Just found this fantastic article out at The Dana Foundation (which I’m adding to my Expeditions page). If you have or have ever been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, you might find this interesting.
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On 11.25.09, In Borderline Personality Disorder, By admin
On 11.25.09, In Borderline Personality Disorder, Dating, By admin
I was in a horrible, embarrassing relationship for several years. I chased him. He let me catch him. He ran away. I chased him. He let me catch him. He ran away. This lasted for four-hundred-and-seventy-five years, which is longer than most prison sentences. The problem seemed to have something to do with my legs, which would not stop moving in his direction. I cursed myself the entire time, and cursed him too, of course.
It was just your typical, lopsided, obsessive relationship. Nothing special, really, except that it literally drove me crazy. Oh, everything was fine so long as we were together – but the minute he ditched me I lost my mind. I stalked this man in a way that would have driven most people to seek a protective order, but he was not “most people”, so in our case I simply stalked him until he suddenly decided we were dating again. From the very beginning he behaved in a way that would have driven most people way far away from his direction, but I was not “most people”. It was almost as if I said, “Wow, I really hate you. Where have you been all my life?”
This relationship didn’t simply happen out of nowhere. It was one of many that followed a similar pattern. This one just happened to last four-hundred-and-seventy-five years instead of, say, one-hundred years.
I was so miserably, dangerously crazy when I was chasing this guy. Once I caught him, I was fine. Just another nice lady working in tech support. But this was a guy who wouldn’t stay caught, so I was crazy a goodly percentage of those four-hundred-seventy-five years. In fact, I started seeing a psychiatrist at the beginning of that relationship. I also went in to therapy. Because the relationship lasted for so many, many years I had plenty of time to try to figure out why I was in the relationship to begin with, and the general direction of my psychiatric and psychological treatments began to focus on Borderline Personality Disorder. BPD made sense to me (although I must admit no doctor or therapist – psychological assessment examiner notwithstanding – seemed to agree with me). I found a great textbook about the treatment of BPD, and I found a therapist willing to focus on Dialectical Behavior Therapy in a one-on-one situation. DBT became my focus, my talisman, my ticket to a future that didn’t involve running.
And then, suddenly, it was over. I met and married someone else. Someone I didn’t have to chase, who happens to love me, and who I love, too.
With the horrible relationship behind me, I couldn’t think of much to talk about in therapy, so I stopped going. The decision about who and what to fight was a no-brainer so long as the war still raged: the enemy was clearly identifiable as “my boyfriend”, and the war was for my sanity. Once the boyfriend was out of the picture I lost track of where the front line was, or if there was even still a war going on.
It’s difficult to know where to begin in therapy when I’m not standing in the middle of a war. A lot of the language I used to describe my feelings back then is gone because I’ve lost the context. If I were to see a therapist today and try to tell her (or him) why I wanted to see them and what I hoped to achieve I would be at a loss.
“What’s wrong?” they might ask.
I’d have to say, “Well, nothing, really.”
“And what do you hope to achieve through therapy?”
“Eh, er, I dunno to tell you the truth, hard to put in to words.”
I plan to crack open my old friend, Cognitive-Behavorial Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (by Marsha M. Linehan) this weekend and see where it leads me. And blog about it here, of course.
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On 11.24.09, In Borderline Personality Disorder, By admin
“The most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is the more he is convinced of his own infallibility…”
— Thomas Merton
I enjoyed re-reading my old psychological assessment, yesterday. Typing it up for this blog gave me new insights in to what the examiner was reporting; insights that were quite incomplete when the assessment was done.
The assessment upset me a great deal the first time I read it, back in 2002. I was expecting a report all-together different than the 4-page map of my psyche it turned out to be. Key terms like “ego-inflation”, “narcissistic”, and “masochistic” glared back at me like charges in a police report, and my first instinct was to say, “I didn’t do it!”. In fact, I called my then-boyfriend in tears the night after I picked it up from the examiner. I read it over and over again for a few days before losing it somewhere in my multitude of personal papers.
Transcribing my psychological assessment made me think about each word individually, and I decided to challenge my assumptions about the meaning of the words that bothered me the most. I decided to Google “ego-inflation” first. The first thing I found was the Thomas Merton quote at the top of this post. I’m writing about it here because it resonated with me.
Those of you who have read some of my more recent posts may have noticed that I am contemplating going back in to therapy. I know I need to do just that, but trust is a problem for me. Because of that I tend to do my own research and fall back on self-help. At some level I know this is illogical, and that without discourse with another person all I can do is rearrange the same old ideas in my mind over and over again. I can even remember bringing this up in therapy. Unfortunately, I lost faith in every therapist I ever had and never finished working through the issue of trust. Distrust tends to fester and now here I am again, very much at the mercy of my own ideas and suppositions.
Yesterday, I realized that what the examiner meant when she referred to “ego-inflation” was my tendency to create ideas about the world and my place in it out of my own imagination and then to project those ideas on to my environment. This resonated with me because it is, in a word, true. I can’t speak for anyone but myself when I say this, but without the willingness to learn from other human beings I do, very much, tend to look solely to myself for leadership.
I imagine myself driving down a highway, utterly lost. I know where I want to go, but I have no idea how to get there. I am unwilling (or unable) to ask for directions. I’ve been driving for what seems like forever, and the feeling of being lost – the fear, the doubt, the sheer frustration – eventually becomes overwhelming and to counter that I convince myself that the road I’m on will get me to my destination, no doubt about it. I do this because it beats feeling lost, and I’ll continue down that road until the conviction wears away. The sense that my destination is near, but just out of reach, is maddening.
This reflects nicely in a recurring nightmare of mine. It usually involves walking through some kind of structure – a parking garage, or a mall, or even my own house – and suddenly finding that no matter what door I open, what stair I climb, what entrance or exit I pass through, I can’t get to where I’m going. The dream tends to go on and on and on.
The problem is not how to trust someone, or finding someone to trust, really. The problem, really, is being willing to ask for and follow directions, knowing that I am asking a complete stranger how to get where I’m going.
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On 11.23.09, In Borderline Personality Disorder, By admin
When I was 35 I asked my psychiatrist for a diagnosis – but not just any diagnosis. I wanted something concrete. Something scientific. Something repeatable. She argued that a diagnosis wasn’t terribly important, and I argued for psychological testing. She referred me to Examiner X.
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