Shit Is Gonna Get Real: Borderline Personality Disorder and My Personal Recovery

I was on the phone with my brother, Josh, the other day. I was telling him how I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder but I was in recovery. He said, “You can be cured of that?” To which I replied, “It’s one of the only personality disorders that someone can truly recover from.”

Maybe there’s hope and recovery for other personality disorders with newer treatments but when I was introduced to Dialectal Behavioral Therapy (DBT), that was what I was told. That if a person with Borderline Personality Disorder really worked hard and had the desire to change, they could indeed recover from it, and that it was the only personality disorder thought to be curable. Of course, time will probably prove that wrong. I believe there is hope for all who live with a personality disorder, if they want to change and are willing to work hard.

That’s what I have to do. I have to work at it. It’s a daily practice. I am still growing and learning and coping, and will hope to do that for the rest of my life. I am currently going through a workbook called “The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook” by McKay, Wood, and Brantley.

And, I’d like to share some of my work within the book as I go through it. If you want to purchase the workbook, you can do that here.*

As many of you might know those with BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) find some pretty interesting coping mechanisms to deal with their emotions and problems. Here’s a list of mine:

• Spending time thinking about past pain, mistakes, and problems.
• I get anxious worrying about possible future pain, mistakes, and problems.
• I isolate myself from other people to avoid distressing situations.
• I use to engage in dangerous behaviors such as cutting. I still deal with picking at sores, and pulling out hair. In fact, yesterday I burned hair off my arm to deal with feeling alone.
• I use to engage in unsafe sexual activities, such as having sex with strangers and having unprotected sex.
• I use to avoid dealing with the causes of my problems, such as abusive or dysfunctional relationships (i.e. men I dated, my mother)
• I use food to punish and control myself by eating too much.
• I have attempted suicide seven times
• I avoid pleasant activities, such as social events and exercise, because I don’t think that I deserve to feel better, sometimes.

In the workbook it says, “All of these strategies are paths to even deeper emotional pain, because even the strategies that offer temporary relief will only cause you more suffering in the future.” It’s true. None of these fix the issues, they just create more issues. I still struggle with a lot. But that’s what recovery is. Struggling to do what is best for me, and eventually, it becomes less and less of a struggle. Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it makes it easier each time I choose a healthier coping method.

The workbook will go on to discuss healthy coping mechanisms. I will blog about my responses to the workbook, and share how I cope in future blogs. So, stay tuned. Shit is gonna get real and personal, but maybe it will help someone**, and that’s so worth it.

Original photography by Harmony R. Greenwood-Hogg

 

*I am not receiving any incentive to link the workbook.

**If you believe you have a personality disorder or mental illness, please seek professional help. I am not a therapist or healthcare professional. You can find a therapist here.

If you’re experiencing suicidal thoughts please contact 911 or reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.

 

 

Master Puppeteers

I need to talk about something. The something isn’t so easy to talk about. A few months ago I was introduced to a young lady that has mental illness. I try to be there for those with mental illness, especially young people.

She said she was seventeen. She said she was being abused. She said she had been sex trafficked for 10 years of her life, sold by her mother. She said she had given birth to seven children, all of which had died or been murdered. She said she was raped almost daily by her foster father who she calls Popaw. She said her neighbor harassed her and molested her. She said there was never any food in the house, and that they would eat out and not feed her. She said the man who abused her for ten years was in prison for murder, and that the cops found her naked and chained to a bed in the basement. She said that they never bought her clothes. She said her social worker told her “living isn’t for everyone.”

She said a lot of things and I believed her. I believed every word because she said no one believed her. She started calling me Mommy, and I let her because her own mother had betrayed her. I felt close to her story because I too had been betrayed by my own mother, more than once. No, she never sold me into sex trafficking, but she regularly broke my trust growing up. She regularly emotionally abused me. She abused me physically as a young child. In my adulthood, my mother became a background character that I could not trust or have in my life for my own mental health. So, of course I felt close to this young lady. Of course I wanted to help heal her wounds. Of course I had empathy for her. My compassion for those suffering is grand and wide.

