Borderline Personality Disorder. The first time that I heard this diagnosis, I was sitting in the meeting room of the Psychiatric Unit of the hospital. I had been in the hospital for about a week, refusing to eat, avoiding eye contact, and throw tantrums like a toddler. “I am not a fucking borderline! I’m not fucking crazy!” My thoughts racing so fast and my entire body felt like it was going to explode. The worst part was not knowing who came up with this awful accusation. My adoptive mom points to the therapist, I trusted to never talk behind my back. My therapist said that my adoptive mom came to her asking about borderline personality disorder. I still don’t know who originally pointed into that direction. All I know is they’d been talking about it for several months before they told me. It hurts to know that no one really can be trusted- except for newborns and pets. Thinking about that hospitalization makes me wanna scream and cry. I wanna hate everyone that was involved. I wanna run away and never speak to another human. But I also know that they all just wanted to help me.
It doesn’t matter who came up with my diagnosis (well, it obviously matters a little bit to me). What matters is how this diagnosis has affected me. BPD is very difficult to accurately diagnose, let alone treat. It’s not like other psychiatric disorders, where pills can be handed to make delusions dissolve, emotions regulate, and concentration return. Medication can help to an extent, but they don’t re-program your brain (neither does Electroconvulsive Therapy). It takes a lot of time and work. The symptoms of BPD are described in three areas of a person’s life: emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Today, I’m just blogging about the emotional symptoms of BPD and the correlation to my life.
Normally, temperament is a term found in the very child development text books, because it’s determined before humans can even talk, or crawl, or even have teeth. Some babies seem pretty laid back and can sleep through thunder, but other babies are frightened more easily, have trouble sleeping through a quit night, and cry more. This is just the way they are biologically developed. While not all babies with a sensitive temperament are gonna develop BPD, most of us that struggle with BPD are very sensitive and have been our entire lives. I’m sure if you know me, you can come up with examples of me being overly-sensitive. I know that I get overstimulated very easily. That’s why I shut down and often hide, when it comes to parties and even at the grocery store. I’ll skip things on my list if an aisle is too crowded. Small environmental things are so much more stimulating for me than they are for others. I hate it, because sometimes, I just wanna relax and hangout with friends without feeling stressed for no good reason.
I have a friend, who in the very beginning of our relationship, he told me that I was kind of intense. I just bursted into laughter, because the therapist in one of the groups that I was attending had just been talking about the intensity of emotional reactions that people with BPD often display. My reaction to being told that I was diagnosed with BPD is a perfect example of this. Instead of asking what it meant, I just exploded into a rage without allowing any one to speak with me. For all they knew, I wasn’t even paying attention to the conversation, because I had been staring at the ground for the past ten minutes. It’s hard to control my emotions, especially when I think that no one else feels the same way. I want my emotions justified. I want understanding of how I feel, but I’m learning that no one really cares how I feel. People have their own lives and see things different.
I have an example from this past week for the next symptom. On Wednesday, the Medicaid van was an hour late to take me to my treatment program. I was so pissed off. I got to my treatment program and just sulked all day. Didn’t talk much, went back to no eye contact, and by the end of the day, I was in tears. It wasn’t until the next afternoon that I was able to pick myself up. When I’m in a bad mood, I’m in a bad mood for the rest of the day and possibly the week. People with BPD slowly return to their baseline mood. (A quick off-topic side note that I just thought about: my baseline mood has always been melancholy. Not quite depressed, but bleh. But lately, I’ve been developing a new baseline, but I’m not sure how to describe it yet.)
The final symptom in BPD’s emotional characteristics is chronic problems with depression, anxiety, anger, or feelings of emptiness. (It’s sad that I went down the list of symptoms and checked almost every single one of them off.) I think this blog did a pretty good job describing chronic problem with anger, depression and anxiety. Emptiness, well I can definitely say these past couple of years, I was feeling pretty empty and lacked any direction for a while.
My next blog is going to describe the though patterns associated with BPD. I’ll post either tomorrow or Sunday. It may take me a couple of days to type it, because it’ll be a little “intense.”
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