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Elis
Contributor

Borderline Personality Disorder just a label put on a deeply empathetic person that has been through some tough times?

I’m questioning this “label” the gentlemen sitting in the expensive office with his glasses and his little notes in front of him...as he begins to ask me short question about 5 or so and I am given the option to say yes or no and DING DING DING! In under 10 or 15 minutes of meeting me for the first time ever he’s done it! He has cracked the case! Apparently this guy is a f*#king oracle! Funny how you can ask a person has this ever happened to you? Have you ever? Sometimes a lot of events happen to those suffering severe depression and that then gives you this label? Honestly I don’t think I needed this information I have accepted that I just need to do what needs to get done, get a job, a place and pretty much steer clear of intense situations like falling in love and visit family on my good days and not give the negative emo side of me the chances to indulge and grow. But honestly could I be given a worse mental condition it’s so hard and I hate when it seeps out and pushes people away and the comments “your complicated aren’t you” “just relax”  even “did you have a good day today” I’ve lost my shit basically raised my voice to my dad and said “please stop asking me how my day was the answer is always going to be shit!” Had to apologise straight after, feel guilty for not being happy because that’s all they want from me and I just can’t. I feel like a burden that I don’t want anyone else to carry and I literally don’t want to talk to anyone about it or any of life I don’t want there advise or their pity or have to try to alter my face to look normal and not absolutely dishearted and channeling soul crushing pain that they could never comprehend. Right now I just need a script and notes on how to be normal, how people prefer me to lie to them, how I’m meant to feel and daily answers to how are you today and I’ll study them. I feel like the more I ignore this the worse I will get. A dark part of me just wants to wreck havoc and just let the condition flow and f$*k it the world can deal with it. Omg are you serious I’m not allowed to swear on this site? it creates the dark humour, the personality of the written piece I’m not using it like an uneducated bogan.

10 REPLIES 10

Re: Borderline Personality Disorder just a label put on a deeply empathetic person that has been through some tough times?

Hi @Elis 

 

I think people find a way of swearing here - I suppose like other things we need to pick an audience - for some people - it's not polite - for other people - it's perfectly okay - and maybe I'm another educated bogun but I think that's another label and there are too many labels

 

I think we all have labelsI think we all have labelsI think it's rough to have a short time with a pyschiatrist who asks a lot of questions and then slams on a label and you suddenly have BDP and haven't even got time to look up what that is before your time's up and you go out feeling dazed - I get it

 

My funniest thing was the first time I saw a psychiatrict nurse to see if I qualified for a private hospital admission asked me if I heard voices - totally a novice at this I replied "Of course"- she was suddenly interested and asked me what they said to me - and rather dazed I said "I can hear you perfectly - there's nothing wrong with my hearing" - 

 

Anyway - back to your story - I can hear you btw and know about your frustration because you write so clearly - most of us know when we have depression - but just in case we don't - and fair enough - they tell us - and then - maybe they add in anxiety and we can add that - wondering - and we are then told to avoid this and that, try this and that - reading a little finds more labels and is this at all helpful

 

Personally I am a complicated person - that's a wonderful thing to be - I have been told that too and felt complimented - and it has been suggested that I keep away from certain placels and people and to read gentle things and watch programmes that won't trigger me and it all seems like an avoidance puzzle to me

 

I don't know if I am making any sense but to me it's great that you have written all this

 

Here you don't have to change your face - if you have had a bad day then you can say so - there is no need to feel guily about anything - we can all handle that because we all feel like that at times - you can have your dark humour - we don't need to lie here - we have all been there and know already - your stories are unique and there is no need to wreak more havoc - you have had enough - we can handle your truth

 

And enough labels - we all have them - I am glad you have shared and welcome to the forum - we are a sort of family here - a different sort - we care about each other

 

Dec

Re: Borderline Personality Disorder just a label put on a deeply empathetic person that has been through some tough times?

Thankyou for your incredible post.

 

I'm so sorry that this has happened to you and that you've been feeling like sh*t, I feel for 

you but I don't think there is anything wrong with you, I say this only because your words

echoed so many of my own experiences and made me feel like I wasn't alone, and amazingly grateful that someone else was talking real, not colluding with the bulls*ht, with the bullsh*t that

gets so bad  it essentially becomes emotional abuse. Even when it was never, ever intended to be

so and when the people doing it find out how badly they are affecting people, often the people they love they feel terrible. I'm talking about colluding with completly messed up and harmful social norms.