I spent countless nights worrying about her safety. I cried every day for her. I invested time, energy, and money. I sent her things in the mail. I stayed up late messaging her on Facebook to get her through wanting to kill herself and cutting herself. I involved another friend in helping her. I involved a lot of others with her story in hopes of finding some way to help her. And they were all helpful and wanted to help her have a better future. I started calling every foundation under the sun to get her the help she needed. Needless to say, I was exhausted and my mental wellness took a dive.

I personally started self injuring, creating sores that I could pick at, and picking at sores that happened from just living and being clumsy. I started ignoring my need for sleep so I could be there for her. I was constantly on messenger even when hanging out with friends, explaining why I was messenger so they wouldn’t think I was rude.

Then the day came that I encouraged her to call me so we could three way call the Runaway help line because every organization said that at her age, she would likely need to run away to get the help she needed. You read that right: the only solution for a girl with her history is to run away. So she did call me, and then I three way called the Runaway help line. We got a rep on the phone that was very willing to help, but then she went silent, as if she had hung up. She wouldn’t answer the lady back. She wouldn’t answer me back. Nothing. Just silence. So, I had to end the call.

I spent the next few hours trying to understand why she did that. I asked her why and she said she froze. Which I could understand having mental illness myself. But then she said she can’t run away. That she wouldn’t run away. That she would not spend any time in a shelter. That she has no money for a bus ticket, even when I offered to pay the bus ticket. Even when I offered to send spending money for food, just long enough for her to get help with transitional housing and food. Every excuse under the sun was given for why she could not leave the abusive environment she was in.

For the first time, I became suspicious. Why? Because I know that if I was 17 in an abusive environment, I would grab what would fit into a backpack and high tail it out of there. And I did at the age of 17. I ran away. My mother had used a belt to beat me for smoking cigarettes, so I grabbed my backpack and started walking the 5 miles to Burger King, the place of my employment, to hopefully get help from a coworker and find some place to stay.

With my suspicions high, I started to talk with a friend. That friend started to do some digging and found her mother’s Facebook profile. I messaged her mother, asking her to verify some details of her story, but I did not give her any details of her daughter’s story. That’s when I got a response back from the mother explaining that she had never been sold into sex trafficking, that she had never been raped. That she had never been pregnant or given birth to seven babies. That she was actually living with her adoptive grandparents, the grandpa being a blood relative and the grandmother being a step grandmother. She had lived with them since age 12, being legally adopted by them by the age of 13. She explained that she gets messages like mine at least once a month and that her daughter had been doing this since she was 13. The mother explained that her daughter was mentally ill and that they had done everything to get her the help she needed, but to no avail. She refused to go to counseling, and that if she said she was going to counseling every week, that too was a lie. They couldn’t make her go anymore.

The mother indicated that she would let her mother know (the grandmother), and that the best thing to do in this situation was to block her and move on with my life. She asked me to call the grandmother. So, I did. I spent an hour on the phone with the grandmother who profusely apologized. She did not realize that she was at it again, but had become suspicious when she started receiving presents from me and the friend that I had involved in her story and life. She told me that they had done everything they could to help her, involving the courts with hopes of getting help, with no results.

I had been catfished. I was incredibly sad. I was incredibly angry. I was embarrassed. How did I not see it? How had I, a skeptic by nature, been fooled? The answer is simple, really: I was an empath and she played on my emotions, and did so expertly. She was playing on hundreds of people’s emotions. Having people from all over the world send her things because her story said that no one else was. In reality, her grandmother said that they regularly took her shopping for clothes because she kept gaining weight. They regularly fed her along with the rest of the family. That they cared for her, but had reached the end of their rope and that sometimes they weren’t so nice to her because they simply had had enough. They had had enough of her lies, her laziness, and her meanness. She wasn’t a nice person if she didn’t get her way, so they nearly give in every time to try and keep the peace, prisoners of her rage. At 78, the grandmother is weary and exhausted.

I can imagine she is. I was weary and exhausted. I had invested so much into this young lady and it was all a lie. I felt betrayed. I felt stupid. I felt embarrassed by my naivety. I had been duped, in the most grand way. Which is why I’m here sharing this story today.

I’m sharing because I let my mental wellness take a dive for the wellness of another. And while I’m all for helping others, being there for others, I’m not for neglecting my own mental wellness, which I did in grand fashion.

