“Borderlines typically respond to depression, anxiety, frustration, or anger with more layers of these same feelings. Because of the borderline’s perfectionism and tendency to perceive things in black-and-white extremes, she attempts to obliterate unpleasant feelings rather than understand or cope with them.
When she finds that she cannot simply erase these bad feelings, she becomes even more frustrated or guilty. Since feeling bad is unacceptable, she feels bad about feeling bad. When this makes her feel worse, she becomes caught in a seemingly bottomless downward spiral.”
~ From I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality
This was me today. I was using all my skills and getting nowhere. Instead of accepting that, given the circumstances, there are always going to be bad days, I got cranky and frustrated when I couldn’t make myself feel better or break the funk.
Thankfully, it finally registered what was going on. So I let myself back-off a little on the study. I took some time to just feel sad and be okay with it. I took some deep breaths. And then I got on with life.
It’s easy to forget that the goal of DBT isn’t to stop the feelings, it’s to stop the reactivity. So today, despite how much my BPD brain wanted to tell me otherwise, was actually a good day. It was a DBT skills win, because I didn’t react and I didn’t make things worse. This is healing.
It’s not perfect and it’s better than it was.