Borderline Personality Disorder
This disorder, this disease, is difficult. Everyday is a battle inside the mind of a person suffering with Borderline Personality Disorder, BPD for short. They fight with their emotions, constantly. They have to remind themselves continually that they are good enough and that people, their friends and family, and sometimes even strangers, don't hate them.
One wrong word, one look, anything that feels even remotely like rejection, IS REJECTION to a person with BPD. Then they obsess about that rejection constantly. They pick everything apart over and over, and over again. It is a war zone inside their own minds. Trying to take back control of everything going on in their mind is pain staking, it's exhausting.
People with BPD want to be alone, it's safer that way, but they don't want to be lonely. They push people away because they are scared they will be rejected. When they find themselves alone they wonder why nobody loves them.
When a person with BPD does make a connection, they attach themselves and they obsess because it is what they do. No calls, no messages, no dates = rejection. It doesn't matter the reason. They often become overbearing. So much so, they push people away and end up alone again. Exactly where they dreaded being the most. Alone and obsessing over why nobody loves them.
It's a vicious cycle of their own making. They can see it but often times they cannot stop it because of the obsessive nature of it all. The bridges of their lives are burnt and full of people they left standing there.
Some days it seems like people with BPD have no heart. They seem ice cold. Completely unfeeling. Unaffected by anything going on around them. They have turned their emotions off just to survive.
Other days their hearts feel like they will explode out of their chests. They are so over emotional they are inconsolable. Even something unrelated to them can take them spiralling into empathetic agony. Once they get through that, if they get through that, they use all their strength to shut down again because that has to be easier. Until something sets them off again. Rinse, repeat.
There is no balance of feelings with someone with BPD. They are either on fire, or they are shut off. And you never know who you might face. They never know who they might face themselves.
This is why most people with BPD are addicts. They will do anything to shut themselves off. Drugs, alcohol, food, gambling, shopping. Anything to slow down their obsessive minds, to numb them to their own feelings, to shut them down.
Like most people, some days suck and some days are great. Unlike most people, those with BPD never know what each day holds when they wake up. They don't know what will trigger them. They never know who they will be when they wake up or who they will be when they go to bed.
BPD sufferers are always exhausted but they never get a good nights rest. They obsess even in their dreams. Often they have night terrors. There is no end.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, derived from Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, teaches people the skills needed to ensure that their behaviour as a result of the BPD (and the emotional dysregulation that comes with), do not cause harm. That a change in their feelings and thoughts may not actually be feasible so give them the much needed skills to manage living with them.
Cognitive behaviour therapy is based more on how to change thoughts and feelings.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy is more the acceptance of, and the skills to live with, thoughts and feelings without causing harm to oneself or others.
This disease is a prison of the mind. Learning to live with that is the only way to survive it.
If I've left you on that bridge I hope you will wander back sometime because while it might be difficult I like to think I am worth it. Or so the skills are teaching me.
Thank you M.H., whoever you are, because your words in combination with my words, explain Borderline Personality Disorder perfectly.
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