The Buddha and the Borderline: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating

by Kiera Van Gelder

What do I recover? With drug addiction, you hear that you can recover and reclaim your former self, the person you were before you started using. With other psychiatric illnesses, getting rid of symptoms means you’re more or less back to “yourself.” But what if you simply don’t have a solid self to return to—if the way you are is seen as basically broken?

In fact, Dr. Linehan devised this approach to therapy after discovering that trying to help people with BPD could be like pouring salt in a wound. We can’t tolerate criticism and judgment. For us, therapy’s constant emphasis on “fixing ourselves” and the pressure to change is like pushing someone whose back is already against the wall—a wall full of spikes. When the focus is solely on change, we tend to flee therapy or stay very angry and defensive. On the other hand, too much unconditional acceptance by the therapist can keep us stuck. In either case, we often get worse. So Dr. Linehan took an approach that no one else seemed to have considered. While her psychiatric training was in cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses on changing problematic thoughts, feelings, and actions, her personal experience with Zen Buddhism taught her that compassion, nonjudgment, and mindfulness can normalize our experience and help us trust and accept ourselves.

But nothing came to mind. And inside that “nothing” lives something awful: a falling through black, blank space with my insides on fire. I knew I needed distance between myself and my feelings so I could observe, but just being with my feelings was like being possessed. I didn’t need mindfulness; I needed an exorcism. Perhaps a minute passed, maybe five. The possession was in full swing. I don’t think I’m doing this right, whispered a part of me. Another part began a familiar litany: Nothing is working. I can’t stand this. I am so fucked-up. I can’t even sit for one minute without falling apart.

And perhaps not surprisingly, I grew more mindful as the slow rhythm of bloodletting rinsed me with clarity. It wasn’t dramatic; it was familiar and reassuring. I was all business, making sure not to press too deep. I etched the lines in orderly rows, and after I was done, I swiped with alcohol, blotted the skin, and applied gauze. When Bennet and Alexis returned late that night, I was in much better shape—and wearing a long-sleeved shirt to bed.

DBT describes people as having essentially three states of mind: emotion mind, reason mind, and wise mind.

I think the hardest aspect of understanding wise mind is believing that something exists within me that’s actually reliable. Where inside me is this wisdom? How do I access this calm, intuitive, go-with-the-flow awareness?

She says that people with BPD are like emotional burn victims: We’ve lost all of our protective skin (Linehan 1993a).

Someone in the group mentioned “urge surfing,” a DBT technique for learning how to ride out each feeling and impulse rather than habitually escaping it though various modes of self-destruction.

this idea could really help me

I can just as easily flee from a relationship as I can get lost in one. I definitely need to learn how to negotiate rather than cutting and running when trouble develops. However, I’m beginning to understand that I also stay in relationships that are beyond negotiation, that I stay trapped and hopeless, because I’m too afraid to be on my own—because there’s nothing else in my life to hold on to.

I don’t know which is worse, the pain of presence or the pain of absence.

“Do you want to be with me because you love me,” he asks, “or because you can’t stand being with yourself?”

But it feels like time is standing still. Why is it that the more pain you feel, the slower the seconds tick by?

Is my pain really that much greater, or am I just weaker?

It says that in comparison to people with other personality disorders, borderlines experience greater levels of worthlessness, anger, abandonment, and hopelessness—that more than others, we feel like bad, damaged children, shunned by the world, and better off dead (Zanarini et al. 1998).

We’re emotional epileptics, thrown from one fit of horrible suffering to another.

Poisoned by what’s inside us, and vulnerable to anything outside us. I’ve spent my life chasing relief from this pain, only to find myself more deeply mired in it. How can it be that after all of this work, killing myself once again seems like the only option left?

How you think affects how you feel and behave.” At first this sounds like a new age platitude: Think good thoughts and all will be well! But when Susan takes us through an exercise showing how a thought like “I’m fat” can lead to a behavior like starving oneself, the importance of thought grows clearer.

Having no emotional skin leaves me raw and vulnerable to even a feather’s touch. And as my life falls apart, my defenses against these triggers seem to diminish, so that, increasingly, I’m almost always upset.

“The lives of suicidal, borderline individuals are unbearable as they are currently being lived”

While my father knows about my situation and keeps his distance, my mother dives into my despair without an oxygen tank, only to surface minutes later, hauling ass for shore. I once had a dream that the two of us were trapped in the wheel of a water mill. We tried desperately to extract ourselves and save each other, but one of us was always dragged under the water, only to emerge and watch helplessly as the other got pulled down.

“The Borderline Chain of Desire.” Here’s how it goes: Connection. Disconnection. Craving. Despair. Self- hatred. Suicidality. Desperate attempt to reconnect. More rejection.

swings in self-perception decorated with music and clothes. I’m a bad-ass and wear latex; I’m a hippie and wear Indian prints. The various parts of me cannot seem to coexist.

He doesn’t berate himself for pain and anger; he howls. And this delights me, even though I feel ashamed when my own rage comes to the surface. My anger doesn’t signify courage; it’s just more confirmation that I’m bad.

Opposing forces battle within me: I want to get better. I want to die. I want to be loved. I want to spit in the face of everyone I see.

