Borderline Personality Disorder:  Consumer Talk

I've recently been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, cautiously, with at minimum "borderline personality disorder traits" by a psychologist and BPD by a psychiatrist. All my life I've been in a quandary as to what is wrong, because I have had episodic crises in between which I have expended inordinate energy surviving in a fast paced and high level career and lifestyle. The toll has been cumulative culminating in physical ailments from stress and collapse from depression in the hospital.

I know now there is no ignoring this, that the "buck stops here," if you will. I am forced to make first priority health and therapy and all those things I was afraid would be futile and therefore irrelevant to my creating my own success. Taking responsibility for creating your life experience is admirable, but the existentialist philosophy can be lonely, and debasing when faced with results that even the most concerted efforts could not control. The humiliation of failing when I know I tried in every way I knew how, was overwhelming. Some of the issues and deep seated insecurities I find terribly embarrassing, and incongruent with the dignity I wanted to establish in my life.

This last episode of blacking out under extreme stress (and drinking) and (I can't even write about it without stumbling) cutting my arms was just devastating. I thought I had "gotten over such immaturity". This is how I always viewed it. The involuntary hospitalization, albeit short, numbed me and shook me to the bone. For the first time I have no excuse but to get help, because I have the time now. It is also the first time BPD was discussed with me. Years past, diagnoses varied between alcoholism, Post traumatic stress syndrome, bipolar (and those were the nice comments - family more likely called it irresponsible, immoral, selfish, etc.) - It occurred to me that family "help" only degraded what little confidence I had, and psychology was mostly conjecture and what was in vogue in any given year.

I became very cynical about any help that I could ever find any help. Now I am determined to follow through. Although I don't "rage" all the time, and certainly do not exhibit psychosis, I find much of what I read about BPD answers many questions for me. I am entering into this venture with guarded optimism. I want stability, and to make a positive difference in this life.. I believe fervently in the Jewish concept of "Tikkun Olam" or that we have an obligation as human beings to help repair the world in whatever capacity we are able. At times in my life, even survival has been tenuous, and I want much more than that - I want the range of human experience, and empathy and connection. None of us here are alone in our pain, and I trust that we can capitalize on each others experiences to improve our lives.

It's well and good to quote Eleanor Roosevelt about no one making you feel inferior without your consent, but many people with borderline personality disorder are in the public system and are dependent for their mental health needs on people who are prejudiced against them and are less likely to give them services as soon as they see that diagnosis on a file. What's really needed is education.

The Borderline Dragon

Imagine that your thoughts and feelings change suddenly with no apparent reason other than that they can and always have. Imagine that your brain shifts to thoughts of dying to thoughts of goals and planning for the future within minutes. Imagine that your fantasy is your reality yet true reality never matches your fantasy. Imagine that you have a conscious choice to live in either place. Imagine that all your achievements in the past, perhaps even in the past hour, now mean nothing; as if they never happened. Imagine that you are as distant to understanding others as you are often as distant from yourself. Imagine you are borderline.

The line is never drawn solid. It changes...altering perception. You never actually can "cross the line" because one never exists in your world. It has always been fluid. It relies on your present state, real or fantasy and you find yourself constantly guarding yourself against an invisible enemy. And, then one day, you discover the enemy all along has been YOU. Today is that day for me.

You learn that life is a right...not a flight or fight situation. Your brain understands this and comprehends and focuses on reality, yet the pull of your perceived state of emotion tugs and brings you down the drain. When you are your own enemy, there is no true visible target. You strike out against yourself in a world that you perceive to be eternally striking against you. You find harm and pain in the warmest of places and ignore risk and intuition as well as instinct when you feel emptiness deep within. All you know is to fill the hole that can never be truly filled due to the fact that everything you place within disappears so quickly. No dollar amount, no satisfaction, no person, no relationship, no self-achievement could ever fill what is actually never empty. You just can't feel it. You dare not think you are fulfilled, for that, in itself, would mean death. To live on either side of the line is what you are truly afraid of. To make a choice and to see things as they truly are in the present.

It made sense for you not to live in the present, the here and now, many years ago as you were abused and abandoned. Developing your borderline personality actually saved you back then. It removed you for the danger and pain. The ultimate defense against any and all enemies, any and all abusers, any and all emotion of pain, shame, and disgust - to take yourself out of the present into a world where you are safe. No security to be found in reality so you escape to fantasy and develop altering perceptions to keep you safe and sound. As you grow, this has followed you, the ultimate guardian. If you need a friendly dragon to ward off your attacker...you just create one.

Then, as you grow and prosper, you discover that the dragon you created to be by your side, serving, as your friend, your protector, is not real. You stand alone in a fight that only existed years ago...no present danger, yet your body and mind still feel threatened. You are on guard for no reason and the tension and depression produced by this is devastating. You are fighting a battle that you have already won, yet your gun still remains drawn at the invisible enemy within yourself. Most times, you yourself become the enemy and find yourself as the target of yourself. Why? Maybe in hopes that your friendly dragon will come rescue you once again. Yet, you find yourself fighting alone in a war you have already won years ago.

