I have to admit I do not consider myself a regular borderliner. I do not know whether there is any truth to this or whether this is simply grandiosity on my side. When I read forums and message boards aimed at people with BPD I am disgusted by all the self pity and unaccountability. People blaming their BPD for them cheating on their spouses. Posting messages to the tune of “I went ballistic last night and I could see I was hurting my partner, but I just could not stop. That darn borderline.”
Of course I have those impulses. If things do not go my way, my first instinct is to stomp my feet, to throw things around the room and to hurtle insults at my husband, until he concedes and does as I say, if only to keep the peace. But, I choose not to act on that. I choose to talk to my husband and tell him I feel like throwing a tantrum. I choose to go out and take my car for a spin. I choose to ring Jay and tell him I feel like acting out. Anything, as long as it helps me get through the next few hours.
This has taken a lot of practice and a lot of hours spent in therapy. But I pride myself on having put so much effort into changing those behaviors that were problematic in my marriage. My husband and I are coming up to our three year anniversary and I cannot even remember the last time I threw a full scale tantrum. There is still some sulking every now and then. Still some extreme clinginess when I am sad or scared. But these emotions are so much easier to work with.
I have often wondered what “made” me borderline. Because I think we can all agree that borderliners are not born. I have yet to meet a borderliner that has had a carefree, stable, loving childhood free from any trauma, abuse and/or neglect.
When I started nannying and looking after babies and toddlers I was surprised by how similar my responses were to theirs. I often think that I am so good with children, not because of my nurturing and caring personality, but because I am so similar to them in my thinking and acting. I have their constant need for reassurance, for touch, for acknowledgment. When I get anxious I get the compulsive need to see and touch/cuddle my husband every few minutes, much like a toddler experimenting with her autonomy. Wanting to explore the world, yet needing to know her caregiver is still there. When I have had a rough day, I await the return of my husband anxiously, and need to be close to him for a good one to two hours, meaning literally being within a 2-3 meter proximity of him. I had previously attributed these things to just being part of my craziness, but noticed that these behaviors were very similar to the behaviors displayed by the 8 month old baby and the 26 month old toddler I was looking after.
This made me wonder, if rather than being crazy, there was a part of me that had not properly grown up yet.
I find it hard to consider this possibility as it automatically makes me feel ungrateful towards my parents. As if I would be blaming them for my acting out. It was always easier to say “that is just GI, she is crazy like that.”
But over the past year Jay and I have looked into my early childhood experiences. It has been scary, as well as kind of liberating.
Treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder consists mostly of Linehan Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectal Behavioral Therapy (DBT). These therapies are centered around identifying irrational thoughts and dysfunctional behavior patterns. Recognizing that rather than these feelings, thoughts and urges coming “from nowhere” (as it always felt like to me) there is a chain of thoughts, feelings and events that precipitates the urge to act out. Once you can identify these links, therapy tries to teach you to intervene earlier on in the chain rather than later. In DBT they also teach you self-soothing techniques, distress tolerance strategies and emotion regulation.
These therapies go hand in hand with endless forms to fill out, analyses to write out whenever you have engaged in self-destructive behavior, diary cards to complete at the end of every day, etc. All the rules, forms and homework made me feel very controlled and in turn made me rebel. Jay can bear testament to me dragging my feet at every step, until we finally decided (after two years of fruitless DBT) that this was not working for me.
I do not think DBT and CBT do not work. I think they definitely have their place in the treatment of BPD, however, I think they are over-prescribed, and that not everyone fits these therapy models. I learned all the skills, all the strategies, and I knew exactly what to do when I felt like acting out. But this was not enough for me. I did not just want an action plan for the times I felt like hurting myself, I wanted the urges to go away completely. After three or four years of feeling like hurting myself more often than not, I felt very discouraged with DBT. If this was what my life was going to amount to, wanting to hurt myself most days, and then spending all of my energy trying to postpone that moment until it would eventually go away, only to have to repeat the whole process the very next day, then I would rather be a chronic self-harmer.
I can see how CBT and DBT can work for some people, but I wanted, I needed, to know why I was feeling these things. Why did I react so strongly to rejection and abandonment? Why could someone cancelling a meeting with me, send me into suicidal despair? Why did I rarely yell or express anger, but instead felt like tearing myself apart, wanting to feel the pain soar across my skin? Why did I sulk, much like a toddler, even though I was now a grown twenty-something year old woman?
