Volatil9~

Sharing my meanderings and epiphanies on psychology that I've obtained through my experience as a baby psychonaut. Just philosophies, not peer-reviewed science, aight. Leaving the blog up, but I have moved! Going down new paths.

[volatil9]

Psychedelics

So I’ve begun on a new era in my psychological adventure. Psychedelics. The stuff that makes minds explode in colors and fireworks and opens up for alternative worlds, what is perceived as multi dimensions, being one with the universe and ego death. It’s a trip. Wow. The most interesting part is its effect on reprogramming the mind, of creating a reset and allowing us to tune ourselves, to become more open, empathetic, less defensive and to unlink traumas, compulsions and other nasties. I will have a lot to say on the subject; it’s just about finding the energy to pull myself up by the boostraps and manage to put my thoughts into some form of coherency. To be continued.

[volatil9]

I know I said in the past to think more positively, consider things you’re grateful for, hyper-focus on anything but negativity, but forget I said that. For reals. I’ve come to some realizations since I picked up the books of Zachary Stockhill and, uh, that other guy, and it’s that - if you feel pain, it’s because there IS pain; and the worst you can do is ignore it. There’s something going completely wrong with our culture at the moment, and several people are realizing it. Drowning ourselves in positivity and thinking about what we should be grateful for only repeat and perpetuate the idea that we’re ungrateful, dysfunctional failures. That sound harsh? It is. If you’re drowning in pain, in fear, in anger, it means something’s the matter - something requires attending to. Parts of your mind are trying to tell you something. By telling them “shut up, be positive, be grateful”, you’re invalidating these parts of concern. Does that mean these parts got it right? No. But they’re not backing down, because no matter what, they believe they’re right and they MUST by all means tell you. That means the time you spend distracting yourself, meditating, writing thank you lists or “my positive traits”, or listening to happy music, you’ll still find yourself back at “I fucking hate my life”. And on top of it, you’ll think “what the hell is wrong with me, I did all these things, and I still end up at square one. I’m such a failure”.

If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that inside all of us is a little village of different personalities; voices that will make you feel angry, sad, happy, hopeless, hopeful, ecstatic, or who will argue one point, and one argue another, etc. And what you may not realize is that you’re constantly subconsciously managing these voices, these little people, without quite realizing it. The thing about these subselves though is that they all have their beliefs, their opinions,  their concerns, their goals, etc., and they all revolve around you. Their ultimate purpose is to protect you, at ALL costs. So when an inner voice is telling you something and you’re not listening to it, it’ll manifest differently, as a nagging heavy feeling, as a stomach ache, as a headache, as a tick, as a panic attack, as a fit of anger, as food binging, as a drug addiction, as inexplicable crying... until you listen. Until you VALIDATE it. You know that we all want to be validated, to be heard and understood - and so does your inner little village. Well, little is an understatement, it’s huge. It’s like a townhall full of citizens, all with their different tasks and opinions, but with the common goal of protecting the townhall, the village-- you. If you validate, by asking, by listening, without judging, your concerned citizens, you may feel calm, and better. The nagging voices and emotions will cease. And when you’re listening - and NOT judging - you are in self. In control. It’s like a mayor listening to all the citizens in a screaming, loud townhall, and finding sudden quiet and silence. Once you listen to these voices, you may find that they’ve been afraid or concerned about different things, especially of feeling or getting hurt again. You may be able to calm their nerves, to tell them it’s all under control, it will be fine, and you appreciate their input; you may speak to an inner protector and tell them there’s no need for them to make you act or feel the way they do, because you can find a solution to the issue in some other and better way - and they will reassign themselves, and protect you in a new and healthier way. Essentially, you gotta learn to listen to yourself, not tell yourself over and over you’re wrong for being upset. Everyone gets upset. And the more we’re ignored, silenced, invalidated, the more hurt we get and the louder the voices, until it takes over our lives. These voices, or subselves, CANNOT be banished or die. They stay with you, even if it means in the dungeon or attic of your mind. And they so desperately want to return to you. And here, validation is the key.