This experience has taught me that no one else’s mental wellness is more important than my own. And, that is selfish. But, it is not wrong. To be selfish about your own mental health is to be mentally healthy.

Since finding out that I was catfished I have since blocked this young lady from my Facebook and on my phone. I cannot be in contact with her without sacrificing my own mental wellness. I made sure to inform other people of this young lady’s deception, only to be met with concern for her and none for me by some. I guess that’s okay, cause those people did not invest the time and energy I did. They backed away at the first sign of “too difficult.” I don’t. I embrace the “too difficult” and the “too crazy.” I embrace the hardest to love, and I do it with abandon. Sure, my willingness to help sometimes gets me hurt, but I’d rather live my life taking risks on people, choosing to love the hardest people to love, than to back away at the first sign of “too difficult.”

But, it is painful. I feel like I lost a daughter. I feel betrayed. And, I’m incredibly sad. I also still love her. I still care about her. I still worry about her. Because regardless of the catfishing, the lies, the manipulation, I do know that she is mentally ill and she does need a whole team of help. I also know that I cannot be that for her. I’m not a psychologist or therapist. I’m just an empath with a whole lot of love and compassion for the hurting. While that can be life changing for some people, having someone love them, in this case, I was simply being played by a master puppeteer. I hope that she will get help and want to change. I hope that her future is full of love and joy. I hope that she gets mentally well. I hope so much for her. I have forgiven her. However, I cannot forget. I won’t forget. This is a cautionary tale about ignoring your own mental wellness: don’t. Never neglect your own mental wellness for the wellness of another. It’s counterproductive.

 

 

So, I stopped

 

When I was about 13, or 14, I was an 8th grade student at Southern Middle School. The other middle school was located on the north end of town, and I’m sure you can guess it was called Northern Middle School. Person County North Carolina is not known for clever, or imaginative naming of things. Like all other towns, it has a Main Street, and an old courthouse, and various little businesses reminding all who pass by of another time. A time when things like self injury, depression, and suicide were shrouded in shame, swept under rugs, and family members were shipped off to asylums.

It was in the 8th grade that I first self injured. We had just moved to North Carolina from Texas. Culture shock is to put it lightly. I felt like an alien from another world, and I basically was. I spent 7th grade at Northern Middle School. Then we moved and I spent 8th grade at Southern Middle School. In the span of four years I had attended four different schools from 5th to 8th grade. I had left my only friend in Texas, and we had not parted on the best of terms. I was a black sheep. I fit nowhere.

Sometime in the middle of the 8th grade year my father left my mother, and essentially left his three kids to go live with another woman, and her two year old, over two hours away. I had no clue how to process what was going on. I did not have anyone I could talk with.

I turned the anger, the confusion, and the abandonment onto myself, and began to use self injury to cope. It wasn’t anything noticeable to family. Over the years, I learned to hide it well. I hid it so well that no one knew until I was in my mid twenties.

It would not be until I was 31 that I would stop. On October 13th, 2012 I self injured for what I hope will be the last time. To be over three years, going on four without self injury is surreal to me. I don’t know if there are words to describe how I stopped. It was as if a switch went off in my head and I realized that self injury was going to take me down, and for what? I could not allow the actions of others, the stress of life, or my own defunct mental health to decide what I did to myself. I’ve always been defiant, rebellious, with a bit of a “prove them wrong” attitude. So, I stopped.

I still get the urges. When there isn’t enough money, I think about cutting. When my husband and I fight, I think about self injuring. When I’m lonely, scared, in too much chronic pain, or feeling numb, I think about it. Yet, I refuse. The more I refuse, the easier it becomes to refuse.

Another thing I refuse: to be ashamed. Self injury is part of mental health and illness. I refuse to stay in the dark, to stay quiet, or to sweep it under the rug. I rolled that rug up, and chucked it. This is me, and this is my story, my life, my struggle, and I am not alone.

Neither are you.

If you are reading this and you’re self injuring, know that you can stop. Know that you are not alone. There is help. Take a look at the links below that have resources to get help. Reach out to trusted family or friends and start talking. Come into the light, into the warmth, and know that you are loved. There is hope.

SiOS

twloha

The Cornell Research Program on Self Injury and Recovery

S.A.F.E.

Help Guide

Reach Out