Problem Solving

Psychotherapy. What the heck is that? I don't even know. I've looked it up and it's complex and has all these big words and terms and phrases and just way too much information to comprehend. I found myself having to look up every term and then looking up the terms to describe that term.

So since I'm not formally trained to be a therapist or anything, I'll skip the bullshit and just talk about what I've been told. Even now I can't remember everything.

I'll go in the order of which things have been introduced to me:

1. Meditation. The first day of therapy I was told to meditate. I thought, what? I don't do that stuff and I don't even really take it seriously. I'm not Buddhist and I don't like sitting still. Even to this day I still can't get a hold of it and my therapist is getting upset with me. It's a habit you have to make for yourself. She told me to start out by just sitting down in a room on my own. Turn off the lights if you have to to help yourself focus. Close your eyes. For the first few times you do it, just count down from 100. Do that a few times and once you can connect a calm feeling to meditation, then go to a higher number, like 150. Eventually, when you are comfortable with meditation, start listening to guided meditations on youtube. There are a TON and they're all different, so you have to spend some time to find that type that's right for you.
2. Taking a Breath. This is the simplest one. As soon as you feel strong feelings coming on, no matter what they are, stop and take a deep breath. Just one could change the situation completely. It gives you a short break in your thinking.
3. Processing. This something you actually do during an appointment with a therapist. Mine gives me buzzy things to hold that sort of ground me and make me focus better on my thoughts. She asks me questions and gives me a minute or so to think (or process) about it. I'll tell her all my thoughts having to do with that, and she'll come up with another question. The questions are all about your personal experiences that have bothered you and affected you deeply. With this, you have to be open to speaking about these things to your therapist.
4. Five Senses. If meditation isn't working well for you (like me), there's something else you can do! Make a list (actually write this down) of the five senses. Taste, touch, smell, sight, sound. Next to each of those things, write your favorite things. Mine is,
1. Taste: Shrimp
2. Touch: My cat
3. Smell: Vanilla lotion
4. Sight: Artwork
5. Sound: Rain

          Now that you have your list, try to compile these things together, or at least as much as you
          can. This is for when your mind is racing for whatever reason, and you want/need to calm
          down. Start at the top of the list, and give it three minutes. If that sense doesn't help you, move
          on to the next. Speeding through them won't help you.

Now, I know how hard it can be to even think rationally when you're having a "crisis", let alone think of these things. I can't even say myself that any of these I use habitually (except for Processing), but it takes time to learn things. And it's even more difficult when you're crying and screaming and in a fit of rage and hitting everything in sight (along with yourself) and hating everything about you and your life.

I'll post new things that are introduced to me as I continue therapy.

Causes, Personal Experiences

There are a couple causes Borderline Personality Disorder, and they deal with childhood. The biggest cause is childhood abuse of any form. The other is genes, the disorder running in the family.

Now since the causes are so straight forward in their explanations, all I can really do is speak of my own causes. I'm going to be slightly vague and try to keep my story abridged, but I'll give you the general idea. I'll probably end up elaborating later anyway.

I'll have to start with how I was born. Not physically how I was born, but my temperament. Temperament is your natural predisposition, like where your point of level emotion is.

My therapist used a great example for me, and the best way to describe it is with pictures.

Okay. So there are two babies in a nursery at the hospital, both had been born at the same time on the same day. We will call them Baby A and Baby B just because I don't feel like being too creative.

So babies pretty much cry easily, right? It sucks but it's true. So, something sets them off, like some nurse drops a pan full of syringes, trips, falls, and pokes out her eye and is screaming in pain. These babies are going to start crying. This is where temperament comes in. Baby B has a naturally higher temperament than Baby A.

So, his stress levels are just naturally higher. That means when the nurse pokes out her eye, he's way more upset than the other baby. They start at their respective temperament levels and their stress shoots up.

Poor babies. There's even more noise as people come in with a gourney to wheel out the nurse. But once she's gone and peace and quiet is restored, the babies can finally calm back down. But, because of their temperament levels, Baby B is still going to be pretty stressed and can have his anger set off like a trigger once again.

So there you go. My explanation wasn't as good as my therapist's and I probably missed something important. Oh, also I am Baby B. Anyway, Temperament is only 50% of the problem. (Or just my problem, it all depends).

The other 50% is the presence of an Invalidating Environment. That means that where I (or you or whoever) grew up didn't provide enough validation for them. To explain, I will use my situation.

I have lived with my parents my whole life. When I was a kid, they were still married. With them, no matter what I did or how well I did in school mattered. I have gotten top grades for all years of my life so far, and it doesn't mean anything. I wasn't told "good job", it was just what they expected of me and as long as I met their expectations, there were no problems.

Also, there was a strong lack of affection. Remember years ago when someone made fun of Kobe Bryant or Kobe made fun of someone else, saying they were a bad person because "His mom must have never hugged him enough as a kid"? Well, that's part of my problem. I wasn't given too many hugs or kisses. We didn't hold hands in the store or whatever. Physical contact is very important from birth, especially before the kid can talk and understand what you're saying. Touch, especially a mother's touch, is very important and shows love. Then, once they can speak and understand, it is also important to verbally tell children that you love them and let them know that the good things they do actually ARE good and should be celebrated. I didn't receive that either, of course.

