In Which I Out Myself… And Try To Break Stigmas

His office runs group DBT therapy and I joined their intense summer program, which had 3 hour sessions, 2 or 3 days a week (I don’t remember), for about 6 weeks.

It was really expensive but I needed it, so I asked for charity to help me cover it.

That DBT course changed my life. It taught me so much about Borderline Personality Disorder and how to deal with it. As I mentioned in my previous post about BPD, DBT was created as a therapy for BPD by Marsha Lineham, and it is comprised of 4 parts- mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation and interpersonal effectiveness.

It is supposed to be so effective that statistically up to 75 percent of people diagnosed with BPD no longer fit the criteria after a certain amount of years doing DBT. Google is telling me after 1 year but I remember originally hearing it after 5 or 10 years, but maybe these are new statistics.

I learned that borderline personality disorder is caused by the combination of being emotionally sensitive by nature and growing up in an invalidating environment.

I learned that complex PTSD and borderline personality disorder are so similar that some professionals want to even rename BPD as C-PTSD. But at its most basic, borderline personality disorder is a result of trauma. Yes, growing up in an invalidating environment is a trauma. And yes, I got an official diagnosis of CPTSD as well.

Stigmas

When I first got my diagnosis, I was terrified to tell anyone about it, because of how stigmatized it is. Even I believed the stigma, that it was synonymous with abuse, until I learned more about it.

I tried talking about it online in some anonymous forums and I was told the most horrible things. 

• People with borderline personality disorder are unfixable 
• We’re impossible to deal with, and that’s why even therapists often don’t want to work with us as clients
• We are abusers, cruel and manipulative
• That we destroy the people who we are close to
• That we create chaos in everyone’s lives around us
• That we are in denial of the issues we have
• And that we aren’t willing to work on ourselves and get better
• And probably the worst of all was this person who was saying that BPD isn’t a mental illness, but a disorder in our personality and who we are, and there is “no person hiding underneath waiting to come out once the medication kicks in” since the essence of who we are is the problem.

That last thing of all honestly set me spiraling. I turned to the head of my DBT program and asked her if it was true that there was no “normal person hiding underneath waiting to come out” and if it was true that we were in denial of our issues and were unfixable. That was when I learned about the tremendously high “cure rate” of BPD once you learned DBT. I learned how wrong all these incorrect stigmas about BPD were.

I learned that while, yes, people with BPD can be challenging to live with sometimes, that doesn’t make us abusive and in denial of our issues. Yes, sometimes people with BPD can have abusive behaviors, but not all, and most of us desperately want to get help and work at it. We’re miserable untreated and want anything to feel and get better.

People with BPD can be very emotionally fragile and as brittle as one of those delicate glass Christmas figurines, but that doesn’t mean we make people’s lives miserable.

One of the most problematic things I ever heard from a so called “professional” about BPD (her name is Doctor Ramani… and maybe I’m splitting by saying I hate her with a passion over this, but I’m not willing to hear anything else she says because of that) is that people with BPD are very similar to narcissists in that we both lack empathy. I can’t even tell you how wrong this is. I know so many people with BPD and if anything, the trait that probably unites them is their empathy and how much they feel for others. So many people with borderline personality disorder end up becoming therapists, and some of the most empathetic people I know are those with borderline. That stereotype is as far from the truth as it can get. In fact, people with BPD often enter relationships with and are abused by narcissists.

Here’s the thing.

I kind of get why some people have a very negative view of people with BPD. One word.

Both people with narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder develop these disorders as a result of growing up in a really problematic background, often abuse… and therefore it is only logical that there will be many people who have both of them. In fact, this study shows that there are a significant amount of people with both.

I am pretty sure that the people that are so negatively stigmatized with BPD are people who have both BPD and narcissistic personality disorder. Because, yes, many of the negative stereotypes people have about those with BPD really fit people who are narcissistic in addition to borderline. 

Blaming other people for all their issues? Yes.

And when you have issues like a temper, mood swings, etc… and you think you are flawless, you won’t apologize if you hurt someone when you lost it, and will blame the other person for making you be that way, and you definitely won’t try to make things any better. And that definitely can be abusive. 

The more I learned about narcissism and about BPD, the more I realized that the people that abused me that had BPD also had NPD, and that was the biggest issue of all. It all made sense once I realized that.

And I realize the irony in writing a post trying to break the stigma against BPD while “reassigning blame from BPD onto NPD” but… people with NPD aren’t evil people. They are suffering from trauma. And it’s essentially a deep seated insecurity which comes out as narcissism. And they need help. But because they’re suffering so much from this, they can’t admit they need help, and so they suffer. And unfortunately others suffer with them. And it is so hard to treat NPD because it goes against the very nature of what NPD is. 

A diagnosis gave me knowledge of language and concepts.

