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February 10 - February 25, 2024
“You want to stop crying.” “I want to stop feeling this way. I just don’t know how much longer I can keep dealing with it.”
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.
Is this wise mind? Other’s might say it’s simply common sense. Maybe, for me, there’s no difference.
“Do you want to be with me because you love me,” he asks, “or because you can’t stand being with yourself?” It’s the last time I call him.
Though I rarely believe in myself, I’ve always believed in saviors. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t given up and am always reshaping myself into an ideal image for my chosen savior.
The world is full of saviors, both professed and unwitting. But so far, no one has saved me, and I continue to feel like I cannot help myself.
But it feels like time is standing still. Why is it that the more pain you feel, the slower the seconds tick by?
That word again, “recovery.” Its meaning is always related to progress: the journey from illness to wellness, from being incapacitated to being effective, reclaiming the parts of yourself buried under problems you’re finally overcoming. This word has been in heavy rotation in my vocabulary for so very long, with the basic assumption that when you hit bottom, you’ll finally admit to having a problem and ask for help. Sometimes people never bottom out—or at least don’t realize they’ve hit bottom.
I’m a “help seeker.” Whenever I hit bottom, I look for some way out.
For some people with BPD, the need to escape is so overwhelming and the pain so intolerable that no thinking or planning happens. They attempt suicide the way crack addicts do crack, habitually and impulsively, using death to alleviate the compulsion and pain. These attempts aren’t necessarily planned. And a lot of times, they’re instantly regretted.
I didn’t know why I did those things; I just felt this immense pressure inside of me and a weight of misery that I couldn’t push away.
On a logical level, I know that everyone feels pain. Everyone suffers. Is my pain really that much greater, or am I just weaker? Where is the line between normal and abnormal emotional suffering?
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
I’m starting to understand why people say that hospitalizing borderlines is a bad idea because we get addicted to the care. Of course we do! We’re watered, fed, and walked, and it is a balm to every aggravated nerve. Plus, for the first time in years I don’t have to put on a public face and pretend that everything is okay.
Bathroom escapes are probably one of my first and most enduring emotion regulation strategies,
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.
I’m on fire again, I tell myself. Just get someplace safe.
can’t believe I’m hearing this; it’s insane! I finally get the BPD diagnosis, and then no one will talk about it and Anna still denies it. I’m told DBT will help me, and now it appears I’m not even getting real DBT. And all along, I’m asked why I’m not getting better—what I’m failing to do. Who can I trust in this process? What if Carol is just as deluded? Does anyone know how to help?
“The Borderline Chain of Desire.” Here’s how it goes: Connection. Disconnection. Craving. Despair. Self- hatred. Suicidality. Desperate attempt to reconnect. More rejection.
if the world is closed to you and all you feel is pain, why keep pretending?
My compulsion to cut has an entirely different motivation—in my world, pain simply relieves another form of pain. In my heart, I don’t want to hurt myself, or anyone else,
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.
while I have family, I don’t have their support. A picture of love is not the same thing as being present and walking through this with me.
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?
we feel misunderstood and think that no one cares about us and that we are bad…damaged children, shunned by the world
When I call my mom and tell her I’m back in the hospital, she exclaims, “What happened?!” “Nothing happened. It was just another day.”
after almost a year of supposed treatment for BPD, my symptoms of inappropriate anger, paranoia under stress, rapidly shifting emotions, and all of the core feelings of being neglected, alone, and helpless aren’t symptoms of the disease anymore; they’re a response to real conditions. I finally realize that a diagnosis of BPD will create a response in the mental health system (and others) that can actually trigger these so-called symptoms, locking you into the borderline criteria. The clinical term for this situation is “iatrogenic,” meaning a treatment that causes more illness.
We’ll begin with my childhood, climb over the demolished landscape of my adolescence, and survey the desolate wasteland of my adulthood, figuring out what to fix as we go.
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.
I’m pretty much overwhelmed with every negative emotion, and while I’m not acting on my urges, I still want to die, still want to hurt myself. I am instinctively afraid of revealing this to him. My symptoms overwhelm people, even those with professional credentials. I need too much. I am impossible to please.
I’m relieved and terrified. This could be a whole new beginning. Or it could be yet another false start.
Maybe you have to be delusional to keep going back—or masochistic. But now I have that other motivator: the anger. I’m not going to let this thing kill me.
we tend to share three basic assumptions: The world is dangerous and malevolent; we are powerless and vulnerable; and we are inherently unacceptable
We are endangered; we are like small children; and we feel uncared for
although I am trying, as usual, to make things better, I continue to feel like I’m drowning, with no one to grab onto.
do I feel unacceptable because I have distorted beliefs in my mind, or because of the way people responded to me as I was growing up?
How much of what I perceive is accurate, and how much is a distortion?
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. Ethan reminds me that DBT isn’t about discovering ultimate truths; it’s often about tolerating seeming contradictions.
How do you do that? The borderline mind is trapped in polarity. It needs to be trained to tolerate these multiplicities and ambiguities, but ri...
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person with BPD will “move from a sense of incompleteness toward a life that involves an ongoing capacity for experiences of joy and freedom”
Most painful is how everyone (except Ethan) seems to think I just need to get back on the horse that threw me.
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.
BPD behaviors and experiences develop through a combination of biological vulnerability and an environment that is unable to respond adequately to our special needs.
What has my motive always been? To be loved, cared for, protected, affirmed, and kept away from the great black hole in the center of my soul. And I want sex. It’s been a while. You can view this need as pathological, or see it as the most natural thing in the world. For me, it’s often both.
Inside all this hunger for someone else is a simple yearning for companionship, human touch, and connection. I just never know how to separate these out and proceed accordingly.
We’re polar opposites: I live in emotion mind; Taylor in reason mind. I’m impulsive; he’s calculating. I read social sub-subtexts; Taylor recognizes only the concrete and literal. He is spatial to my relational, cool blue to my burning red, earth and rock to my hailstorms and hurricanes.
This hadn’t occurred to me. 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.
“The two most important things to remember,” Taylor adds, brushing the tears off my cheek, “are relax, and look ahead.” Relax… And look ahead…
Trauma, unresolved issues, core wounds—maybe it makes sense that these demons only resurface when I achieve a semblance of safety. Now that the ground is firm, my inner rifts are more accessible.
