[ May is BPD ( Borderline Personality Disorder ) awareness month, & I wanted to drop this here, for my followers — & whole tumblr — to see. Why am I posting this ( again ), you might ask ? Because yes, I have BPD, & BPD awareness is close to my heart. I’ve had it for at least 10 years in various levels of severity. BPD isn’t the only personality disorder nor mental disorder I have either, & I’m not scared to admit it.
As I said, BPD awareness is important to me. I see myself as an unaffiliated BPD advocate — I educate people on BPD matters, I defend & support fellow survivors. I try to make sure I tell to every single person I plan to become a closer friends with that I have this disorder, & ask them to try to understand me the best they can if my emotions get the best of me. Hell, even I sometimes don’t understand myself.
Because of this ( or these ) disorders I have always been more or less misunderstood, & I have never really “fit the norm” how people should behave. I just didn’t understand how emotions work, like many other BPD survivors. I didn’t know how to voice my emotions out in other way than anger or over-reacting, that stems from neglect & trauma I had to endure ever since I was a toddler — that is how I learned to survive in the middle of abuse, that is how I learned to defend myself — by attacking back when I feel threatened, like an abused dog. I am not saying this as an “understand me because I am a special snowflake”, no, everyone should try to understand each other regardless.
How can you become better at understanding BPD survivors ? By listening. By asking us questions & not second guessing. I dare to say, we survivors actually like to enlighten our disorder to those who are curious & want to learn, to make people try to understand us better. Educate yourself on the subject — if you have a friend, a family member or anyone close to you that suffers from BPD, or, educate yourself even if you don’t, the more knowledge the better. Knowledge counters stigmas.
Some people are confused what ‘personality disorder’ actually means. In short, it’s as simple as this: personality disorders are disordered versions of normal & common personality traits. Most people meet at least some kind of symptoms of any personality disorder at healthy levels ( because many traits are normal ), but when these traits become overwhelming & severely disturb one’s functionality in life, then it becomes a problem – a disorder. If you meet the symptoms it doesn’t necessarily mean you actually have a disorder. Many of these traits are fine at healthy levels, but the keyword is “overwhelming” when figuring out if any of the traits are literally disordered, & meet personality disorder criteria. For example, fear of abandonment. I dare to say that nobody wants to be completely alone, humans are social creatures, & the fear of losing someone we care about is completely normal — but when you obsess, get excessively jealous, possessive, & use hundreds worth of money in a month on someone to bribe them so they won’t leave you, that’s when it becomes — you guessed it — overwhelming.
Now to the stigmas. I’m tired of people stigmatizing this disorder, & I want to debunk the following stigmas from a fellow BPD survivor’s perspective. Sometimes we stigmatize without even realizing we’re doing it, which we should try our best to break free from.
Stigma 1: We’re not selfish. Being selfish isn’t an inherently evil thing — sometimes it’s good to be healthily selfish, to put yourself first & take care of yourself. I, & many other BPD survivors, have too many things we need to deal with every day, so we might not be the best people to put other people’s needs first as well as someone that isn’t dealing with extreme mood swings that can last from literally 15 seconds to couple of hours. We do care about you, we promise. We just sometimes don’t have the strength to carry both of our burdens. We won’t & shouldn’t sacrifice ourselves, sabotage our own mental well-being, & set ourselves on fire so you’ll stay warm — that is called healthy selfishness.
Stigma 2: We’re not manipulative. We’re afraid you’ll abandon us in a blink of an eye, throwing us away like we’re trash, just like we feel everyone else in our lives have. We just don’t know how to voice our excessively strong emotions right without sounding hostile or pushy. We’re not down-right abusive & evil, we don’t mean to be abusive & lash out at you, but what can we do when we’re on the edge all the time, scared, when we’re constantly being tortured by our own minds ? What else can we do than scream from pain ( sometimes unfortunately at you ), if we simply don’t have any other way to cope ?
Stigma 3: We’re not attention seekers. Once again, we just might not know how to voice our emotions out early enough before we’ve bottled everything up, then everything just explodes because we become so overwhelmed, & it seems like we’re making the situation a horrible shit storm of drama. Due to the abuse we had suffer, we don’t feel like we’re anything, our self-esteem is extremely low, we just need someone to love us, we crave the validation we were deprived of before. We’re desperately crying out for help, unfortunately most of the time in a very inappropriate & overly dramatic way.
Stigma 4: We’re not treatment resistant — from a personal perspective: I thought I was, but my medications are set & suit me — actually I feel so well I’m working on weaning myself off of them. I attend CBT trauma therapy, & have for 2.5 years, & it helps so much. I do not abuse alcohol, drugs, or sex, I am actively combating self harm & suicidal thoughts every single day. I will never be completely cured, but I will get better. There is recovery.
Stigma 5: Only thing in this list I can agree with is BPD people being difficult, because being difficult is subjective. We as humans don’t have an “one size fits all” base for our tolerance — all of us tolerate certain things to certain extents. Some tolerate yelling, swearing, & lashing out fairly well, & some don’t tolerate it at all. Neither are inherently wrong.
Unless you really know me & we have a mutual understanding between each other you have no right to even try to determine what kind of a person I am. So many people start to abuse me, hurl drama, & tell how horrible person I am because I’m behaving in a certain way — because I just might not know better. I might not know how else to behave. & I know it’s wrong when I behave badly, I’m not perfect — but neither are you, & you still have no right to verbally abuse me. You have no right to do that to ANYONE.
My disorders do not determine me. My disorders are not ME.
Stigmas just make everything worse, for everyone. These stigmas surrounding us make us BPD survivors AFRAID to admit we have BPD. We are AFRAID to seek for help. We’re AFRAID to even talk about the subject in any way & we keep suffering, feeling alone in this hellhole of a world that might never understand us.
Don’t succumb to the stigma. Don’t be afraid of someone with BPD, because some of us suffer in silence & struggle internally, & some of us voice our emotions out in a very immature way — we’re not all the same. Imagine someone whose most outer layer of skin has been peeled completely off. You are red & raw. Even a soft breeze of wind hurts, even the smallest touch can make anyone scream from pain. That is what BPD emotions are like. We know how we behave is not right, but most of the time we just can’t help it. We learned these ways to behave from trauma — we had to do SOMETHING to survive, & now we are stuck with a certain way of behavior, a survival method that might get triggered by even the smallest things that remind us of the abuse we had to endure. We feel like we are in serious danger & we need to defend ourselves at least somehow. We know how we have learned to survive doesn’t work anymore, some of us are in so much better place than we were before, but we just can’t break free without professional help or dedicated self treatment, such as mindfulness, yoga, betterhelp.com, & meditation.
Not all of our bad behaviors are BPD based, but it’s very likely most of them are. Try to remember, that our bad behaviors stem from intensive pain. You don’t need to understand us & you never fully can unless you’re in our shoes, but just at least try to. Sometimes even trying is more than enough.
We are not perfect. You aren’t perfect either. We all make mistakes, some just more than others. Deep down inside we BPD survivors are just like you, just more sensitive. We are human, we are flawed, & we feel emotions. We are trying our best to be “normal” & not hurt anyone.
To other BPD survivors — there is hope. You’re not a sufferer — you’re a survivor. Someone loves you, & you should love yourself, too.
This has been a PSA. Thank you for reading. Thank you for trying to understand.
Still got some questions left ? Need support from a fellow BPD survivor ? Feel free to IM me. ]
