I am once, again, deeply sorry that my output in 2024 has been so slow. I aim to fix that. As modest as this blog is in its readership, the composition of it is really for me first, and for the readers second. This is how therapeutic writing works.
Here we go!
Explaining borderline personality to someone usually involves a moderate to extensive amount of talking. The disorder is delineated by nine criteria, five of which are required to meet a diagnosis of BPD. As it stands, I think I satisfy eight of these standards rather handsomely. This makes me officially part of the club.
Lucky me.
As far as primers on BPD go, the usual step would be to outline the diagnostic criteria. This means lots of medical terminology, piled on with a lot of blah blah blah, which often results in highly technical, tedious reading.
You’re not here for something tedious, are you? I hope not. Life is too short to deal with tedious problems. I’m sure I will do a post on all of the technical stuff at some point, but even I find myself periodically bored by the particulars my situation. My circumstances as someone with BPD have been less than pleasant, and I prefer not to think on it when I can.
Let’s be clear:
It is not as if my mental illness has done more good than bad. And yes, there is good. People with BPD experience emotions at a high intensity, something I would say that is at least twice as intense, and often more, than the emotional reactivity of someone who does not have BPD. For me this means that the bad moments are very much bad. It ALSO means that the good moments are good, and the expression of love is rather deep. Simply put? The borderline has the potential to love like no other.
This path is a path of extremes. Not always, but often. I don’t simply like something or find it amusing. I prefer to love things fully and hate things fully. And while this satisfies the hard and fast categories that address my anxiety and need for control and safety, such stark and suspiciously clean assessments of my reality do not take me to a good place. I feel control, but that’s often an illusion.
A facsimile sense of control does not stop an incoming date with destiny. It only makes that date with destiny harder to cope with when it gets here. When reality differs from the mindset of the borderline, the mindset cannot possibly win. There is no chance, as words cannot alter the fabric of what is actually the case.
When reality is what it is, and the borderline does not see it, there is high risk that the borderline will come up against one of their worst fears: the fear of abandonment.
This is the thread that truly defines the madness of the borderline personality. There are 9 criteria, but this is the slice of the code that makes all the other criteria take shape. All maladaptive behavior for the borderline, or seemingly all of it, speaks to a crippling fear of abandonment.
The borderline can imagine few things worse than the feeling of being alone, rejected, and not welcome in the company of others. As the disorder tends to be characterized by chronic feelings of emptiness, it’s common for such feelings to accompany the fear of the big A, the final A, the A that says you, the borderline, are terribly, hopelessly sick and not worthy to be in the company of someone else. The feeling is one of being stuck in a trash compactor, with the metal walls closing in on heaps of rubbish. When this is triggered, the borderline can easily tap into a range of maladaptive behaviors. When exercised, such behaviors often injure the other party so much that abandonment is virtually certain.
Borderlines help facilitate what they often fear the most. This is the ultimate irony, and perhaps the most paradoxical consequence of the borderline brain.
The mind of a borderline is most certainly not a fun thing to have, and especially when the sense of abandonment is heavy. Emotion rises high, reason gets subdued, and the efforts of the borderline must be redirected to a sense of calm, control, and measured actions. These qualities are easy to commit to on paper, but much less accessible during peak emotional distress, and borderlines know all about peak emotional distress. Although Iconsider this be a guess, I would say that most acts of borderline abandonment are committed in the face of difficult behavior from someone else.
This is the way of it, and it is the path to ultimate aloneness, where the only things left are the remnants of thoughts that, over time, must be used to build an identity. When the identity depends on the warm and approving presence of others, managing unregulated emotions gets exponentially trickier.
How do I know? From personal experience of course, and recent events especially. I can’t claim that I am perfectly innocent during each disagreement that comes my way. This is far from it. BPD is not easy to manage and I have not always done a good job with the management. All the same, I must keep up with the maintenance. I have two children who need me to be at my best as much as possible, so my choice is to accept the fact that BPD requires lifelong intervention. There will never be a moment when I can let my defenses go slack. To give up is to make abandonment much more likely.
And sometimes, in the end, there is very little that one can do. I have spent hundreds of hours in therapy, including some time in an intensive outpatient program, as well as week length inpatient stay. I have employed different techniques, such as writing and controlled breath work, have engaged in the practice of psycho-education (by reading books on my disorder), and have consulted a psychiatric doctor for the right meds.
None of this was enough to stop what was coming, and the type of abandonment I have always feared, day to day, and especially in times of emotional turmoil, is here.
I have often joked about how, on account of how quirky and badly dressed I am, I would be a hard sell on most dating apps.
Eventually, I am going to find out just of a hard sell I actually am, because my time in my doomed marriage, spanning 17 years, has left me heartbroken, with the giant red letter of abandonment sewn on my breast.
This is the dark of night for me, the blackest of black places.
Abandonment is no longer a fear, but reality. When people tell me that there is nothing to fear but fear itself, I will simply point to the “A” sewn onto my shirt.
Abandonment is real, and as such, there is much more to fear than fear. What is really terrifying is the question that is necessitated by the departure of my spouse: What now?
And I have no idea what will be in the “What now,” but I intend to find out.
What choice to I have?
Yours, Mentally,
Nathan
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