Don’t wait for others to listen or validate you - the ultimate validation, the ultimate listening, the ultimate soothing -- comes from yourself. When you feel that shakey feeling in a scary situation, tell your concerned part that it’s okay, you get it, they’re concerned for you, and it’s okay. You got this. Tell that angry part that wants to set fire to the world that it’s okay, people are idiots, but you get it. You get why it’s upset, you get why it’s afraid of being misunderstood, of being rejected, hurt. You get it. If anyone gets it, it’s you. You get that they all have the intent to protect you, and that it’s love. Try this, and see if it won’t help you at times when your inner critics are tearing you down, echoing voices of past exes, bullies, parents, or others. Criticizing yourself won’t ever make these concerned parts go away. Telling yourself lies, that it’s fine when it’s not, and that you’re a loser for even thinking or feeling differently, won’t help. And it’s not true. You’re just simply human and you care about yourself. Every feeling, every thought, is a villager caring about you.

Remind yourself you’re not alone, not ever. Your village is with you, even if their attempt at protecting you and your interests are sometimes (or very often) based in misconceptions, in having learned by watching and doing what others did who had no clue either. But they can learn, from your-Self. And once they do, it is Awesome.

[volatil9]

my god thank you so much for those posts about retroactive jealousy. I've been dealing with this since I got together with my boyfriend and I even said to myself earlier today "this is an obsession I have with his ex" and now I feel like the problem I have has been identified and I can tackle it. I have bpd as well. I appreciate your insight on this topic so much you have no idea

I’m so glad to hear it’s been helpful to you! Identifying the problem can mean so much relief. I really hope you eventually find your way out of that cage of mental torture and anguish. I guess you could say since RJ is a form of OCD that it’s simply a way for us to try and regain control over our situation, that being our ultimate fear of being abandoned. Problem with that is though, we essentially can’t. We can’t control if someone will abandon us or not, and that’s what’s practically driving us mad. We so desperately want to protect ourselves against potential hurt and rejection that it’s safer to cause it ourselves before our deepest fears are realized. It’s quite a pinch, buut, it’s possible for your inner warriors to eventually calm down (if not entirely, then at least more than usual). It just takes stability and predictability, and trust, lots of it. All which depend on time and of course, the worthiness and patience of your partner ;).

[volatil9]

What if I was to tell you that every fit of anger, sadness, fear, stubbornness or similar was you caring deeply about yourself? What if every time you believed you hated yourself, loathed yourself with more passion than your worst enemy, it was actually a sign of self-care? What if every jab at yourself and at others was you attempting to protect yourself, to go on, to survive in a world full of hate, abandonment, and conflict? Because as much as we think we hate ourselves, we are in constant war with the world and ourselves in an attempt to keep breathing, to stay afloat. The truth is, if you didn’t care at all, your anger, fear, sadness, would all dissipate. You’d watch yourself rot with indifference. You care, and your whole disorder is based on that. To protect you from ever getting hurt again. Does it do a good job? Hell no. But it’s trying, as well as any child could who lacked the wisdom and understanding of an adult. Our emotional wounds are like photographs, like little hurt and angry children frozen in time, doing what hurt and angry children would do to protect themselves. If you could realize the wounds - the exiles - we hide within ourselves are just scared and hurt children, and that the effort we go through to protect them are the mechanisms of the knowledge and understanding we had at the time we acquired those wounds, we could learn to better understand and respect ourselves. Once we realize this, we can talk to our inner protectors, tell them they don’t need so feverishly to protect our inner children anymore, because we are adults now and we now know how to, in healthier, better ways. That way our exiles, our inner children, babies, or teenagers - or even adults - could come home where they belong, knowing that whatever exiled them in the first place was a lie, and that they are loved for exactly who they are.

[volatil9]

The damning aspect of the stigma surrounding BPD is that if you defend BPD and those who have BPD as not all the same and not all as bad, you get labeled “abuse sympathizer”, gaslighter, or even abuser. Nuance is not something that is welcomed, rather, BPD must be all good or all bad, according to everyone else, which I find quite ironic (and slightly comical). One wonders if interpreting the attempt to highlight a grey zone and nuance surrounding a very stigmatized illness as defending all abusers and ignoring all victims is not its own form of gaslighting.