In my year with my first therapist, I had no idea that my “floating off into space” when I was stressed was called dissociation, and the therapist never gave me that name. Had I had that name, I could have learned tools to use to stop dissociation. After doing DBT, and many years of therapy, I have so many tools in my arsenal to help me come back from dissociation, many of them from the crisis management section of DBT, but also ones I learned in somatic therapy, etc…

The knowledge that I was black and white thinking and splitting made me sometimes be able to take a step back and see that I was doing that, and then make a conscious effort to stop doing that. In fact, in dialectical behavioral therapy, the dialectical aspect is being able to see two concepts at once and integrate them, and not see all or nothings about situations. 

I would not have gone to DBT had I not figured out I had BPD. 

I know people that had BPD but because they didn’t know it was BPD, they were just being treated for anxiety, which was helping only slightly, but not enough. However, once they got that diagnosis, they were able to get on the right meds and get much better.

One of the most important things I learned about BPD is that it is caused by the combination of naturally having intense emotions and growing up being invalidated. 

What is validation? It is acknowledging and accepting feelings without judgment.

We are so quick to judge people’s emotions. “Oh, stop being such a drama queen.” “That is something stupid to be upset about.” “That’s not a big deal.”

But we need, by nature, to feel seen and heard, and not shut down. 

For example, you can “feel no one likes you”. Which means feeling alone, unloved, unappreciated, etc… That doesn’t mean that it is a fact that that no one likes you. And it doesn’t mean that you are allowed to scream at people because of that. You can feel miserable and jealous that someone has more nice things than you… but that doesn’t mean they actually do have more nice things, and you aren’t allowed to go take things from them. 

Validating someone’s emotions does not mean that you are giving them a pass to behave how they want.

When someone has intense emotions by nature (and yes, people are born that way; you can see babies like that from day one), and they are invalidated and told that their feelings are stupid, they become more and more desperate to be heard, and so they learn that the only way to be heard is to make a big freaking deal about something, screaming, freaking out, crying, etc… and that can continue into adulthood… and then you end up with BPD.

One of the ways of healing that cycle is through validation- also external validation, via therapists and loved ones, and self validation, which therapy teaches you, and the DBT tool of radical acceptance helps with that.

Because of how much I learned about the importance of validation, I try to incorporate that into my parenting, especially because some of my kids have more intense emotions by nature, or as I call it “big feelings”. I want to make sure that what happened to me doesn’t happen to them, and I teach them that they are allowed to feel however they want, that all feelings are welcome in our house, and all feelings matter. Again, all feelings doesn’t mean all actions- you can be angry but you can’t scream at someone or hit them. You can be sad but that doesn’t mean you can wail into my ear.

A big part of me wonders if my EDS played a part in my developing BPD. (There is a case study I found about someone with both, but I don’t know the statistical likelihood.) People with invisible illnesses like EDS, people in pain that don’t look like it from the outside, no visible cuts and bruises, can often be accused of faking it and/or making a big deal out of nothing. And when you’re suffering in pain and no one believes you or calls you a drama queen, on a regular basis… that is invalidation central there.

• Fear of abandonment and black and white thinking in relationships- I thought I didn’t really have this anymore, but recently it did come back to bite me in the behind and I almost ruined an important relationship over this. Healing isn’t linear, but I’m mostly better there. 
• Splitting and black and white thinking in general? I can’t say I don’t do this, but at least I’m often able to notice when I’m doing that and try to reign myself in. But if I can’t, I often am receptive to hearing that I’m doing that, even if I can’t automatically stop doing that.
• Unstable sense of self? I think I no longer have this.
• My mood swings are mostly better, but I’m on mood stabilizers, so I don’t know if I can write this one off.
• Same with the chronic feelings of emptiness.
• Intense, inappropriate anger… Sometimes, I’ll admit. And my therapist is giving me tools to deal with this when it comes up.
• Dissociation, yes. But at least I know how to handle it when it comes up.

So yes, I still have a BPD diagnosis. But I’d recon that by far I do not look like what people think of when they think of when they hear BPD.

The stigma around BPD causes a bad cycle. The people that are “stereotypically BPD”, who are most likely comorbid with something else, are what comes to mind for the population at large when they hear BPD. Because of that, no one wants to be associated with that and accused of all sorts of terrible things, like I was back in the day on that message board. So we keep it a secret. And then the only people known to have BPD are the ones that fit the stereotype. And on it goes.

I’m coming out as having BPD because I want to challenge what you think of when you hear the words borderline personality disorder. I don’t mind becoming another face you think of when you hear the phrase, so that maybe you can realize that empathetic, loving, compassionate friends that you love might have borderline and you didn’t even notice, because BPD is not the horrible “synonym for abuser” that people think it is.

I am fully and truly aware that some people will change their opinion of me when they hear this. That some people might decide they no longer want to be my friend. Follow my blog. Be friends with me on Facebook.

But those that love me, that I wouldn’t want to leave me, already know this about me. And they don’t care.