 

I'm talking about how deeply I could relate when I read this quote from your post and how much my life has changed since I decided to find a way to push back:

"I’ve lost my shit basically raised my voice to my dad and said “please stop asking me how my day was the answer is always going to be shit!” Had to apologise straight after, feel guilty for not being happy because that’s all they want from me and I just can’t."

 

What I see here is a daughter feeling guilty for expressing negative feelings and a father who probably meant no harm and was probably just echoing what he had taught in terms of expectaions of a broken society, not realising just how broken and socially unsustainable that society and its norms were. People need to be able to express negative emotions. When we can' express our emotions they go down to the basement and start lifting weights. 

 

Emotions are there to be expressed and heard, and when there is a build up of horrible negative ones, in my experience at any rate, it usually corresponds to a large number of smaller negative emotions that couldn't be expressed, healed and passed and so they have built up to the point where it feels like they are now at a point where it would be dangerous to release them on the world.

 

I've also been through the stage where they can't be held in anymore, literally ranting on street corners or driving my car around because I knew I had to let out all that anger and just couldn't stop ranting so the only thing I could do was drive around with the windows rolled up so that nobody had to hear me yell (for long). And then I note how proud of myself I feel - why? proud of myself for 'maintaining condideration to others' as much as was possible under the circumstances and I  have to ask myself : why do we live in a society where we are all taught and then teach each other that bottling up our emotions to this point is the healthy and thus "normal" thing to do?

 

Now that I have so many years worth of built up and unexpressed emotions, wtf am I supposed to do with them all?

And the answer that has increasingly been coming to me is: find a way to push back.

 

What that means is obviously entirely dependent on everyone and a lot of people will be like 'no way that isn't for me thanks' and fair enough

 

But for me all those emotions were the wise parts of me saying "WTF is wrong with all of you people??? can't you see there is a problem here?? can't you see there are things that need to change?" in a nutshell the bulk of my "darkness" was pure frustration, and that 'beligerance' or 'conbattiveness' or whatever the label they were going to try and use to call my anger and frustratuion a "personality disorder" to make me the problem the one that needed "fixing", was the best last-ditch-fire-fight weapon that I had to push back against them when backed into a corner - I just needed to learn how to use it effectively and who to use it on.

 

We are so incredibly against standing up for ourselves in this society and recently I am feeling increasingly like there is a huge pressure to collude with things that we know deep down (and sometimes on the surface too and everything in between) are just plain wrong.

 

Both the carrot and the stick are used in this endeavour, we are rewarded for meeting social norms and expectations (even when they are really unhealthy or harmful ones) and we are punished when we breach them (even when doing so is actually exactly what is healthy or helpful in resolving an untenable situation or creating positive change) then of course there is always the guilt: many people harm others without intention or conscious awareness, so we feel really guilty to let them know that we are feeling hurt.

 

I don't know much about the details of your situation, but I don't agree that we should have to "pick our audience" if we are in a situation where it isn't safe for us to express our emotions and we aren't actually hurting people (and I don't mean the pain that we feel when we know someone we love is in pain and we don't immediately know how to help, or need to just let them be in pain & soothe them - it's not hurting people when they feel that pain, that's them sharing ours and in a healthy society it's a healing thing, in my experience at any rate) then we aren't the problem, it might mean that our  loved ones or whomever we are talking to might need a bit of help to come around and that we might want to try and reach out to others (trying many within reason and pulling back from those that feel unsafe or abusive) because sometimes, as humans, we just need to be heard. It seems to fulfil a really important function. When the inner being rises up and says "I need to be heard" if it gets silenced for too long it shouts in my experience. That isn't something wrong with it.

 

Sometimes abuse is occurring where it shouldn't be and sometimes it's masquerading as something else. Sometimes a standard practice is an abusive practice. And if someone feels like the label they applied to you is harmful and it isn't safe to say so. Sometimes it's reasonable to recognise that you should be able to make a formal complaint and have that complaint be valued and resolved. Where that can't be done, its reasonable, in my experience, to consider that this is an abusive system that might need to be reported to the Royal Commission into violence, abuse and exploitation of persons with disabilities. eg. If I seek help from a person and they impose a label, framework, model or explanation that I find inherently harmful, refuse to listen to me as I say so and deprive me of access to other support or act in other ways that I find harmful. It might be reasonable to ask if I"m experiencing institutional abuse.

