Still a little confusinged

Dear @shanc

Welcome to the forum and thanks for having the courage to join the conversation with such honesty!

I have bipolar, so I don't know that I can be of much help to you specifically at this point - but I'm glad you're here! I do recognise the thread of avoidance, including self-medicating and self-harm. This is so common to many MI sufferers, regardless of diagnosis. The things we do to try and cope are many and varied (and quite understandable). There is a lot on the forum about BPD, you might like to try the search function to help you locate some - here are one or two links to get started.

I wonder if some of the others can relate better to your journey than I can at the moment - via common experiences or diagnosis? @chemonro @isabella @BlueButterfly50 @Ellie @kato @Angel ?

With regard to your mum, I can only suggest that if your diagnosis is BPD that would be terribly confronting for her. That doesn't make it an incorrect diagnosis. (I don't know whether it's right or not, but perhaps it feels right to you - makes sense?) I'm saying this as a mum and as an adult survivor of childhood abuse and neglect. I think if one of my kids was so unwell and diagnosed with BPD I'd be utterly devastated. But I'd also want to do everything I possibly could to help and that would include looking very hard at myself to see whether I had contributed to the illness.

We're here - you can download onto the screen anytime. Sometimes it will take a few hours before getting posted, but if it helps to get it off your chest then go for it. Looking forward to hearing from you again soon. Take care.

Kindest regards,

Kristin

Hello @shanc

My name is Rick and welcome to our little hidey hole.

This is an excellent place to be real. Not needing to hide who we are or how we feel at any given time.

Good or bad it's all accepted here. And so are you.

It's always a difficult time when diagnosis is forst made. Many people in our lives including ourselves may struggle with it. Often there is a feeling of blame attached whether tis or not. And there can be unwanted guilt as well.

Humans all very complex creatures. Add challenges and it more complex.

People who have to manage a mental illness are a subgroup unto themselves, in some ways. The strength that I have witnessed and the courage I have seen in people with MI is enormous. Heroic even.

It takes a lot of cojones to go to a forum like this and lay it all out as you have done.

Not simply talking about the condition itself but the other somehow more personal factors as well.

I myself do not try to offer panaceas. There is, as far I know , No magic wand. But I have found a comfort here that I hope works for you too.

Keep posting

Keep talking

Hope endures

Rick

Below are two links. the first is a link to a page concerning your diagnosis

The second is a Govt web page about a suport service who can give you more info regarding your condition, options, family issues , support.

http://www.mifellowship.org/sites/default/files/styles/Fact%20Sheets/Understanding%20Borderline%20Personality%20Disorder.pdf

http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/mental-pir-about

Hi Shanc and welcome to the forum.

Certainly the things you mention strongly indicate BPD. If you have a good psychiatrist, then you're lucky. Firstly, you got a diagnosis and that major issue for those with BPD. For some, it seems to happen quickly, however I belong to a Melbourne based group of BPD sufferers that hold monthly meetings and practically all our members have been very slow to be diagnosed. It's a common thing because of the stigma. I had to practically scream at my GP to tell me what was in the report from my psychiatrist and even then he asked what difference it made to know and went further to add........"You can't change your personality!"

He's old school and obviously doesn't know a lot about BPD. Modern thinking has the personality as a more fluid thing than was first thought, so it may be possible to alter a poorly functioning personality. The woman who runs our group is a classic example of someone who was told they'd probably spend most of their life in locked wards, only to get her life together with the help of an amazing friend and DBT. She's not perfect, but the transformation has been profound. If you're interested, you might like to use a search engine to look up the group. I'd post a link here, but it would probably break the community rules We also have a BPD forum which you might like to join.

Your mum sounds unfortunately typical of the same "old school" thinking as my sister, who is ten years older than me. Mention anything to do with psych and I see the shutters go down behind her eyes. She just doesn't want to know because she thinks all I have to do is get a grip and soldier on. All the while, she has her own set of problems and refuses to recognise them.

As to cutting off friends, yes, that's something I do quite freely. It's the old love/hate thing for me. They only have to say the wrong thing and I go from great admiration to total disdain in a heartbeat. Their words, even though they might not be meant at hurtful, wound like a white hot sword. People just don't think, but then again they're not trained to talk to people suffering BPD. The don't realise that a simple little gesture or word can set of an emotional avalanche.

Oh, one thing too you may not be aware of, your BPD symptoms probably won't match everybody elses in text book fashion. Using a combination of the 9 criteria for having BPD, there are 256 variants, so rarely will you find two sufferers with exactly the same set of symptoms.

Some of the above is probably out of context, but it's the best I can do at present.

Kind regards,

Ellie.