I needed to know why. I did not need to know what to do once the feeling was there, I needed to know how it got there in the first place.
So over the last year or so, Jay and I have been looking at my early childhood.
I was a baby born six weeks early. I then spent the first two weeks of my life in an incubator, after which my mum signed me out of hospital against doctors’ recommendation. She was tired of driving up and down between home and the hospital (this was before mums were allowed to stay overnight if their baby was in hospital). I was home for four weeks, after which I was put in daycare, full-time. When I turned four, I started primary school. I was dropped off with a babysitter in the morning, who fed me breakfast and got me ready for school, picked me up again at the end of the day and looked after me until my mum picked me up around 6pm. I do not have very fond memories of this babysitter, nor are they overly negative. Over the next few years my younger sister and I went through a dozen or so babysitters, until, at eight years old, my parents deemed me old enough to walk myself home after school, let myself in, fix myself a snack and entertain myself until my dad came home around 6pm.
Do I remember this time as particularly lonely or scary? In short, no. I remember being proud that I was considered mature enough to have my own house-key. Could it be interpreted as neglect? Perhaps. But again, I want to stress this was not something I experienced as frightening or lonely.
It did mean that throughout my early childhood, I possibly could have suffered an attachment disorder, where I never properly bonded with one primary caregiver. I am all for daycare, but I consider a six week old baby too young to go into daycare for 50hours a week. I also don’t know how daycares were run in the eighties, but the daycare that I volunteered for three years ago, had one adult looking after six babies. No matter how loving and caring you are, the reality of looking after six babies is that, for most of the day, you are meeting their basic needs. You are changing nappies, preparing bottles, feeding, burping, putting to bed, and that leaves very little time for one-on-one bonding.
I was a high achiever all throughout primary school, middle school and junior high school. I scored top marks in most subjects, but rather than thriving on this success, my sense of self was tied up in my achievements. Therefore, a slightly less than perfect mark could shatter my self-esteem so completely, as I felt it rendered me a complete failure as a person.
Babies need to be able to form trust in their primary caregiver that their wants and needs will be met, that their distress will be comforted, and their pains will be soothed. Only by forming that trusting relationship, does the toddler learn to trust in herself. I cannot help think that this step was somehow missed in my development, as my sense of self has been very shaky ever since I can remember.
Of course there were other factors that added to this as well. I choose not to go into detail about that out of respect for my parents, as I believe they did the best they could with what they had.
But the realization that there was not something bad or crazy inside of me marked a turning point for me in therapy. Rather than literally wanting to cut and bleed the crazy badness out of me, I was able to feel compassion for the toddler I had once been. When I felt sad and was scared that the feeling would consume me, I was able to recognize that the part of me that thinks the sadness will never end, is a very young part. And that the adult inside me knows the sadness will go away eventually, and I will not fall apart or disintegrate because of it.
I think this was a vital step for me that was missed during my years of DBT and CBT. With all their forms and steps and techniques, nobody had ever sat down with me to look at why I constantly felt like hurting myself. Why were these urges there in the first place?
This is not to say that my urges to act out disappeared overnight. It is still hard sometimes and it still takes a lot of effort to resist the urge to hurt myself. But rather than it feeling like a never-ending battle, it feels like I am slowly allowing the young part of me to grow up and integrate with the rest of me. I can envision a time where I will be self-harm free. And most importantly, I can be gentle with myself. It is much easier to put effort into looking after myself, if I know it is merely the young part of me that needs nurturing, rather than putting effort into not hurting myself day after day after day without end in sight.
And over these last few weeks I have had to soothe that younger part of me a lot. Jay has had to cancel quite a few sessions over the last month or so due to illness, and I notice that a part of me feels like she’s falling apart. She’s scared Jay will never return, and that like many other people in her past, he will simply walk out of her life and vanish. This in turn makes me want to act out. (The borderliner in me is screaming “I will leave you before you leave me. You hurt me by cancelling sessions, so I will hurt you by hurting myself.”) But I’m trying hard to comfort the little girl inside me, and to keep myself from acting out. Instead I try to look after myself, I am enjoying my new job as an after school care supervisor, and I am hoping with all my might that Jay will have been restored to full health next week.