[volatil9]

Stigma

Having borderline personality disorder is its own huge challenge, but one that adds to it is stigma. I often see the disorder flung out like an insult to all and every abusive person online, assuming that if someone is a bad person they must obviously be someone with BPD. For those of us who struggle to overcome the challenges of BPD, and whose self-loathing is the epitome of our disorder, seeing people constantly labeling every bad person as someone with BPD makes coming to terms and being honest around our disorder even harder. Telling someone you are a sufferer of BPD can be its own death sentence, because despite of the fact that personality disorders can be absolutely invisible to most people, people might drop you like a hot potato if they knew you’re one to carry the label. The stigma seems to originate two-ways: from those who have suffered severe abuse at the hands of people with BPD, and media headlines. Victims will publically and loudly condemn every single person with BPD because of the abuse they themselves experienced, and though they have every right to be angry and refuse any more excuses, not every person with BPD can or should take responsibility for another person’s actions just because they share the same diagnosis. In terms of headlines and internet attention, we know that drama and violence draw the most interest. It means that when BPD often comes up in the media, people will develop the worst associations to the diagnosis they can get. What springs to people’s minds is the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction and every other stereotype of BPD, when the truth is most people with BPD would make absolutely zero headlines. Non-violent, non-dangerous people with BPD don’t make news stories and they don’t draw attention in the countless forums online. Our stories go unnoticed and ignored, but the associations people have of BPD comes full circle back at us. The argument I’m trying to make here is that not everyone with BPD is a one-dimensional abusive asshole who is going to boil your rabbit. BPD varies in degree, combination of symptoms, it comes with or without comorbidity (such as NPD) and is not an all-defining characteristic of a person. You can have BPD and be a great person, and you can have BPD and be the worst person. Though it is described as a personality disorder, it is not to be understood as that it is a person’s personality that is bad and thus their character, but to be understood as that the symptoms of the disorder, that being the inability to properly regulate mood, to self-reflect in a healthy way, to handle and cope with conflicts or situations as a healthy adult would, are tied to the way a person feels, thinks, and how they understand the world. That distinction is a difficult one to make, but an important one nonetheless. To put those who struggle to get better, both for their own as well as they loved ones’ sake, in the same box as those with a total lack of empathy, a disregard for the well-being of others, and an egotistic need to meet their own ends, is in my opinion grossly unjust to those who already struggle with coming to terms with their diagnosis and seeking to find recovery. It’s an enormous and harmful leap in my eyes, as I know how many, myself included, fight to be a happier and better person, to overcome the emptiness of our core, and to do right by our loved ones. In the end, I argue this because people with BPD already blame and hate themselves for what they do and feel, they already believe they are doomed to a life of misery, self-loathing and condemnation, they all believe that treatment is impossible, especially because people online, either with no experiences or the worst experiences, argue so. But I disagree. I disagree that you are all the same, that WE are all the same. Getting better IS possible and can happen with the right support and treatment. Stigma doesn’t define us individually, it defines a stereotype, one that is easy to succumb to because of all the self-hate. But just remember, no stranger online or IRL knows who you are on the basis of a label, only you do, because you are your own person. So don’t use them as a way to measure your worth, your character, and so forth, because even though we must wade against the stream, mentally, socially, and societally, we can all make it despite of everything. Many have, and many more will.

[asking-the-death]

You need a private talk? Just message me(send me an ask)

[volatil9]

Who am I and why can’t I control my feelings? “Internal Family Systems“ - IFS - and BPD

All my life I’ve felt like emotions were constantly hijacking my mind, pushing me in the background. And it turns out I wasn’t very far from the truth. IFS is a form of therapy - “Internal Family Systems” - which I’m surprised is not more prevalent. Any human being on the planet will have experienced ‘inner conflicts’, voices in your mind that argue with each other, make it hard for you to make decisions, and so forth. As borderline you will be very familiar with feeling contradictory emotions, love/hate, joy/fear, any combination that would essentially make you feel confused. Who am I when I have so many different feelings and thoughts? Well. IFS explains that these voices are not you - but they may be running your life.

