.
It’s only recently that I am able to start the slow processing of teaching myself what I now know to be true: Providing basic – or even perfect – physical care for a child is not enough. If our western society is proof of anything, it’s that. How many well-off suburban kids, raised in a (relative) lap of luxury, routinely grow up to struggle with severe mental illness of one kind or another? All the physical care in the world does not make up for the crucial things that our culture now lacks: authentic emotional health and expression; real community; compassion and validation on a regular basis; genuine caring relationships that we know will always be there for us. The number of people I know who were raised in such an environment could be counted on one hand; you’ll spot them right away because they’re happy, well-adjusted, in great relationships and very successful in some way.
Anyway, rather than go off on a tangent/rant about all that, I’ll stick to the point: my family is terrified of emotions. So much so that even when my life was completely off the rails and I was covered in cuts and severely underweight, nobody said a word. I pulled out all my eyebrows and eyelashes; I got caught shoplifting. Nobody said a word other than, “Don’t do that.” Nobody suggested therapy. Nobody asked what was wrong. Nobody. No screaming fights in my family. No “I love you” either. No crying, no comforting, no admitting that you’re actually having a really, really awful day.
I am the product of this environment, clearly. I have internalized every one of these lessons until emotions are scary, uncomfortable, foreign. I don’t like to be around people who are crying or upset – so you can imagine how group therapy is for me. I hate raising emotions in myself because I have a grand total of zero skills for dealing with them. I don’t know how to exorcise or express them healthily, and I’ve long preferred numbness as opposed to the only other coping tool I adopted for handling them, which was self-destruction of just about any kind. I see my problems and my hurts as constantly in need of someone else’s care and attention, but I believe I’ll never really have it since people don’t care and can’t be trusted to do so.
I honestly would not wish BPD on my worst enemy.
So anyway, I wake up last night thinking of a number of choice remarks exchanged between my dad and my (now adult) brother the other day. No need to infuriate everyone else with them, but suffice it to say they were to the effect of “trauma and mental illness are stupid figments of the imagination and people just feign them to get attention” along with some bullshit about how the government is too liberal in funding their treatment. Offensive, as well as WAY too close to home for me to take it any way other than personally.
Now I know my family and I will never see eye-to-eye on politics and/or religion. That’s just the way it is and always will be, and I honestly don’t think it would matter – if there was a foundation of basic respect and validation going on. I’m willing to accept that you can’t just dismiss someone based on generalizations about the beliefs they subscribe to. Do I get the same basic courtesy? No. Do I say a fucking word about it even though I’m seething? No. I sit there and pretend I can’t hear it. I sit there and pretend I’m numb to the raging anger, injustice, hurt and indignation that are coursing through me.
Old habits die hard, eh?
As a result, I’m the one who gets to wake up in the middle of the night, twisted and tight with rage without understanding why.
All of my unresolved hurts from this environment mean that every time I feel hurt again – at all – by any member of my family now, I tap into a deep well of pain and anger that I’ve been filling for years and years now. I don’t know what to do with it. Any of it. As I see it, the options are:
Ignore it
Run from it
Drag it up
Ignoring it doesn’t work. Duh. It’s a strategy I’ve employed, unsuccessfully, for the vast majority of my life and I think it would ultimately prove just as fruitless as it did for my parents, and their parents before them, and probably their parents before them, etc. etc. I have no interest in alternately suppressing my emotions and (rarely) releasing them in passive-aggressive, indirect ways that achieve nothing.
Running from it always seemed like the best option to me. Until I did it. For three years I lived overseas and enjoyed an overwhelming sensation of freedom and possibility. Family by phone/email, just how I like them. The odd visit, sure, I can handle that. But the big things were still ingrained in me. They weren’t resolved and they fucked up everything in the end. My closest relationships destroyed, my life choices terrible, my pain still handled in self-destructive ways that didn’t work.
Dragging it up is the only option I’ve never tried. Mostly because it’s the scariest. By far. But also (and maybe I’m just saying this to give myself an excuse not to tackle it), I think it would be more harmful than helpful. Sure it might be initially cathartic for me – but I really don’t see my emotionally-stunted family dealing very well with a full-blown attack based on things they probably don’t even remember doing. I foresee plenty of defensiveness (“How can you be so ungrateful!”), dismissiveness (“You’re exaggerating, it was never that bad; you’re being too sensitive”), and ultimately, just more pain as a result of opening up/having emotions, which is a lesson I really don’t need to learn anymore.
My parents had a favourite phrase to be sarcastically deployed while we were growing up: “Tell it to your therapist.” The way they used it was meant to imply, “You’re being silly and I’m not going to take your whining seriously.” What it actually implied was everything their actions/behaviour primarily supported: “Stop talking about your problems because I don’t care, even though I actually do realize I’m being the kind of parent right now that ends up with kids in need of therapy.”
“But you don’t let us watch the Simpsons and Kevin’s mom does!”
Oh go tell it to your therapist.
“You didn’t pick me up and I had to walk a whole block!”
Tell it to your therapist.
“I can’t stop hurting myself and I’m living on a few pieces of fruit a week.”
Tell it to your therapist. Except I never actually said that one because I was too afraid that that would be the answer.
Every time I think of all the times my parents would say that stupid fucking phrase, I want to puke/cry with rage and with how pathetic it all is. It hurts worse because I don’t actually want to break all ties with my family forever – I still care about them. And I can’t just write my parents off as bad parents either, contrary to how this all sounds. The saddest part of all of this is how hard (potentially impossible?) it is to break generations of this kind of parenting. Raise your kids to be uncomfortable with emotions, to hate the side of themselves that feels, and they will not be able to help themselves raising their kids the same way. Talk about leaving a legacy.
I think for many of us, when we seek help with the problems that have plagued our families and environments, we are actually taking on a much harder task than anticipated because it’s not just about fixing one person. We’re trying to break a whole chain of empty, miserable people rather than be just another link. Often, we are still right in the midst of those chains, and cutting ties with them entirely simply isn’t an option. I don’t think about having my own family very often yet, but I hope that if I ever decide to, I will NOT allow myself to be a mother until I am certain that I have broken that chain. If I can’t handle emotions – first and foremost, my own – then I really don’t stand a chance of doing much better than my parents. I can understand that, in theory, but it doesn’t make the anger any less powerful when the same hurtful shit keeps coming up…
My therapy journey, recovering from Borderline Personality Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I write for welldoing.org , for Planet Mindful magazine, and for Muse Magazine Australia, under the name Clara Bridges. Listed in Top Ten Resources for BPD in 2016 by goodtherapy.org.
Half of a Soul - Life with BPD 