 

Identifying as a victim of Violence, abuse and exploitation can be a powerful position for a person who is seeking for the harmful behaviour to stop. Because it is framing those things as what they are. Sometimes it can be hard to find the language or support. 

 

When we are working in a system that is still coming to terms with admitting or recognising endemic abuse it can be particularly hard and to identify abuse sometimes we have to borrow from other contexts.

 

Here  is blue knot's definition of emotional abuse for children

https://www.blueknot.org.au/Resources/Information/Understanding-abuse-and-trauma/What-is-child-abuse...

eg

"Emotional abuse includes acts of omission (emotional neglect - what is not done) e.g. not expressing or showing love and affection. It also includes acts of commission (what is done) e.g. rejection, humiliation, insults, setting unreasonable expectations or restricting opportunities for the child to learn, socialise or explore. Both acts of commission and omission can negatively affect a child’s self-esteem and ability to engage with others."

Thisis something I often identify with if I find myself in the situation you described with the doctor at the beginning of yuor post. The person is supposed to be fulfilling the role of providying de-facto emotional support (in my mind, why else would I seek someone out when I'm in emotional distress specifically to resolve it?) instead they don't show any empathy - while "love and affection" might not be appropriate in a clincal setting, I would think it's reasonable to expect that empathy, understanding and appropriate emotional connection necessary to achieve safety and healing are. Coldness, and projecting dogmatic views that the person finds unhelpful are things that I have found personally to be extremely damaging and effectively constitute emotional abuse in the clinical setting.

 

Another article I found helpful in feeling comfortable with my own feelings and starting to feel more confident to push back or walk away from harmful support where it was a lost cause and find helpful support - and to telll the difference was by borrowng from the "red flags" concepts in domestic violence models. Here is a list of example

https://www.1800respect.org.au/violence-and-abuse/psychological-abuse/

Psychological abuse can include someone regularly:

  • Embarrassing you in public or in front of family, friends, support workers or people you work with
  • Calling you names
  • Threatening to harm you, your pets, children, or other people who are important to you
  • Treating you badly because of things you can’t change — for example, your religion, race, past, disability, gender, sexuality, or family
  • Ignoring you or pretending you aren’t there
  • Doing and saying things that make you feel confused. This might include someone moving or changing things and then denying they have done this.
  • Always correcting what you say with the aim of making you look or feel foolish

Many of the practices associated with common behaviour in mental health fields triggered the red flags above for me. And helped me to realise where I wasn't being treated well and needed to escape or get support in changing things (as appropriate to the situation). One of the things that made me feel confused that I would adapt to an institutional setting, were when I tried to make complaints about the way in which I was affected by certain labelling - and being told that it was not a complaint because that was standard procedure: something being standard procedure doesn't mean it can't be psycological abuse. If I (or anyone) personally finds the labels and accompanying ideology unhelpful it shouldn't be forced on them as a pre-condition of support. 

 

It  can be really scary to recognise that things aren't right in a support situation, but in my experience it can also be a really important and powerful part of healing. Having to walk away from therapists and reach out to speak out about abuse and find safety from it or get the right support that i needed to speak out about my feelings and things that just weren't right without feeling gulty about it was really hard, but it's also been really important for me and made me feel less and less powerless. The best part is when it starts to feel like what I thought was a terrible quality: that 'beligerance' that 'anger' was actually a part of me that was only loud because it was trying to get m y attention and the attention of my fellow community members, when it starts to be heard by the right people and things start to change, it starts to reveal itself as something taht was actually a postive quality and a very natural and adaptive (NOT maladaptive but genuinely adaptive ) reaction.

 

I don't know if any of this has been helpful at all, but I guess what I am trying to say is that you don't have to accept a support person that doesn't feel helpful. Or an ideolgy - if 'borderline personality disorder' is not a label or concept you find helpful then you should be allowed to work to a model or framework you do find helpful, or even just work with your own inate understanding of yourself: the right therapist or support person will do that and if they won't they aren't the right one. 

 

I hope that helps, our society is in a place where it does need to change, I feel. We have been labelling everyone who expresses this, and trying to make them the problem, they aren't. And sometimes, in my experience, what others called my 'disorder' was actually my conscience and good sense - it's hard and it's really, really raw sometimes. But speaking out - even just the post you made  - can make a huge difference, hearing others we can relate to, for me anyway, is what builds strength and confidence to push back against a society that needs to change.