Thank you for reading.
Yours truly,
GI
Of course I have those impulses. If things do not go my way, my first instinct is to stomp my feet, to throw things around the room and to hurtle insults at my husband, until he concedes and does as I say, if only to keep the peace. But, I choose not to act on that. I choose to talk to my husband and tell him I feel like throwing a tantrum. I choose to go out and take my car for a spin. I choose to ring Jay and tell him I feel like acting out. Anything, as long as it helps me get through the next few hours.
This has taken a lot of practice and a lot of hours spent in therapy. But I pride myself on having put so much effort into changing those behaviors that were problematic in my marriage. My husband and I are coming up to our three year anniversary and I cannot even remember the last time I threw a full scale tantrum. There is still some sulking every now and then. Still some extreme clinginess when I am sad or scared. But these emotions are so much easier to work with.
I have often wondered what “made” me borderline. Because I think we can all agree that borderliners are not born. I have yet to meet a borderliner that has had a carefree, stable, loving childhood free from any trauma, abuse and/or neglect.
When I started nannying and looking after babies and toddlers I was surprised by how similar my responses were to theirs. I often think that I am so good with children, not because of my nurturing and caring personality, but because I am so similar to them in my thinking and acting. I have their constant need for reassurance, for touch, for acknowledgment. When I get anxious I get the compulsive need to see and touch/cuddle my husband every few minutes, much like a toddler experimenting with her autonomy. Wanting to explore the world, yet needing to know her caregiver is still there. When I have had a rough day, I await the return of my husband anxiously, and need to be close to him for a good one to two hours, meaning literally being within a 2-3 meter proximity of him. I had previously attributed these things to just being part of my craziness, but noticed that these behaviors were very similar to the behaviors displayed by the 8 month old baby and the 26 month old toddler I was looking after.
This made me wonder, if rather than being crazy, there was a part of me that had not properly grown up yet.
I find it hard to consider this possibility as it automatically makes me feel ungrateful towards my parents. As if I would be blaming them for my acting out. It was always easier to say “that is just GI, she is crazy like that.”
But over the past year Jay and I have looked into my early childhood experiences. It has been scary, as well as kind of liberating.
Treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder consists mostly of Linehan Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectal Behavioral Therapy (DBT). These therapies are centered around identifying irrational thoughts and dysfunctional behavior patterns. Recognizing that rather than these feelings, thoughts and urges coming “from nowhere” (as it always felt like to me) there is a chain of thoughts, feelings and events that precipitates the urge to act out. Once you can identify these links, therapy tries to teach you to intervene earlier on in the chain rather than later. In DBT they also teach you self-soothing techniques, distress tolerance strategies and emotion regulation.
These therapies go hand in hand with endless forms to fill out, analyses to write out whenever you have engaged in self-destructive behavior, diary cards to complete at the end of every day, etc. All the rules, forms and homework made me feel very controlled and in turn made me rebel. Jay can bear testament to me dragging my feet at every step, until we finally decided (after two years of fruitless DBT) that this was not working for me.
I do not think DBT and CBT do not work. I think they definitely have their place in the treatment of BPD, however, I think they are over-prescribed, and that not everyone fits these therapy models. I learned all the skills, all the strategies, and I knew exactly what to do when I felt like acting out. But this was not enough for me. I did not just want an action plan for the times I felt like hurting myself, I wanted the urges to go away completely. After three or four years of feeling like hurting myself more often than not, I felt very discouraged with DBT. If this was what my life was going to amount to, wanting to hurt myself most days, and then spending all of my energy trying to postpone that moment until it would eventually go away, only to have to repeat the whole process the very next day, then I would rather be a chronic self-harmer.
I can see how CBT and DBT can work for some people, but I wanted, I needed, to know why I was feeling these things. Why did I react so strongly to rejection and abandonment? Why could someone cancelling a meeting with me, send me into suicidal despair? Why did I rarely yell or express anger, but instead felt like tearing myself apart, wanting to feel the pain soar across my skin? Why did I sulk, much like a toddler, even though I was now a grown twenty-something year old woman?
