Borderline Personality Disorder:  Consumer Talk

My recovery has been slow and gradual, at least to me it has been. My therapist has told me how amazed she is at my growth compared to where I was years ago. She honestly never thought I would ever be able to stop self injuring. I have stopped now for 3 years.

I don't think there is just one thing that has helped me heal. I have definitely got the best combination of meds for me. It is different for everybody. I take Klonopin, Tegretol, Artane, Effexor, and Risperidone. I think pretty soon I am going to talk to the doctor and go off the Risperidone and the Artane. I haven't been psychotic in along time.

About 3 years ago, I was living in a group home and something clicked in me. I am not sure what it was. I was struggling with the urge to hurt myself and I just couldn't stop. I started to look at the goals I wanted to do in my life. I then began to take steps to achieve them. The one I chose was to go back to school to work as a therapist with children. I found a school that had a program in Art therapy, so I went for it. It was like the "urge" to go to school took over the "urge" to hurt myself in some way. I was a nervous wreck at first because the last time I was in a college my grade point average was 1.7. I was determined, though. I completed a whole year of school and came up with a 3.11 GPA. Isn't that cool!!! I had to drop out because of physical problems. I believe that going to school gave me the self confidence that I needed for me to make it on my own.

I moved out of the group home right after the year of school. I really had a hard time at first. I was in and out of sub-acute stabilization. I learned over time how to be alone. I have learned how to feel comfortable with who I am ( I am still learning this one) . The key phrase I believe in goes like this: It is not my fault that I got where I got , but it is my fault if I stay where I am at.

I have learned to let go of my mom. I was an abused child and for along time I tried real hard to make my mom be a real mom. She will never change and I have learned to let her be who she is. That is very hard to learn. I still struggle with this at times. I have to talk to myself and the adult part of me has to come in and take care of the little girl part of me.

I have had to figure out other ways to comfort myself besides hurting myself. I have a teddy bear and I rock , and other things like that. The comforting type of things that I have done probably have been the biggest help in my recovery.

I was sadistically abused by my grandfather. I still deal with flashbacks at times. It is those times that the adult part has to come to take care of l the little girl. I have learned how to bring myself back into the present when a flashback happens. I become like paralyzed and really can't move. I talk to myself in my head and figure out what little steps I could do to come back to now. Like , I will tell myself that I am going to lift my arm up and when I do I relax just a little. Then I do something else like that until I am all the way back and able to move. A therapist once taught me a way to stay in today. She says that when I am remembering and I get very scared, I look around the room saying the things I hear right now, saying the things that I see right now, saying the things that I smell right now.... Saying all this out loud. This always helps me.

Last fall I began to look for a job. A friend at church came to me and said I could work for her at her school. She runs a school for learning disabled children. I am a tutor part-time working with these kids that have a hard time learning. I absolutely love it!!! I have always wanted to work with troubled children. Here is the opportunity I have been looking for. I believe that God is a good God and He has been with me my whole life.

I know a lot of people have issues around religion. I did for along time. I was molested by my minister when I was 16. He said he would kill me if I told anyone. I have had to learn to separate the two. God had nothing to do with this person representing him hurting me. I don't push God on no one. I do believe that He has worked in my life. I am nowhere near totally recovered. I seem to be soaking in things kind of fast. I have come to believe that everyone has choices about how we act and what we do and even how we feel. I believe that a lot of people don't even realize that they have these choices. I used to get soooo mad at anyone that would tell me that I have a choice on what I feel , etc.

I now realize that I didn't want to accept responsibility for changing my behaviors or feeling. I have had to learn to take the responsibility for my life. If I wanted things differently I need to take action toward changing it. I can't sit around and wait for others to take care of me. That is hard. Now I don't think that we have total control of how we feel , but I do think that we have control over how much control we let the feeling have over us.

I feel sad quite a bit. I can't control having that feeling but I do have control over how much power I give to that feeling.

I think that life is a journey. For a long time I was in a foggy state of being but now I am coming out of the fog. Life is good most days. I do have bad days but I think everyone does.

I have been in a lot of hospitals and I have heard over and over how hopeless I am. The doctors and professionals didn't know anything about what it meant to have BPD. I felt like screaming many times but I didn't have the words to say what I felt. I now have the words. Many people thought and still think that "borderlines" do this on purpose. Self injury was never for attention for me, but that was how it was viewed. When I tried to explain it, then I was being manipulative. I did learn one thing , that I hate being a borderline. I was not treated as an individual with a mental illness, I was treated with disregard.

I got out of the hospitals and I have been getting better. I have found myself and have learned a lot of coping skills. It has been 3 years since I have self injured. I have found my way with the help of my therapist. For a long time, I didn't ever think I would have a life with quality and now I have life with quality. It can happen and has happened to others too.