If I want to survive, I have to stop turning my energy against myself—stop being the worker bee, the supplicant always feeling helpless and asking for help, the one who desires, unrequited. I have to transform this despair and anger into power.

Many things can happen when you’re in a no-win situation: You can completely fall apart, feeling helpless and victimized. You can run away and hope the world changes. Or you can rise like a fury, go dark, and be the pain—which I’ve done before.

In the transition groups, people talked about “recovery jobs,” and that’s what this is. I tell myself, I’m going to take this job because I have to learn how to be a part of life again. I have to train in managing my feelings and reactions, and not let my distorted thinking and emotions control me.

And all I can think is Fuck you. Fuck you for making me jump back in and telling me I could land on my feet. Fuck you for all your fucking help.

A picture of love is not the same thing as being present and walking through this with me.

“I want you to hold the Buddha whenever you start to feel upset,”

How much of what I feel as neglect has been fueled by the force of my constant need? How much can any person hold another who is perpetually falling?

Then they’ll ask for a suicide history, but they don’t seem to be interested in all those times when a person has been on that edge for hours, days, or weeks; they only want to know about actual attempts. Apparently getting that close and then backing away doesn’t count. But from my side, it’s like racing toward a brick wall in a car and then swerving at the last minute. Afterward there’s adrenaline and relief, but no way to get out of the car, and the compulsion to careen toward the wall comes again and again.

Ultimately rage, not hope, hurls me into recovery when I finally understand that it’s not simply my illness, but incompetence and avoidance from the mental health system that has created my “incurable and hopeless” condition.

Safety. Always a big word in therapy. I have a good idea of what I need to be safe: Give me a place to live where I don’t have to fear leaving my room. Give me a way to make money that doesn’t kill me with anxiety and exhaustion. Give me a lover who isn’t entangled with an ex. Give me a medication doctor who doesn’t make me feel like a lab rat. Give me proof that people with BPD get better. Give me someone who understands.

The bad rap with BPD is seemingly endless. Therapists won’t talk about the diagnosis or disclose it. Insurance companies won’t pay for treatment. And even within a therapy like DBT—which Dr. Linehan developed specifically for BPD—no one mentions it. I still wonder how you get treatment for something unspeakable.

It’s not just my behaviors that make me unsafe; it’s how I experience the world and how I feel I’ve been treated, and how I experience my own emotions and myself.

Cognitive therapists analyzed the perceptions of people with BPD through questionnaires and concluded that we tend to share three basic assumptions: The world is dangerous and malevolent; we are powerless and vulnerable; and we are inherently unacceptable

How much of what I perceive is accurate, and how much is a distortion? Ethan points out that I’m coming up on ten years of sobriety. Certainly that shows I’m able to take care of myself on some level. I agree—and yet I don’t. I am capable—and yet I’m not. Ethan tells me to remember the dialectic. It’s not either-or. My experience right now is “both.” I am an adult and a child; protected and vulnerable.

How do you do that? The borderline mind is trapped in polarity. It needs to be trained to tolerate these multiplicities and ambiguities, but right now I can’t hold two things at once.

Yet all cheerleading and small pieces of evidence aside (Yay! I’ve showered today!), a backward glance at my life reaffirms that I’ve been caught in a cycle of failures and breakdowns for decades. This evidence outweighs everything else. In the dialectic of “I’m helpless” versus “I’m capable,” I need evidence beyond my own life. I need to see that others have moved beyond being stuck in this downward spiral. I need a faith, of sorts, that can create an actual dialectic, because right now, despite my determination to get better, the situation is “I’m fucked” and “I don’t know how to get better.”

Most painful is how everyone (except Ethan) seems to think I just need to get back on the horse that threw me. Phone conversations with both my mother and my father are barely endurable. Both give advice and suggestions without understanding the illness, and I end up defending myself or mindlessly agreeing with them just to end the call.

And that’s one of the things I really hate—hate!—about BPD: that such a small incident can topple my inner composure, causing me to feel so vulnerable and out of control.

Her ability to find promise in opportunity is unyielding, which either bolsters me or negates me, depending on the hour and my mood.

This is so familiar: I run from the “oppressor” and discover that my own presence is just as oppressive.

Am I doing things differently, or is it this office and Renee, nurturing me in a way no job ever has?

Perhaps the difference is that my skills and the environment are finally working together.

This means that many of our “symptoms” can be seen as “behavioral solutions to intolerably painful emotions” (1993a, 149), including cutting, suicide attempts, desperately clinging to others, dissociating, getting high, jumping into bed with strangers. “Anything to stop the pain” might be a good subtitle for BPD.

First, we’re highly sensitive to emotional stimuli (meaning we experience social dynamics, the environment, and our own inner states with an acuteness similar to having exposed nerve endings). Second, we respond more intensely, and much more quickly, than other people. And third, we don’t “come down” from our emotions for a long time. Once the nerves have been touched, the sensations keep peaking. Shock waves of emotion that might pass through others in minutes might keep cresting in us for hours, sometimes days.

As anyone with BPD knows, the charges so often leveled against us include being overly sensitive, overly reactive, and emotionally intense and unpredictable. Luckily, DBT doesn’t present these tendencies as pathologies; it views them as basic biological vulnerabilities. They aren’t symptoms to be cured, but inherent qualities that we haven’t learned to manage.