Sunny Spells and Scattered Showers: Textbook

last session

'Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder make frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment (Criterion 1). The perception of impending separation or rejection, or the loss of external structure, can lead to profound changes in self-image, affect, cognition, and behavior. These individuals are very sensitive to environmental circumstances. They experience intense abandonment fears and inappropriate anger even when faced with a realistic time-limited separation or when there are unavoidable changes in plans (e.g. sudden despair in reaction to a clinician’s announcing the end of the hour; panic of fury when someone important to them is just a few minutes late or must cancel an appointment). They may believe that this "abandonment" implies they are "bad." These abandonment fears are related to an intolerance of being alone and a need to have other people with them. Their frantic efforts to avoid abandonment may include impulsive actions such as self-mutilating or suicidal behaviors, which are described separately in Criterion 5.

Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder have a pattern of unstable and intense relationships (Criterion 2). They may idealize potential caregivers or lovers at the first or second meeting, demand to spend a lot of time together, and share the most intimate details early in a relationship. However, they may switch quickly from idealizing other people to devaluing them, feeling that the other person does not care enough, does not give enough, is not "there" enough. These individuals can empathize with and nurture other people, but only with the expectation that the other person will "be there" in return to meet their own needs on demand. These individuals are prone to sudden and dramatic shifts in their view of others, who may alternately be seen as beneficent supports or as cruelly punitive. Such shifts often reflect disillusionment with a caregiver who nurturing qualities had been idealized or whose rejection or abandonment is expected.'

I cannot begin to describe how tired I am of all this. I feel like I'm just going round and round and round in circles, but getting absolutely nowhere. And here's the clincher, the exact, textbook behaviour that's been going on for the last two weeks - Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder may have a pattern of undermining themselves at the moment a goal is about to be realized (e.g...... regressing severely after a discussion of how well therapy is going........). This one is so painfully true it actually needs to be flashing.

And there it is. The problem with being so utterly predictable is that when she names what it is that might be going on, I react so totally and completely that it can't but be true. I'm taken over by it, and it shakes me to my core, because I cannot stand to think that this is how I am. I've come a long way, but I still have so far to go. The DSM also helpfully remarks that after ten years of therapy, symptoms may have reduced enough to no longer meet the criteria for diagnosis. Ten years. Ten. I'm six in, and only dealing with bpd specifically for the last 12 months. While it's good to know there may be light at the end of the tunnel, it's far anough away right now to be of zero consolation.

I don't know what I'm at. I don't know if I want to keep blogging, because I don't know if in doing so, I'm spending too much time in my head. But, I also want to stop taking my meds, and stop seeing Therapist, because I'm back to thinking that really (despite all of the above) this whole borderline thing is just a crock of shit, something I've made up because............ok I don't why.

If my posts are gappy the next while, you'll know why. If I decide to stop blogging entirely, or take a break, I'll let you know. Mostly, I'm just very, very confused right now.