It is important to remember to never give up , even when others, even professionals, have given up. It is important, I believe, that people with BPD that have recovered, stand up and tell those that still struggle. It is really worth all the effort.

I have done a lot of healing, but for along time I was on the border of giving up. I really honestly never thought that life would ever be any good. It really does get better. I would like to stand up and say to all that it does get better with a lot of work.

I have been wanting to write to someone and express the healing that I have experienced. When I was all alone and had no one, I didn't hear much from recovered borderlines. I didn't know if there were any.

Most of my life I have been in and out of psychiatrist's offices and General Practitioner's offices. I knew I was different...I knew I was alone in whatever was wrong with me...I knew I was intelligent...I knew I had worth...but somehow I couldn't quite make it all click and flow.

About the time I felt like I could manage, something would happen and "down the chute" I'd go. I threw fits, I got so depressed I wanted to die. I would love you but if you did me wrong you were then the object of my hatred! I lost jobs. I lost friends. I almost lost my kids!

Well, now I am 52, have 2 grown children and 3 grandchildren. Finally, about 3 years ago, a very good Psychologist saw that I had a need to know. She told me all of my diagnoses, explained how the illnesses work, etc., and gave me names of books to read. In essence she trusted me with the whole truth.

Truth, no matter how bad it was, was the beginning of healing. I can't say that I am healed. But I now RECOGNIZE borderline personality disorder  thoughts and ideas as mainly false garbage! They are programmed thoughts and actions. They were BAD coping skills. They have to be replaced by good, pleasant coping skills.

Now, as adversity or whatever used to do me in, hits me in the face, I make a conscious decision to NOT think that way or react that way. Is it easy? HECK NO! BUT, it is easier than doing really stupid things, and losing my temper, and making a complete fool of myself in front of people, and hiding and all the other things I did to escape people and situations! Do I still mess up? YOU BET I DO!!!! But life is soooo much easier now.

I no longer NEED my adult children to make me center of attention. Life does NOT revolve around ME! The fact that they don't call me for a few days does NOT mean they hate me.

If someone yells at me, I don't have to fall apart and go into hiding and become so depressed that I want to die.

I AM OK! I AM A REAL PERSON! I AM WORTHY OF LOVE! BUT IF I DON'T GET IT, I LOVE MYSELF! I don't HAVE to have a hissy fit to be heard. If they don't hear me, it is THEIR loss!

Everything doesn't HAVE to be perfect! I don't have to be perfect. I CAN'T be perfect! YOU can't be perfect! NO ONE can be perfect!

What my mother said is NOT true about me! What my father said is NOT true about me! I am smart! I am pretty! I am SOMEBODY going SOMEWHERE and I can stand up tall and yell it to the world! AND YOU CAN TOO!

Signed....Better and Better and Better!

I was first diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) 20 years ago after a serious suicide attempt and a subsequent 8 month hospitalization (6 months as in-patient and 2 months as out-patient). It came as a relief that there was a name for the turmoil and hell I lived with, and that it wasn't "just me." I grew up with multiple messages, direct and subtle, that the only problem was "me" and lived an increasing hell as a result, so I'd already spent 10 years in and out of therapy after I'd escaped my family-of-origin at 16.

I still struggle with BPD, although I've come light years in my ability to understand and deal with my "demons." I've studied it extensively, developed skills in relating, articulating and understanding what I go through. I've worked with a wonderful therapist for almost 7 years, and with her help I've been able to gradually shine a light into most of the dark corners of my inner dungeon.

I'm still shining light into the darkest pit at the core of that dungeon and it is a slow, painful, terrifying journey -- even after all this time. I know I have made and continue to make progress, although when I am crippled with emotional and existential pain it sometimes feels like I've only succeeded in being painfully aware of my woundedness (kind of like coffee makes you alert but you're still drunk).

My journey is currently showing me how crushingly toxic the core of my identity is, filled with an engulfing belief that I am fundamentally bad, wrong and hopelessly inadequate. I have excavated down through the layers of my dysfunction so that I now am dealing with (what I hope is) the deepest core of this inner toxicity. The healing of this condition is definitely a long term and multi-layered process, not an event.

This toxic core is so painful, terrifying and overwhelming that I can deal with only a tiny amount of it at a time and even then it is easy to fall crashing into it, like falling into a volcano pit. One thing my therapist has taught me is how important it is to do this work at one's own pace, and to respect the signals that the Inner Child sends out when s/he's had enough. A little drop of this toxic waste dump inside me can send me into a state of complete emotional paralysis as I tumble down into the pain of feeling bad, wrong and ultimately crazy.

My subsequent inability to work forces me to live in a constant state of poverty on social assistance, which can itself be a trigger of acute frustration, rage and abandonment. The holiday season (as I write this) is an especially difficult time of year for me because of this.