I needed to know why. I did not need to know what to do once the feeling was there, I needed to know how it got there in the first place.
So over the last year or so, Jay and I have been looking at my early childhood.
I was a baby born six weeks early. I then spent the first two weeks of my life in an incubator, after which my mum signed me out of hospital against doctors’ recommendation. She was tired of driving up and down between home and the hospital (this was before mums were allowed to stay overnight if their baby was in hospital). I was home for four weeks, after which I was put in daycare, full-time. When I turned four, I started primary school. I was dropped off with a babysitter in the morning, who fed me breakfast and got me ready for school, picked me up again at the end of the day and looked after me until my mum picked me up around 6pm. I do not have very fond memories of this babysitter, nor are they overly negative. Over the next few years my younger sister and I went through a dozen or so babysitters, until, at eight years old, my parents deemed me old enough to walk myself home after school, let myself in, fix myself a snack and entertain myself until my dad came home around 6pm.
Do I remember this time as particularly lonely or scary? In short, no. I remember being proud that I was considered mature enough to have my own house-key. Could it be interpreted as neglect? Perhaps. But again, I want to stress this was not something I experienced as frightening or lonely.
It did mean that throughout my early childhood, I possibly could have suffered an attachment disorder, where I never properly bonded with one primary caregiver. I am all for daycare, but I consider a six week old baby too young to go into daycare for 50hours a week. I also don’t know how daycares were run in the eighties, but the daycare that I volunteered for three years ago, had one adult looking after six babies. No matter how loving and caring you are, the reality of looking after six babies is that, for most of the day, you are meeting their basic needs. You are changing nappies, preparing bottles, feeding, burping, putting to bed, and that leaves very little time for one-on-one bonding.
I was a high achiever all throughout primary school, middle school and junior high school. I scored top marks in most subjects, but rather than thriving on this success, my sense of self was tied up in my achievements. Therefore, a slightly less than perfect mark could shatter my self-esteem so completely, as I felt it rendered me a complete failure as a person.
Babies need to be able to form trust in their primary caregiver that their wants and needs will be met, that their distress will be comforted, and their pains will be soothed. Only by forming that trusting relationship, does the toddler learn to trust in herself. I cannot help think that this step was somehow missed in my development, as my sense of self has been very shaky ever since I can remember.
Of course there were other factors that added to this as well. I choose not to go into detail about that out of respect for my parents, as I believe they did the best they could with what they had.
But the realization that there was not something bad or crazy inside of me marked a turning point for me in therapy. Rather than literally wanting to cut and bleed the crazy badness out of me, I was able to feel compassion for the toddler I had once been. When I felt sad and was scared that the feeling would consume me, I was able to recognize that the part of me that thinks the sadness will never end, is a very young part. And that the adult inside me knows the sadness will go away eventually, and I will not fall apart or disintegrate because of it.
I think this was a vital step for me that was missed during my years of DBT and CBT. With all their forms and steps and techniques, nobody had ever sat down with me to look at why I constantly felt like hurting myself. Why were these urges there in the first place?
This is not to say that my urges to act out disappeared overnight. It is still hard sometimes and it still takes a lot of effort to resist the urge to hurt myself. But rather than it feeling like a never-ending battle, it feels like I am slowly allowing the young part of me to grow up and integrate with the rest of me. I can envision a time where I will be self-harm free. And most importantly, I can be gentle with myself. It is much easier to put effort into looking after myself, if I know it is merely the young part of me that needs nurturing, rather than putting effort into not hurting myself day after day after day without end in sight.
And over these last few weeks I have had to soothe that younger part of me a lot. Jay has had to cancel quite a few sessions over the last month or so due to illness, and I notice that a part of me feels like she’s falling apart. She’s scared Jay will never return, and that like many other people in her past, he will simply walk out of her life and vanish. This in turn makes me want to act out. (The borderliner in me is screaming “I will leave you before you leave me. You hurt me by cancelling sessions, so I will hurt you by hurting myself.”) But I’m trying hard to comfort the little girl inside me, and to keep myself from acting out. Instead I try to look after myself, I am enjoying my new job as an after school care supervisor, and I am hoping with all my might that Jay will have been restored to full health next week.
Thank you for reading.
Yours truly,
GI
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