 

Not everyone is going to agree - but that doesn't mean its about "picking one's audience" for me that phrase is a silencing phrase, for me it's more about speaking out anyway - and trusting that it's going to be raw and messy at first and maybe for quite a while but it is going to get better with time. Because it's far better that the truth comes out, and sometimes it's been buried under a lot of different layers.

 

Wishing you all the very, very best and thanks for your amazing honest post 

 

 

Re: Borderline Personality Disorder just a label put on a deeply empathetic person that has been through some tough times?

Thankyou for your incredible post.

 

 

I'm so sorry that this has happened to you and that you've been feeling like sh*t, I feel for 

you but I don't think there is anything wrong with you, I say this only because your words

echoed so many of my own experiences and made me feel like I wasn't alone, and amazingly grateful that someone else was talking real, not colluding with the bulls*ht, with the bullsh*t that

gets so bad  it essentially becomes emotional abuse. Even when it was never, ever intended to be

so and when the people doing it find out how badly they are affecting people, often the people they love they feel terrible. I'm talking about colluding with completly messed up and harmful social norms.

 

I'm talking about how deeply I could relate when I read this quote from your post and how much my life has changed since I decided to find a way to push back:

"I’ve lost my shit basically raised my voice to my dad and said “please stop asking me how my day was the answer is always going to be shit!” Had to apologise straight after, feel guilty for not being happy because that’s all they want from me and I just can’t."

 

What I see here is a daughter feeling guilty for expressing negative feelings and a father who probably meant no harm and was probably just echoing what he had taught in terms of expectaions of a broken society, not realising just how broken and socially unsustainable that society and its norms were. People need to be able to express negative emotions. When we can' express our emotions they go down to the basement and start lifting weights. 

 

Emotions are there to be expressed and heard, and when there is a build up of horrible negative ones, in my experience at any rate, it usually corresponds to a large number of smaller negative emotions that couldn't be expressed, healed and passed and so they have built up to the point where it feels like they are now at a point where it would be dangerous to release them on the world.

 

I've also been through the stage where they can't be held in anymore, literally ranting on street corners or driving my car around because I knew I had to let out all that anger and just couldn't stop ranting so the only thing I could do was drive around with the windows rolled up so that nobody had to hear me yell (for long). And then I note how proud of myself I feel - why? proud of myself for 'maintaining condideration to others' as much as was possible under the circumstances and I  have to ask myself : why do we live in a society where we are all taught and then teach each other that bottling up our emotions to this point is the healthy and thus "normal" thing to do?

 

Now that I have so many years worth of built up and unexpressed emotions, wtf am I supposed to do with them all?

And the answer that has increasingly been coming to me is: find a way to push back.

 

What that means is obviously entirely dependent on everyone and a lot of people will be like 'no way that isn't for me thanks' and fair enough

 

But for me all those emotions were the wise parts of me saying "WTF is wrong with all of you people??? can't you see there is a problem here?? can't you see there are things that need to change?" in a nutshell the bulk of my "darkness" was pure frustration, and that 'beligerance' or 'conbattiveness' or whatever the label they were going to try and use to call my anger and frustratuion a "personality disorder" to make me the problem the one that needed "fixing", was the best last-ditch-fire-fight weapon that I had to push back against them when backed into a corner - I just needed to learn how to use it effectively and who to use it on.

 

We are so incredibly against standing up for ourselves in this society and recently I am feeling increasingly like there is a huge pressure to collude with things that we know deep down (and sometimes on the surface too and everything in between) are just plain wrong.

 

Both the carrot and the stick are used in this endeavour, we are rewarded for meeting social norms and expectations (even when they are really unhealthy or harmful ones) and we are punished when we breach them (even when doing so is actually exactly what is healthy or helpful in resolving an untenable situation or creating positive change) then of course there is always the guilt: many people harm others without intention or conscious awareness, so we feel really guilty to let them know that we are feeling hurt.

 

I don't know much about the details of your situation, but I don't agree that we should have to "pick our audience" if we are in a situation where it isn't safe for us to express our emotions and we aren't actually hurting people (and I don't mean the pain that we feel when we know someone we love is in pain and we don't immediately know how to help, or need to just let them be in pain & soothe them - it's not hurting people when they feel that pain, that's them sharing ours and in a healthy society it's a healing thing, in my experience at any rate) then we aren't the problem, it might mean that our  loved ones or whomever we are talking to might need a bit of help to come around and that we might want to try and reach out to others (trying many within reason and pulling back from those that feel unsafe or abusive) because sometimes, as humans, we just need to be heard. It seems to fulfil a really important function. When the inner being rises up and says "I need to be heard" if it gets silenced for too long it shouts in my experience. That isn't something wrong with it.