I keep going. I wonder why sometimes and wonder if I'm just playing a rigged game constructed by a cruel and manipulative Universe, but I don't really believe that. (That's just Life imitating my family)!

I've come far enough that I can maintain an awareness of a more positive view of the Universe, even in (most of) my dark moments. I'm learning to reach out now, to share and explore my spiritual growth with others so that I can find a place for myself in the Universe. I have a couple of friends I can turn to when things get bad (most of the time). And somehow I've never gone hungry. So things could be a lot worse. I just wish (still) that they would become better.

BPD, Tourette's Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder
Brilliant and Bright, Creative and Analytical,
Unable to Complete, Unable to Compete,
Scared and Alone, Even in a Crowd,
Always Messing Up What's Good, Angry and Depressed,
No One to Lean On, No Life of My Own....
Twenty People I Am and I Know Them All Well,
Yet My Lord, When I Look Inside No One's Home...
I Know it's Hard for All To See But My God This Is All There Is Of Me.

I was one of the "girls". Part of the "dynamic seven" that frequented the women’s issues unit at the general hospital in my city. The "girls", seven of us who suffer from BPD, were known throughout the hospital land as attention-seekers, needy individuals who took up a lot of staff time, perpetually suicidal to the point of being boring (why don't you just kill yourself already and get it over with), and yet intriguing and fascinating at the same time. Some mental health workers loved us and others saw us coming through the psychiatric emergency room and put in for a vacation.

Being borderline is confusing, distressing and sometimes fun. I get to be manipulative, cunning, downright mean and brilliant, creative and interesting in the same hospitalization. Don't get me wrong, I am by no means proud of my diagnosis. I just want to get down to honesty.

I want to get well now, but I don't think that I always did so that is why hospitalization after hospitalization didn't seem to help. This is perhaps a side to BPD that is not often talked about amongst suffers of the disorder themselves. How maybe we don't want to get well. I was stuck in a painful cycle. If I got well, (cured?) then maybe I wouldn't be as interesting. I certainly wouldn't get as much as attention if I wasn't constantly threatening to kill myself. More than anything in the world I was afraid to become BORING. My BPD, despite all of its heartache, kept me interesting, or at least I had come to believe that it did. Today I know differently. Today I know that I can be in recovery without having to lose my uniqueness. I don't have to be a borderline anymore to simply get my needs met. This realization happened over time and lots of therapy, almost eight years and over fifty hospitalizations.

I am writing this to not only assist in my own recovery from this harrowing, largely misunderstood psychiatric illness, but to offer professionals and other sufferers of BPD, the other "girls" (and boys, too) out there in hospital land waiting for their fairy godmothers (who are often the mothers who weren't there when we were kids), the hope that there is a gray light at the end of a very black and white tunnel. Everyone can get there, I believe. Moderation is a bliss place, I hear. I want to get there someday. I just keep changing highways, but my father used to tell me that all roads lead home.

I am so alone today he has gone away why i am surprised I don't know for everyone goes away..from my family to friends they can't cope and how could they for I can't either. i can't understand how or when it will ever go away !let up give me a break! Only the cutting the pain the blood brings relief..my dad always told me I was not ever going to be worth anything and seems as though he was right, nothing that is except for having sex with. Nothing except for breaking of my bones and that is all life has ever given me so he must be right. The darkness the loneliness, the ever insistent whisper of the voices the pain the pain the guilt this is my world how unfair to ever have asked him to share it with me .i can't stay much longer I am sure but at least i am alive today. thanks for giving me this place where it was for a minute ok to say what really lives inside of me.

I have been diagnosed with BPD for a little over year now. It was a wonderful thing to finally be able to put a name to all the outrageous things I was doing. One of the major problems that I was dealing with was self-mutilating. I began cutting at the age of 15 and I am turning 21 soon. I had a son when I was 19, got married soon after, and then moved 2 hours away from my family and friends. All the changes affected me greatly and my cutting got worse. One day I cut and called for assistance from a mobile crisis unit. I explained to them my situation and they decided to take it as a suicide attempt. So along with the ambulance, 3 police cruisers wound up in front of my house. The ambulance took me to the hospital and the police stayed at my house with my son until my husband got home, they would not let me take him. The next day I was visited by a worker from Social services and a few weeks later a letter came in the mail saying they had found me guilty of neglect. I was devastated and out of habit began cutting even more. One day I cut very badly and had to go to the hospital to get 9 stitches. The crisis worker at the hospital decided not to report me to social services that time but warned me that if it happened again, I would be reported and they might take my son away.

All of this took place almost a year ago. May 11,2000 will be my one year anniversary of not cutting. It took a lot of determination and strength that I didn't know I had. But I did it. I'm not completely better yet, I still think about cutting and I still have other issues to deal with. But the cutting is basically behind me, my son is more important than anything and I'm glad I realized that in time.

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