Emotions

Emotions are great, aren't they? Feeling happy when happy things happen, feeling sad when sad things happen. Loving people, loving things, enjoyment, anger. Emotions are normal. They are healthy and there is nothing wrong with having them.

I wish someone would have told that to me a long time ago. I was raised with the belief that emotions are things to be kept in, at least the "bad" ones like sadness. Emotions are weaknesses and expressing them is the same as letting your guard down. Once I was to the age where I could understand basic concepts, that was when crying in distress was unacceptable. I was a big girl. I was my brother's big sister and I had to set a good example.

I cried in front of someone in January for the first time in over ten years. I'm not even 20, so that's more than half my life of not crying in front of anyone. Even when I cried on my own I hated myself. I was being weak. It was ridiculous. And then since I hated myself, I cried MORE. Usually the only way I could make myself stop was by self harming or crying myself to sleep. I didn't have any real coping methods because I wasn't supposed to need them.

Now about these emotions: it's not just, I couldn't stop crying because my animal died. That's completely reasonable. It was more like, I couldn't stop crying because someone told me I was wrong about something like what day it was. I'm not just saying I did this as a little kid, either. I still do that to this day. Recently I freaked out completely because I responded to a math problem someone had on Facebook, and a girl made a snide comment (which after I calmed down realized was completely wrong). I completely broke down crying and just fell to the floor and started texting my friends and my therapist. I felt like I was going to die from humiliation or something.

Most of my problems are with extreme sadness like that. But recently (like within the past month), I've started to become extremely angry. I throw things, punch walls, punch myself, punch the air, punch all kinds of things. Then I get mad that it's happening and hate myself even more. I've slammed my head against walls, pounded on my legs until they were sore whether I moved them or not, and have cut at least once somewhere on all of my limbs, and a ton on my stomach. I cut when I'm sad too.

In writing this I realize my reactions are all very similar. Freaking out is freaking out and irrational is irrational. There's no real difference in it because of causes or which emotion it is.

While these emotions explode out of control, nice ones like happiness and enjoyment are completely absent, or don't last more than in the moment. I guess that makes up the depression part of Borderline Personality Disorder. It even sounds pretty Bipolar as well.

I can't explain why this happens. I'm not qualified to and I haven't been told. But in a previous post I wrote things that can help in the moments that these things happen, and I hope that can help.