So, Temperament and Invalidating Environment play a huge role in a child's development. For me, it played a very negative role. These things are sort of the whole "setting yourself up for failure" kind of aspect. They didn't flip the switch on giving me a personality disorder, they just screwed up the wiring in the wall and rerouted it straight for disaster.

Grey Area

I guess the easiest way to tell my story is to split it into two sections: Before Therapy and After/During Therapy. It would make the most sense to go from beginning to end, but I think splitting it is the easiest for me. It made sense while I was taking a shower so I'm going to make it make sense here. This post is mostly the grey area/transition between the two.

Therapy was never an option I had for myself. Suicide was my option. Therapy was something suggested/told to me by a friend who I had met just a month before, this past new years. In my family, or at least in my mind of what my family is like, doctors and medicine and therapy and all of that is never something that's immediately thought of. It's never, "Oh, I feel really sick and I have a pain in my stomach, I should call a doctor and get it checked." Instead, it's more like, "Oh, I feel really sick and I have a pain in my stomach, but mom will get upset if I stay home from school and I probably just need to take a short nap or something and eat soup. I'll be back up and running in no time!" So naturally to me, it took him some persuading to get me into therapy.

In fact, the police were even involved in the process. One night, I just went "alright, I'm done here." I texted everyone I cared about and just said something close to, "Thank you for being a part of my life, goodbye." Then I tried to strangle myself with a belt (which by the way, won't work, it'll only make you sort of dizzy and have all the blood in your head feel like it's pushing out toward your skin). Anyway, the friend called the cops and he told me he was going to, so I ran out and got in my car and drove to a lake I used to live by. I walked all the way down a sidewalk that you can't get to with a car and sat in a park that was in the direct middle of the lake. It was around 9:30 at night so no one else was there and it was dark and cold. By that time everyone was calling or texting me and I guess they had some bonding moments with each other trying to get my address or something. Long story short, I went home because my dad was mad at me since the cops wouldn't leave until I got back.

Now this next part might piss you off or cause you to lose faith in America's police department proceedures, but try to think of it on their terms. They came up to me when I arrived and asked how I was. I told them I was fine because in all honesty I had alread changed my mind about dying, at least for that night. They asked if I needed any phone numbers to call, (which by the way, the national suicide prevention help hotline or whatever is  1-800-273-8255) and I told them yes I had that number. Also, at that moment, my mom pulled up and came rushing over acting all freaked out or something. (My parents are divorced and I live with my dad) Then I reassured the police I was okay, and they left.

My mom gave me a hug and whatever and I pushed her away and just said something like, "I have this under control. I'm going to see a therapist give me the insurance info. Go home."

Mostly after that night it's a blur. It did take me a couple weeks to find a therapist I was happy with, and one that would take my insurance. And I did give up on it plenty of times feeling either falsely content or just fed up with the process and the time it was taking.

But here I am now. My first therapy visit led me to almost immediately being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. She asked if I knew what it was and I said I had heard of it. She asked my opinion on it, and I told her I didn't have one. She gave me some obscure description that was like a metaphor or some incripted message or something. I actually learned about it by going home that day and reading the entire wikipedia article. It was scary. I actually felt scared, and that's pretty abnormal for me.

It wasn't a wake up call or anything, since I knew something was obviously wrong with me if everything in my house was a weapon to use against myself, but it was definitely a "wow". I don't know how to describe it simply. Basically for me, I went home and got on the computer and typed in what she'd said, Borderline Personality Disorder. The wikipedia page was the first hit on Google, so I clicked there. It probably took me five minutes to read the whole thing, and I mean I READ it, I did not skim it. I guess it could maybe be compared to finding someone in the world that is exactly like you, and you're stuck in amazement, because I understood everything that article says, and still says (I often read it to try to understand my feelings and rationalize them). It was like I was reading a description of MYSELF. My COMPLETE self. (Aside from excessive drug and alcohol usage, I will clarify now)

I didn't like it. I was upset. That told me basically everything was wrong with me. I texted some people, asked what they thought about it. They either didn't know and I had to explain it, which I butchered and just ended up saying nevermind about, or they just thought it was a common thing. That got me thinking it was like one of those disorders that's just considered...an excuse? How people don't take ADD/ADHD seriously in children because children are "naturally" like that.

I didn't want an excuse. I'm not the type of person to use excuses for ANYTHING. I don't even want to draw any real attention to myself. But this was nuts. This disorder wasn't anything serious, nooo this was just one of those weird ones that everyone has the symptoms for.

While maybe it's true that the symptoms seem common, it's to the extent that they are occuring or even the strength in which they are occuring that draws the urgency to the disorder. This is not an excuse. This is making my life hell. Life is unnecessarily and unfairly hard, and it doesn't have to be that way.

There's one thing I would just like to say before I move on in my other posts to my personal experiences and my opinions and etc. It's that, out of pretty much I guess all the personality disorders (I forget where I read/heard this from), this is the only curable one.

You can get past this.

(Even for me, this is still unbelievable because I still feel like shit, but hey, "facts" are "facts".)