Recently, life has been rough on me. My friends are keeping a very close eye on me because they're worried I might hurt myself. I'm not going to deny it - they have reason to worry. I'm worried about me, too. But it's about time I just accepted that worry. In my last post, I talked about a skill called "radical acceptance". A very difficult thing to do. For this post, I want to focus more on the thing I face.
I've accepted my situation. That was the easy part. Now I'm in the process of trying to figure out why I am where I am in my mind. I have a very strong urge to harm myself; it's been there for a long time and never really goes away. But now I've been working with my therapist to try to figure out why I have these urges and thoughts. One answer is simple: because I have BPD (borderline personality disorder). Borderline personality disorder is complicated. Really complicated. It's partly because no one really understands it yet, and they haven't even come up with a better name for it. A person with BPD is said to be on the borderline between neurosis and psychosis. Neurosis is simply those disorders without psychosis. Psychosis is when someone loses touch with reality. People with BPD sort of flip-flop right on top of that line. Sometimes we experience psychotic-type symptoms, without full-blown hallucinations or delusions, other times our condition is on the "milder" side with symptoms of anxiety and depression and the like. My therapist today said that I've recently exhibited that line well with the phrase "the thoughts are so loud they may as well be voices". That's when I was leaning toward the psychosis side of the line. And I knew it. I even went to my case manager (a nurse) to talk about whether or not I was indeed dealing with psychotic behaviour because the thoughts in my head were so loud. BPD is a disorder that people talk about in TV shows because some of its characteristics are a lack of control over anger and relatively rapid, out of control mood swings (over hours to days). I know at least one TV show where the serial killer often has BPD or something similar. It's very frustrating, really. We don't all become wild and crazed serial killers when we get angry. My anger is always turned inward. That brings me to another symptom of BPD: self-harm. I hate myself. I have for a long time, and I'm not really sure why. I'll always find something about myself to hate, I think. But my hate and anger turn into self-harm. I'm pretty well controlled right now, but for long periods of time, I was cutting and hitting and burning and scratching and banging my head and choking...the list goes on. I went and found just about every way I could harm myself and still live. Self-harm is a really common symptom of BPD. So much so, that the DBT (dialectical behavioural therapy) groups spend time focusing on just self-harm behaviours, We also have trouble with relationships. Sometimes that means having many casual relations, sometimes it means having trouble dealing with people. I have trouble dealing with people. Take my family for example. I love them all very much, but I also really don't like them. I've never understood how to manage people and relationships with people. My interpersonal skills (as they're called) are severely lacking. And yet, I can go to a stranger and comfort them in an emergency...go figure that one out! Anyway, we have a tendency to worry a lot about abandonment. Being abandoned physically and emotionally. That makes dealing with people that much harder if we're always scared we're going to lose them. One final symptom that I'm going to mention is dissociation. Dissociation is kind of like "zoning out". Time moves forward and backward fluidly, and we can't always stay in one place. There's full dissociation and what I call emotional dissociation. When I dissociate, it's usually emotionally. I separate from myself and lose control over me. I start to appear emotionally flat to others, and I don't experience the "right" emotions. I dissociate when I get stressed so I can deal with whatever is causing it, because otherwise, my emotions get in the way. I appear happy when I should be scared or upset. I just don't act like myself...not quite. The tough part is that I don't always know I'm dissociating. Sometimes it's obvious to me and I can physically feel the separation - like when I'm cutting and I don't feel the pain that should be there. But other times, I don't feel any different (from my perspective), and only know I was dissociating in retrospect. "Unstable" is the term they use in the psychology books. Everything about BPD is unstable. Instability on that line between neurosis and psychosis. Instability in relationships. Instability in emotional regulation. Instability in emotions themselves. What can others do about it? Well, for one, you can be understanding. Give us time to deal with things. Don't expect a problem to go away once it's solved. Be patient with us. Know that self-harm is not an easy thing to stop, and it's going to take us a long time to balance things out and get back on track again. Educate yourself on BPD. If you notice us dissociating, help bring us back to reality. Remind us to take care of ourselves, because we often neglect to do so. Overall, just understand, or try to at the very least. And don't be afraid to ask: what's it like having BPD? (but don't be too surprised if we can't explain it...as I said earlier, it's complicated) Sorry if my post today was a little scrambled. My head's a little scrambled right now.
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AuthorA volunteer. A dancer. A teacher. An observer. Archives
November 2016
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