 

Sometimes abuse is occurring where it shouldn't be and sometimes it's masquerading as something else. Sometimes a standard practice is an abusive practice. And if someone feels like the label they applied to you is harmful and it isn't safe to say so. Sometimes it's reasonable to recognise that you should be able to make a formal complaint and have that complaint be valued and resolved. Where that can't be done, its reasonable, in my experience, to consider that this is an abusive system that might need to be reported to the Royal Commission into violence, abuse and exploitation of persons with disabilities. eg. If I seek help from a person and they impose a label, framework, model or explanation that I find inherently harmful, refuse to listen to me as I say so and deprive me of access to other support or act in other ways that I find harmful. It might be reasonable to ask if I"m experiencing institutional abuse.

 

Identifying as a victim of Violence, abuse and exploitation can be a powerful position for a person who is seeking for the harmful behaviour to stop. Because it is framing those things as what they are. Sometimes it can be hard to find the language or support. 

 

When we are working in a system that is still coming to terms with admitting or recognising endemic abuse it can be particularly hard and to identify abuse sometimes we have to borrow from other contexts.

 

Here  is blue knot's definition of emotional abuse for children

https://www.blueknot.org.au/Resources/Information/Understanding-abuse-and-trauma/What-is-child-abuse...

eg

"Emotional abuse includes acts of omission (emotional neglect - what is not done) e.g. not expressing or showing love and affection. It also includes acts of commission (what is done) e.g. rejection, humiliation, insults, setting unreasonable expectations or restricting opportunities for the child to learn, socialise or explore. Both acts of commission and omission can negatively affect a child’s self-esteem and ability to engage with others."

Thisis something I often identify with if I find myself in the situation you described with the doctor at the beginning of yuor post. The person is supposed to be fulfilling the role of providying de-facto emotional support (in my mind, why else would I seek someone out when I'm in emotional distress specifically to resolve it?) instead they don't show any empathy - while "love and affection" might not be appropriate in a clincal setting, I would think it's reasonable to expect that empathy, understanding and appropriate emotional connection necessary to achieve safety and healing are. Coldness, and projecting dogmatic views that the person finds unhelpful are things that I have found personally to be extremely damaging and effectively constitute emotional abuse in the clinical setting.

 

Another article I found helpful in feeling comfortable with my own feelings and starting to feel more confident to push back or walk away from harmful support where it was a lost cause and find helpful support - and to telll the difference was by borrowng from the "red flags" concepts in domestic violence models. Here is a list of example

https://www.1800respect.org.au/violence-and-abuse/psychological-abuse/

Psychological abuse can include someone regularly:

  • Embarrassing you in public or in front of family, friends, support workers or people you work with
  • Calling you names
  • Threatening to harm you, your pets, children, or other people who are important to you
  • Treating you badly because of things you can’t change — for example, your religion, race, past, disability, gender, sexuality, or family
  • Ignoring you or pretending you aren’t there
  • Doing and saying things that make you feel confused. This might include someone moving or changing things and then denying they have done this.
  • Always correcting what you say with the aim of making you look or feel foolish

Many of the practices associated with common behaviour in mental health fields triggered the red flags above for me. And helped me to realise where I wasn't being treated well and needed to escape or get support in changing things (as appropriate to the situation). One of the things that made me feel confused that I would adapt to an institutional setting, were when I tried to make complaints about the way in which I was affected by certain labelling - and being told that it was not a complaint because that was standard procedure: something being standard procedure doesn't mean it can't be psycological abuse. If I (or anyone) personally finds the labels and accompanying ideology unhelpful it shouldn't be forced on them as a pre-condition of support. 

 

It  can be really scary to recognise that things aren't right in a support situation, but in my experience it can also be a really important and powerful part of healing. Having to walk away from therapists and reach out to speak out about abuse and find safety from it or get the right support that i needed to speak out about my feelings and things that just weren't right without feeling gulty about it was really hard, but it's also been really important for me and made me feel less and less powerless. The best part is when it starts to feel like what I thought was a terrible quality: that 'beligerance' that 'anger' was actually a part of me that was only loud because it was trying to get m y attention and the attention of my fellow community members, when it starts to be heard by the right people and things start to change, it starts to reveal itself as something taht was actually a postive quality and a very natural and adaptive (NOT maladaptive but genuinely adaptive ) reaction.