Imagine yourself now discovering all of this yet confused on how you are suppose to match your inner being with your outer environment. The truth - the reality that you do exist in. Your mind is no longer throwing you back to childhood, your body can feel that maturity in its growth, yet at times you feel so small it seems impossible to drive your own car. As you grow, you assume many roles in life. Those which rely on intellect. Your escape from hell has been your need to grow, to learn, to achieve, and to be productive. You are not much more than an actress assuming any and all roles placed before you - often feeling you have entertained an empty house. There may be applause from the crowd - yet you can not stand to hear it. To acknowledge your success is to acknowledge your fulfillment. Once you are fulfilled, the final curtain, you feel, will come down.

The combination of intelligence and compassion with that of borderline personality can be no worse then hell. You are aware of the destructive behaviors, the emptiness, the desperate measures you will take not to be abandoned or hurt...yet you are as helpless as you were when a child. You have relied on your intellect to bring your further along in life, yet without the emotions, you have remained a partial child. Often reacting and acting out as a child in an adult world and situations. There is no match and no resolution. You learn you can not move forward in life without striking a balance between the heart and the head. You learn that in order to be yourself, you can not be the child you once were. A child living in a horrid reality and one who escaped to vivid fantasy for survival.

Again, no friendly dragon to come play and save you. The once friendly dragon that danced in your childhood has now become the borderline dragon...a dragon that is now mocking your adulthood. Imagine that you now must rid yourself of the borderline dragon. For it has shifted from being your friend to being your worst nightmare. To fight the borderline dragon today, you must see it for what it truly is. A devastating illness nurtured by yourself throughout life.

As you learn, you develop. As you mature you come to realize that the old need to be borderline no longer exists. In its place you need to learn to see things in reality, keep them in reality, and cope with them in reality. That is my goal. To imagine myself as that friendly dragon from fantasy and bring it to reality to give me the strength and fortitude to fight the borderline dragon. For it is that brave dragon from childhood that I need to feel within me. It is this playful and protective dragon that I must reach deep inside myself. So I can comfort and protect myself in a sense of security unmatched by any heaven that could exist. So I can finally make the choice not to be borderline in a world of color, beauty, and where dragons remain in songs and storybooks for children.

If you'd like to give Meri feed back on the above article and the following article and 2 poems below you can email them to her. Meri

The Invisible Pain And The Visible Patient

How many needless trips to the family physician do I need to convince myself that my headaches are not from some rare tumor that can only be seen by a select few? How much money should I spend for prescription after prescription for what does not ail me? How many pills a day must I take to find that none of them contain the magic I have searched for? What do you do when the invisible pain your have felt all your life is only expressed through somatic complaints and anxiety related minor ailments?

You stop. You come to realize that the compulsion for being nurtured and need for attention is what precipitated the numerous co-payments made each year to your physician and the countless money you spent on medicine that perhaps, you never needed. You come to realize that this is just a part of your borderline existence; a part that brings confusion to both patient and medical doctor. To fix a neck full of tension and muscle spasm is easier to cure; to diagnosis a cold or flu is easier to do; and to not tune into your body so much is the most difficult thing to accomplish.

Who can make a bruise into a severe internal bleeding disease, which will only bring upon untimely death? Who can make a simple backache from tension into a slipped disc? Who can make an upset stomach into a rare and complicated disease? Any borderline person you meet, including myself, who can understand visible symptoms and not invisible pain.

Often I have simply just asked for a broken leg. Easier to explain, easier to justify, and one that lends itself to visible healing. An x-ray will show the break and separation; a cast will hold it together while it mends; and physical therapy will make the leg good as new as you once again are able to stand.

How then couldn't I see that I have had a broken soul? A soul that needed mending all these years. The process would have been the same perhaps, an x-ray to determine the invisible pain of childhood; a cast to be placed upon it to keep it safe and secure while you work on the healing and the reconnection of your heart, mind, body and SOUL; and therapy to continue the healing and mending while you gain the strength to once again, stand up in the world for yourself and as yourself.

For no doctor, no medicine and no imagination of a magic pill or spell can cast away the virtue of the borderline personality. A borderline's body is the cast that contains the soul still deep within waiting to finish healing.

To Be BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder)

What does it feel like
to have an illness so obscure?
You spend your lifetime searching
unclear if there is any cure.

Your thinking is black and white
with loss of clarity in between,
although you talk calmly
inside the echo of a scream.

You try to connect to a world
that barely seems at all real,
and in the cloud of borderline personality
is it fantasy that you feel?

You view people as distant
and view yourself as fading away,
some days are easy to get through
some days are ... better not to say.

The life of a borderline person
is no different then hell or your worst fear,
for every time you think you are getting closer
the answers erode in a distant stare.

If I am to ever overcome
all the initials placed after my name,
all professional diagnoses
will I ever be the same?

And where am I to go
to find the right connection just for me?
to be able to say I am no longer borderline
in the mirror will I finally myself see!