6.15.2025
I’m a graduate student of myself.
When I saw myself in “I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me,” I started studying borderline personality disorder (BPD). At that time, in the mid-1990s, Marsha Linehan started publishing her dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) created specifically for BPD. The treatment involves skills training and psychotherapy, which is exactly what I needed: a good shrink who would invest time, energy and thought into helping me on the journey of my life.
How can you pay someone enough money to care about your troubles for more than the time it takes per week to write up patient notes?
My sensitive nature leaves me physically vulnerable to emotional invalidation.
Mother, who worked as a nurse, often told me that I wasn’t “really sick” and didn’t need to stay home from elementary school. I took her blasé responses as dismissed accusations of dishonesty.
I fell behind my third-grade classmates in math because my second-grade teacher spent more time reading to us than encouraging us to practice math.
In third grade, I developed a peptic ulcer that doctors determined was related to stress and anxiety. I still remember the taste of the barium mixture used to diagnose my stomach pain, which mysteriously worsened during math class.
My mother the nurse offered a drink that tasted like chalk and nauseated me. What I needed, but no one knew at the time, were distress tolerance skills.
By the time my panic attacks arrived, during middle school, I was called manipulative.
“Dialectics,” as applied to behavior therapy, has two meanings: that of the fundamental nature of reality, and that of persuasive dialogue and relationship.
Emotional dysregulation in borderline individuals is the combination of an emotional response system that is oversensitive and overreactive with an inability to modulate the resulting strong emotions and actions associated with them. – Marsha Linehan
Shame is not a catalyst for growth.
Gabor Maté says, “The question is never, ‘Why the addiction?’ but ‘Why the pain?’”
The same is true for emotional dysregulation. The question isn’t, “Why are they like this?” It’s: “What happened to them — and how do we support healing while still holding them accountable?”
I’m extremely sensitive to the idea that my mistakes are done purposely to manipulate or cause harm. I’m wired this way, but I actively try to strengthen the connection between my thoughts and reactions. The broken regulator of my brain and central nervous system allowed me to overreact.
Most people with BPD are not monsters. I am terrified of abandonment and emotionally wired for chaos.
I’m a goddamned mess to clean up with honesty and empathy. Thank god for my husband.
Favorite person in the borderline personality disorder community
“Favorite Person” (FP) has a unique meaning in the BPD community. A FP is a person who someone with BPD relies heavily on for emotional support, seeks attention and validation from, and looks up to or idealizes. When referred to as a FP, it goes beyond what other people would generally refer to as their best friend or favorite person. FPs are the object of complete attachment and extreme love from people with BPD. Therefore, those with BPD feel unable to function properly without their FP and fear that their FP will abandon them.
Individuals with BPD are likely to have these relationships, in which the love they feel for their FP is all-consuming and so overwhelming that it is beyond their control; they often have no idea what they are doing toward their FP. In other words, FP is someone who a person with BPD is especially obsessed with even when they have other close friends; FP becomes exactly who the person with BPD needs at that moment.