 

I don't know if any of this has been helpful at all, but I guess what I am trying to say is that you don't have to accept a support person that doesn't feel helpful. Or an ideolgy - if 'borderline personality disorder' is not a label or concept you find helpful then you should be allowed to work to a model or framework you do find helpful, or even just work with your own inate understanding of yourself: the right therapist or support person will do that and if they won't they aren't the right one. 

 

I hope that helps, our society is in a place where it does need to change, I feel. We have been labelling everyone who expresses this, and trying to make them the problem, they aren't. And sometimes, in my experience, what others called my 'disorder' was actually my conscience and good sense - it's hard and it's really, really raw sometimes. But speaking out - even just the post you made  - can make a huge difference, hearing others we can relate to, for me anyway, is what builds strength and confidence to push back against a society that needs to change.

 

Not everyone is going to agree - but that doesn't mean its about "picking one's audience" for me that phrase is a silencing phrase, for me it's more about speaking out anyway - and trusting that it's going to be raw and messy at first and maybe for quite a while but it is going to get better with time. Because it's far better that the truth comes out, and sometimes it's been buried under a lot of different layers.

 

Wishing you all the very, very best and thanks for your amazing honest post 

 

There are increasingly many people from all walks of life all over the world who are becoming more able to call out the parallels between many standard psychiatric practices and practices of abuse. Bearing in mind if a person finds some particular framework helpful, and they knowingly chose it it may not be absue, but sometimes these frameworks are delivered in a way that matches coercive control. Again many of the things on this list, presented in a domestic violence context had parallels for me with aspects of "care" that I found incredibly harmful. The tropes of "you needed it" or "it was for your own good" or "its to prevent harm to self or others" didn't ring true for me in my case, and was just another aspect of the abuse (like "you deserved it" or "you need me" commonly are in an abusive domestic situation) 

https://www.womensaid.org.uk/information-support/what-is-domestic-abuse/coercive-control/

  • Isolating you from friends and family
  • Depriving you of basic needs, such as food
  • Monitoring your time
  • Monitoring you via online communication tools or spyware
  • Taking control over aspects of your everyday life, such as where you can go, who you can see, what you can wear and when you can sleep
  • Depriving you access to support services, such as medical services
  • Repeatedly putting you down, such as saying you’re worthless
  • Humiliating, degrading or dehumanising you
  • Controlling your finances
  • Making threats or intimidating you

Sometimes for me, I was being deprived access to support services by the people providing the support services: because they were providing services that were not supportive to me, but supportive of their belief system/ideology (eg "borderline personality disorder") that I actually found humiliating, degrading or dehumanising. All the other things on the list, I experienced with very little or no adjustment needed from what was listed.

 

I don't know if you and I are on the same page but I found this article really helpful, exactly because I didn't have to adapt it. It's one of increadingly many articles that spell out the problems with the power imbalances and coercive control in mainstream psychiatry explictly. Ironically it'sone of the facets of the framework presented that criticism of the paradigm or "sacred science", are not permitted. It has become so bad in some institutions, unfortunately psychiatry being one, that some people even think that science is dogmatic. Which is really sad because true science is the exact opposite of dogma. I found this article actually helped me feel a bit safer, because its one of increasingly many that actually speak out openly and highlight that for some of us we have been in an oppressive system, and those of us who have experienced it as brainwashing or coersive control rather than help and support are not alone.

http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar_url?url=https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a339/affa25f47eab218ba...

 

I found frameworks like this really helpful when I was going through domestic violence, to start to understand how to identify how to be safe, and I"m starting to realise that we might need to start working to put together resources that help with red flags and achieving safety in institutional settings too.

 

Re: Borderline Personality Disorder just a label put on a deeply empathetic person that has been through some tough times?

Hi @Elis @Fredd50 @Owlunar 

I’m hearing you all - 

I was diagnosed with BPD about 10 yrs ago. I’m now in my early 50’s and am struggling terribly.

 I was sexually abused as a child by three different guys. 

I now suffer from complex ptsd, depression and anxiety. My emotions are everywhere snd my brain is very heightened. 

My emotions were always squashed by my parents in my childhood. I hid my emotions then and still do now. 

