“Run. Away. Screaming.”
That’s what I told Russell when we started dating in early 2008. Now, we’re married with two teenagers.
I’ve been trying to make sense of the first thirty years of my life for the last fifteen.
People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are among the most suicidal and toughest clients to counsel. Our emotional volatility and psychiatrists’ lack of understanding about mood disorders made those with BPD unpopular patients – and still does.
The diagnosis comes with psychiatric evaluation and meeting criteria first reported in the 1994 diagnostic and statistical manual (DSM).
That was three years before a psychiatrist told me that my symptoms checked the boxes. No one had heard of DBT, and my doctor was up to date with the latest research on mood disorders, so I was lucky to even have recognition of what was wrong with me.
I’m on the edge of not being OK and I need(ed) help, but this is who I am as a person.
Over the years, I’ve developed reasonable coping skills for my intense and sometimes unstable emotions and moods. By learning how to truly accept that which we cannot change, no matter how angry it makes us, people with BPD can self-regulate.
I am empowered by my ability to develop better interpersonal skills and control my intense emotions. I am triggered like water shorting out an electrical system.
I need my friends and family to love me in a guiding-not-controlling way. Not just unconditional love but a deep concern and desire for connection.
Validation even when I may be wrong.
My husband says he could write a book on loving someone with BPD.
“Chapter One,” my husband jokes as we discuss best tips for putting up with me, “is called, ‘Yes, dear.’”
I have a borderline personality disorder.
There is no “cure” to who I am as a person.
Can you “fix” your personality?
I am emotionally raw, and I make no excuses for that, but I have learned coping strategies and believe I am self-aware enough to share what work(s)(ed) for me.
My biggest enemy has always been myself and it’s hard not to hate myself when my reflection is sullen, sad and addicted to destruction.
I still get triggered. I get angry. I split.
But rejection and abandonment are still major triggers.
I recently found myself contemplating the line between “I need space” and “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.”
I wish you knew; I wish you understood. I wish you could understand how much you hurt me by shutting me out of your life. You don’t know how much the pain makes me violently want to force upon you the fact that I am not nothing. I matter, and I will make you understand what you are rejecting. Or I will explode verbally, emotionally, physically shaking and crying all over you.
I went from puffy-eyed tears to violently clawing at the skin on my forearms to stop the screaming in my head that I was so goddamn stupid for caring too goddamn much and I thought I mattered but maybe just for the moment.
Thank you for not blocking me.
“I hate you. Don’t leave me.”
After a certain number of failed attempts to unalive myself, and unintended overdoses, I decided I had to make a choice about my desire to live. Like Hamlet.
To be or not to be, that is the question
What is the cure for high suicidality?
A rock-solid reason to live. Purpose.
DBT addresses behaviors and offers coping skills such as mindfulness and radical acceptance, using tools like a “diary card” that identifies a ‘life worth living’ goal.
Linehan’s memoir is titled, “Building a Life Worth Living.”
Linehan wrote, researched and developed dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) to guide others with BPD out of “Hell.” The pain was so great that she adopted a child than risk passing on any genetic predisposition.
But the light I pursued through my darkest hours was the love of family.
I am now the Mom I needed then.