Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) – I remember thinking on many different occasions there must be something terribly wrong with me.
Why was I so sensitive?
Why did I always feel like an outsider?
Why was I so quiet and shy?
Why did I become the alcoholic in the family?
Why was I so nervous and anxious?
Why did I feel the need to cut myself?
Why? … Why? … Why?
Every thought for so long centered around feeling like I was defective. I even wondered at one point if I’d been adopted because I just didn’t seem to “fit in” anywhere.
I received full scholarships to college, but then was suspended after my freshman year.
I couldn’t hold down a job for any length of time.
I ran away from home in my late teens.
I started smoking, drinking, partying and having sex heavily looking for acceptance.
I knew I was intelligent, yet for the life of me could not seem to get a grasp on my impulsiveness.
I felt as if the world was spinning out of control on a daily basis, and that it was going to spin me right off its axis.
And eventually when I was 37…..it did.
Receiving a BPD Diagnosis
I was working in Accounts Receivable for a manufacturing company.
Some health issues began to eat up my time off, and it got to the point I filed for FMLA in order to keep my job.
One day, I was throwing up in the parking lot. So I called my PCP, and was directed to go to the ER.
My boss thought I was faking it. I was told I had better be at work the next day – which I wasn’t.
The trip to the ER resulted in 3 days of mandatory bed rest.
On day number 4, in a robot-like state, I got up, locked all the doors, shut my phone off, and proceeded to lay curled up in the fetal position on the couch for the next 5 – hoping, wishing and praying I would finally just die.
I was 37 years old and in the midst of a breakdown.
A week or so later, I called my workplace to find out I had, of course, been fired.
Almost immediately after, I filed for disability.
Emotionally, I felt like I was the most screwed up person in the world – yet had absolutely no idea why.
Soon after losing my job, I lost my residence and was homeless.
A few months later I ended up in a Safe House for domestic/sexually abused women and children. It was through that facility I was referred to county resources.
There I was partnered with a caseworker, therapist and the psychiatrist who would eventually diagnose me with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), a recurrent history of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the one I had never heard of before:
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
After 10 months of ruling out other diagnoses such as Avoidant Personality Disorder and Histrionic Personality Disorder, BPD became the concluding diagnosis.
I had no idea at the time what that meant. All I knew is there was finally a name to replace “crazy” – and that felt like the biggest relief in the world!!
That is until I decided to Google BPD and learn more about it.
The relief I felt quickly reverted back into a nightmare.
Almost everything I came upon described those with BPD as violent, manipulative and too far gone.
Articles, comments and posts galore were urging others to “run for the hills!”
I was so taken aback, I literally ignored the diagnosis and pretended for the next year it didn’t exist.
The initial waves of relief turned into a perception of myself as a treatment resistant monster, just like the internet described.
I told nobody of that particular diagnosis in the beginning. It was a couple of years before I mustered the courage to voice it out loud – and the initial reception left me wondering if it wasn’t something I should have just taken to the grave.
When the Tides Turn
Even after divulging the BPD diagnosis, it took until I was 45 for the anxiousness and fear of talking about it to begin to dissipate.
That ultimately came through a coach on Instagram (@beatanxiety.me) who chose to take me on as a client, even after I made him aware of those three dreaded letters.
Our sessions together are where I was taught a diagnosis did not equal my identity.
BPD was not who I was, but a trauma response I struggled with.
I was not a pwBPD, a Borderline, or a monster, but a woman who had decades of unhealed trauma trapped within.
The cutting, addictions, reactions, black and white thinking, panic, anxiety, depression were all manifestations of that same unhealed trauma.
I wasn’t “bat shit crazy”, I was hurt and in extreme pain.
My emotional intelligence had been stunted in childhood – thus creating extreme actions/reactions, feelings and behaviors in adulthood that mimicked those of the age in which the trauma began.
The boredom and emptiness I felt was steeped in loneliness
Core wounds were not rooted in the physical and sexual abuse, but in such traumas as abandonment and neglect.
Self-sabotage and self-hatred were byproducts of toxic shame.
Cutting, binge eating and every other self-harm behavior manifested due to a lifelong struggle with low (to non-existent) self-worth.
I wasn’t outwardly angry and violent with others, but inwardly punished myself because I felt I deserved it – as in I blamed myself for everything.
Coaching with Ryan was the first time BPD was explained to me in this manner, and how I believe it really should be:
Through the eyes and lens of TRAUMA.
You Are Not Your Diagnosis
One of the most important concepts I learned from coaching was how to separate my identity from a diagnosis.
By changing the way I spoke of BPD, I also changed the way I viewed it.
Instead of “having BPD”, “suffering from BPD”, being a “person with BPD” or calling myself a “borderline“, my language switched to “I struggle with BPD”.
That one change alone took BPD off the table as part of my identity. And by separating the diagnosis from who I AM, I also put back on the table the possibility of being able to heal from it.
It was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders as I distanced myself (so to speak) from “being” BPD to simply “struggling” with it.
Because the reality is our diagnoses are labels which oftentimes do more harm than good. They can become the excuses we use to blame for addictions, behaviors, reactions, etc. that keep us stuck in those trauma responses we all have the capability to work through.
BPD is not a death sentence, nor is it who you are!
But only if you are willing to face your trauma and fear head on.
You MUST do the hard, consistent work needed to wade through that rubbish pile of abuse, abandonment, neglect, etc. and unearth your inner child, learn the art of reparenting, and FEEL those feelings you’ve been suppressing and running from for as long as you can remember.
Making the Ultimate Investment
It would be great if time was a magic pill and healed all of our wounds.
But the fact of the matter is, it’s not.
Making an investment in yourself, alongside time, is where you will see the ultimate difference.
By investment I don’t mean finding, but MAKING the time to sit with your feelings, research and commit to a trauma informed coach or professional, do the DAILY work required to rebalance your nervous system and re-parent your inner child, as well as integrate new skills such as self-care, compassion, forgiveness and grace.
Focus your attention off of the labels/diagnoses, and onto the processes of healing what lies at the root of BPD:
Trauma!
You are not weak. You are not too far gone. You are not crazy or a monster. You are NOT BPD!
You are simply a human being who has lived in an unimaginable amount of hurt and pain for far too long.
And you DESERVE just as much as anyone else to feel the relief and peace which is totally possible by walking through that trauma, and doing the work it takes to heal your wounded heart once and for all.
Writer, poet, designer, crafter, and mental health advocate. I have encountered struggles throughout life with addiction, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. I no longer identify with the above struggles, however, as I refuse to be defined by a disorder, disease or diagnosis. It is through the guidance of an anxiety coach in which I continue the healing of both my mental and physical health, while in the process supporting others along their own path towards recovery.