Having Borderline Personality Disorder with Bipolar Disorder

Diagnoses:  Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder

I am a 47-year old female who within the last year was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). I have been treated with lithium for bipolar disorder for 27 years, and have a long history of treatment, hospitalization, etc., for that. The BPD diagnosis, added to the bipolar, has thrown me for a loop. While I identify with every single characteristic given for the borderline, I have also read on the internet that this is such a tricky diagnosis that many doctors want to trash it completely. I have heard tapes of a certain Bradshaw on alcoholism that refers jokingly to all adult children of alcoholics being borderlines. 

I am an adult child of two alcoholic parents, I married an alcoholic, and also experienced neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse by a sibling over time, and emotional abuse growing up. 

When I was diagnosed bipolar when I quit college at 19 and attempted suicide, I began a long vigil with mental illness being my REASON for being unsuccessful. I have done okay, then returned to the hospital, held jobs and learned new trades, finished college, returned to the hospital....had two children...on and on....until the last visit when I was asked about being borderline. 

No one hospital and no one doctor has seen me through all of this. Going primarily with the state mental health facility, I have had countless doctors and therapists. I know now that I often reported to them just what I thought I should say to them, and I today am experiencing a fear and anxiety about my life that is crushing. I have a shame about my condition and unhappy state. 

I don't want to return to the therapist because I haven't "changed" anything significantly in my life. I think every day about how best to try to end my life without hurting anyone and without seeming such a coward. I have worn out friends and family with my constant "theorizing" about what is wrong with me. I am in a recovery group, and they all just stare, for I talk in circles and remain trapped inside my fear and pain. I have heard all the catch names for things like grandiosity and perfectionism and fear of failure and magical thinking. I identify but I am still overwhelmed. While I can talk all this to death, when it comes right down to it, I haven't a clue about what I need to do to let go of "my whole past" and start waking up to live in the now. 

No one is threatening to hurt me or leave me....but I sense that my family is tired of my PROBLEMS, and I can't figure out how to ACT better anymore, and I can't decide what I need to do to get really real. Maybe I've hidden behind the illness, refused to grow up, and really and truly hate myself for not learning life lessons that practically everyone else seems to just know. I rarely laugh, I can't seem to cry, I think, and worry, and eat and sleep and secretly wish God would let me silently disappear..