I was never allowed or able to express my emotions or opinions. 

I struggle a lot with BPD. 

Not really sure what the question was now!!! 😊

Re: Borderline Personality Disorder just a label put on a deeply empathetic person that has been through some tough times?

@BlueBay I hear you too!

 

I often lose sight of the starting point when the emotions come out that haven't been expressed in so long and kind of leave me lost and stunned! It's one of the reasons my posts get so long and rambly sometimes (I'm so sorry for that!)

 

I have a hope that the reason they often saythat "people grow out of BPD" is that when people start to get opportunities to express and understand their emotions and grow in mutually respectful environments things heal and then the person doesn't express so many hurt emotions so often. From the point of view of those finely tuned to judge people based on the level of distresed emtion being expressed - then perceive the person to be returned to a 'normal' behavioural pattern 

 

But IMV were never abnormal - just have got less distressed.

 

I pray that every day I will see more people expressing their own true emotions and opinons and being welcomed and valued for it all with a big metaphorical warm hug!  

Re: Borderline Personality Disorder just a label put on a deeply empathetic person that has been through some tough times?

@BlueBay I hear you too!

 

 

I often lose sight of the starting point when the emotions come out that haven't been expressed in so long and kind of leave me lost and stunned! It's one of the reasons my posts get so long and rambly sometimes (I'm so sorry for that!)

 

I have a hope that the reason they often saythat "people grow out of BPD" is that when people start to get opportunities to express and understand their emotions and grow in mutually respectful environments things heal and then the person doesn't express so many hurt emotions so often. From the point of view of those finely tuned to judge people based on the level of distresed emtion being expressed - then perceive the person to be returned to a 'normal' behavioural pattern 

 

But IMV were never abnormal - just have got less distressed.

 

I pray that every day I will see more people expressing their own true emotions and opinons and being welcomed and valued for it all with a big metaphorical warm hug!  

Re: Borderline Personality Disorder just a label put on a deeply empathetic person that has been through some tough times?

Hi BlueBay,

Just like that I suddenly see that I don’t have it that bad. I’m so sorry that has happened to you, I felt a lot of anger build up inside me reading about your early traumatic experiences.

 

Can I ask a question? Are you still angry with them? Not too long ago a read an article about anger and how it fuels depression some you get stuck in a feedback loop of pain>anger>depression it helped me see what I was doing.

 

Don’t give up keep working, keep learning new techniques, developing yourself and showing yourself kindness because I think something like that will be like trying to pull apart two giant magnets you’ll be pulling and pulling thinking your not making any progress then all of sudden it will I promise you that.

 

A place that helped me a lot was located in the beautiful Sunshine Coast.I know and deeply respect  the owner of who has a huge heart and he doesn’t judge anyone at all and will be your mate for life (I can’t advertise the name of the place here unfortunately) but I was sent there (well forced by my family) and the condition I was in was severely traumatised (I mean I’ve never been like this in my entire life) I was in deep psychosis from way to many drugs, I tried to escape and got all the way too town, with no money in my pockets Ihad to go back haha. Floods of tears for the next few days I didn’t talk to anyone. After 4 or 5 days I wasn’t frowning anymore and my face opened up and was clear and beautiful again. They helped me work through a lot of painful events and I would like to see you go there, I am 110% certain you will love it and they will help you so much they are wonderful forward thinking and they are straight down the line especially a great women who was one of my coaches who is so in tune and kind of magical She can put you in a state of conscious hypnosis for example, they have done their homework and continue too make sure they have the newest techniques and tools available.The thing is you feel great when your there but when you go home and are triggered again by the world and not doing self care you can fall back into old habits but still I left that place with so much pain off my shoulders. I think it would help lifting that burden off your shoulders.

 

Re: Borderline Personality Disorder just a label put on a deeply empathetic person that has been through some tough times?

Hi @Elis 

sorry I just saw your post. Yes I’m still angry really sngry. Sngry that it happened, sngry at my parents for not protecting me, sngry at myself, sngry that I am still going through this with mr memories and also my mental illness. 

That sounds like an amazing experience you had on the Sunshine Coast. 

But reality is - I’m not sure I’m ready. 

It is really difficult. 

 

Re: Borderline Personality Disorder just a label put on a deeply empathetic person that has been through some tough times?

I look at it more  as just a set of problems that some people have in common and they are then understood by a diagnosis, a name. 

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