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Her word for the environment that cultivates our disorder is “invalidating.” She doesn’t use the term “abuse” or even “neglect,” but “invalidation” to describe how a vulnerable child’s inner experiences—thoughts, emotions, sensations, and beliefs—are either disregarded, denied, erratically responded to, punished, or oversimplified by caretakers and nurturers. There is a “nonattunement” of response in the family (or school, or even culture) that ends up aggravating a basic biological vulnerability. According to Dr. Linehan (1993a), invalidating environments put a premium on controlling or
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Every experience of invalidation compounds the intensity and dysregulation of our emotion, and feelings of abandonment, isolation, and shame increase. Because we don’t know how to manage the feelings, our behaviors grow ever more destructive and desperate, which results in more invalidation and blame. The end result is a person with all of the BPD symptoms who has learned to expertly invalidate herself.
“Despite how horrible they feel or how much trouble they seem to cause, they do important things for us: They communicate. They motivate. They self-validate. They give our lives richness and meaning.” As the season turns, I try to find meaning in my intense loneliness without concluding that I’m a pathetic loser.
“Barn’s burnt down… Now I can see the moon.”
I want, I want, I want… I want a connection with someone, anyone.
Being alone is torture, but so is being close to others, needing them, having them.
If I didn’t have this unusual patchwork of support, I’d be clinging to the first person who looked at me kindly, and sucking them under in no time.
The question now is, can one of those eggs be a lover, and can I stop making such a mess that eggshells end up all over the floor?
From here, I’m able to see how my fears compete against each other: fear that if anything changes, I’ll fall again, and fear that this sprawling, empty loneliness will destroy me just as easily.
Contrary to folklore, it’s the easiest way to a man’s heart.
Putting yourself out there isn’t easy in the best of circumstances, let alone when you have a personal history that reads like Go Ask Alice and a diagnosis that makes grown men run for their lives.
the patience and determination to work with broken things, and that’s to my benefit. I need a certain kind of person to grow intimate with: someone who doesn’t view my vulnerabilities as weaknesses; someone who can remain calm in the face of my upsets; someone whose own world and sense of self is strong enough to withstand the storms that will pass through it as I learn to trust.
He is spatial to my relational, cool blue to my burning red, earth and rock to my hailstorms and hurricanes.
“When I start to get agitated, it helps me the most if you can stay calm, and for you to pay attention to me when I feel unmoored and alone. And instead of trying to convince me I’m being paranoid, just help me ride out the storm, then I’ll be able to think straight again.”
The funny thing about awareness, though, is that you can know and acknowledge a problem and yet still make the same mistakes over and over.
It’s a symptom and also a wound, a pus-filled, festering wound in my core that opens like a night-blooming flower and unleashes a toxic scent. This is the emotional experiencing I try to avoid at all costs.
After a lifetime of being an escape artist, I finally understand that the only way out is through.
In my world, you do things right or not at all. Or you practice for long hours alone in front of the mirror and only emerge once you’ve achieved perfection.
And so I need to understand: How can I be healthy and functional in so many ways, and yet still be on the edge, without a self?
Like I’m a cripple without a wheelchair, and everyone keeps signing me up for marathons, then shaming me for not winning the race.”
Let yourself be baffled and stop trying to make things work.”
I’ve begun making life maps in my journal, diagramming all of the people, places, and activities that I have relationships with. I draw little houses, motorcycles, and stick figures and draw connections to show the networks that are evolving.
as soon as I feel like she’s ignoring me, I get so angry that I want to destroy the relationship.
I begin to understand that my progress and stability aren’t just because of my management of my BPD symptoms. It’s as much due to the environment, again confirming Linehan’s idea that the disorder is created, and can be dismantled, in the context of relationships (1993a).
struggling to figure out how to cross that chasm from symptoms into normalcy, from patient to person. Both of us are reestablishing connections to the world and finding our place in it after decades of alienation, displacement, helplessness, and failure.
“Each new challenge,” Dr. Crabtree comments, “brings with it another destabilization and potential loss. And so as you get ‘better,’ there’s an ongoing need for more support, not less.”
Success and progress would seem to be a good thing, but they can rip the ground away. This takes many forms: being discharged from a program; losing the empathy of others because they now believe we should be over it; and even—or maybe especially—invalidating and berating ourselves because we insist that we should be cured.
More than ever, I’m realizing it takes a village to help a borderline.
To drink from the source of someone else’s presence, no matter how sour it may eventually taste, creates a temporary sense of self.
It’s like a drug or sex binge. I come off of every run more depleted, even though my intention is to create more connection, to belong more deeply.
I’m devastated and ashamed. And depending on the moment, I’ll go from thinking this woman is the biggest bitch in the world to thinking I’m entirely broken when it comes to making a single friend.
many of the same principles underlie both: dialectics, interdependence, constant change, impermanence, understanding the nature of cause and effect.
I have learned to reduce my pain and misery. I still suffer, but in many ways my suffering is similar to that of everyone else.
The pathway to this worthwhile but seemingly impossible goal is simply to practice diligently until it happens.
Rinpoche nods. “We say that the Buddha is like a doctor, and the Dharma is the medicine. The people of the Sangha are like nurses, there to help you whenever you need it.”
You believe in permanence when there is none; grasp at a solid self although there isn’t one.
“Right now,” Rinpoche concludes, “you have the right motivation but need proper guidance. It’s like you’ve been holding a very hot cup of tea and burning your fingers. Buddhist practice will give you a handle. Eventually you’ll know exactly what is needed, at every moment, because you will have the clarity of your innate intelligence. Your compassion, too, can be infinite, because it won’t be conditional. You will have true freedom.”
It was like a spiritual hit-and-run: I felt the ground lurch from under me even as I floated half off it on the fumes of his presence.
Even though successes are seemingly the building blocks of progress, they also upset the balance, and that makes you more vulnerable. I believe this is happening now.
How do you shut up your Buddhist part? You focus obsessively on everything concrete, never allowing a pause in the ticker tape of thoughts running through your head, jumping from one activity to another, and numbing yourself with TV and sleep. In the daytime, this works pretty well, but at night I freak out. I wake up feeling like there’s a cat smothering my face.
“Sometimes love isn’t enough.”
Ethan suggests that my difficulty with ambivalence—my own and Taylor’s—propels these swings in perspective.
“I accept this pain. I believe it will pass.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it makes sense. Breakups devastate most people; maybe there would be something wrong with you if they didn’t. And a lot of people lose their shit even more than I am right now. But what most of them don’t have is twenty years of illness just waiting to be reactivated.
“Because you don’t do well alone,” he says. “Even I know that. And of all the places to be, a group of Buddhists is probably as good as it gets. At least you won’t have to worry so much about the dishes getting done.”
Buddhism describes the causes of suffering as rooted in the “three poisons”—attachment, aversion, and ignorance—and from my years in therapy I’ve learned that my attachments, self-hatred, and cognitive distortions are among the greatest causes of my distress.
If someone throws a brick at you, it’s an opportunity to practice compassion—to realize that the other person is generating bad karma and therefore doing more harm to himself or herself than to you, or so the reasoning goes.
Not that it’s pretty, but that’s what’s so powerful about the practice: recognizing how even poison is a form of medicine when used the right way.
I want freedom from desire. I want sex. I want to do no harm. I want a big fat steak.
I’m not able to tap into compassion for others because I lack it for myself.