The controversial idea underlying the theory behind IFS is that we are not just ‘one’ person - we are many. Consider these common emotional states: racing thoughts and trouble sleeping; feeling panicky and confused; feeling overwhelmingly angry and doing something that “wasn’t you”; losing it and hurting yourself in frustration - and so forth. We often speak about self defense mechanisms, denial, overwhelming emotion, anxiety, addictions, etc., but what do they mean? Imagine your entire mind split into an entire village - or family - of different personalities, or persons, all with their own goals, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Freud touched on the same idea when he theorized the Id, Ego and Superego - but IFS takes this to a whole other level. We are probably all familiar with the angel and devil sitting on each shoulder, both trying to persuade the person in question. It is not very far off, although as people we are much more complicated than that. This family of ‘subselves’ warn us, advise us, and even take over control. If these subselves have become especially vigilant and protective of us, they may be running our lives to the point our ‘True Self’ or ‘Authentic Self’ has been pushed into the background, and instead a ‘False Self’ - a collection of subselves - are in charge.

Our inner subselves can be grouped into 3 categories (according to Peter K. Gerlach), “Managers”, “Inner Children”, and “Guardians”. I’ll focus on guardians here, because for us with BPD, these are the core issue of our illness. Guardians are our inner SWAT team, and they’re adamantly determined to protect you against any harm. Guardians become especially fierce if they have registered any severe harm done to you in your past (trauma, eg. abandonment/rejection), and they will do everything in their power to make sure that harm does not repeat itself. Your mind can recruit any guardian against any perceived threat, (consider pickle-phobia, for example) that other people haven’t recruited due to other experiences. Though everyone with BPD is different, we all share specific over-all symptoms - meaning we all have very similar guardians protecting us against very similar things, such as abandonment.

I’ll try not to delve too much into details here, but just consider that for most people with BPD we have real or perceived inner wounds of abandonment. Several guardians are here recruited to protect us against re-abandonment, but due to the severity of the wounds, these guardians are hyper-active and hyper-aware. All your guardians are connected to inner ‘schemas’ which you have created throughout your life, inner convictions that you hold, even against what you may find rational. These schemas can hold beliefs about people, yourself, and how the world works, and they are generally very black and white. Your guardians draw on these many convictions (even opposing) and work to remind you of these so that you may avoid harm.

A very common issue for people with BPD is internal conflicts. Let me give an example of how guardians and schemas can come into play:

What often happens to me is I will start idealizing my partner, thinking he’s the best in the world, and dreaming away about him on a pink cloud. Then something switches - I start feeling compulsively jealous out of the blue, scanning his past, anything he’s said before, over-analyzing, and I feel a huge urge to push him away and run in the other direction. Yet as soon as I start pushing him away, I feel panicky and want to draw him closer. Suddenly I find myself feeling both, and I start hating myself fiercely. Why can’t I just get a grip, be logical? Surely, I know what an idiot I am, but I can’t just snap out of it. Why would someone date someone like me who is this fucked up? I’m such human waste, and I should just die. As you can see, there are a lot of active voices and feelings I seemingly have no control over.

Applying IFS can help separating the voices and finding out exactly what’s going on when the typical push-pull effect activates. This can be very hard in the heat of the moment, since in the example I stated I am what is referred to as ‘blended’. Subselves war with each other for the power of their host and take control, colliding in much confusing and paradoxical behavior. However, it IS possible to listen to these voices, even when ‘blended’. What may be happening in such moments is that these subselves are speaking FOR you - “I hate you, go away”, or “I would have been so lost without you”. Or when you sit and struggle to try and keep the anger in (another guardian attempting to control the other rampant guardians), you can, if you listen, hear or feel the different voices, opinions, and concerns exploding in the back of your mind.

But why do these subselves act the what they do? Why do I idealize? Idealizing/putting your partner on a pedestal/recruiting draws on the schema which is related to your abandonment wound; you were hurt and rejected by a parental figure, but you so crave unconditional love and understanding. This guardian wants to heal you and recruit the perfect parental figure who can swoop in and save you, based on an early understanding of attachment and love - the fantasy and deep wanting of a child. However, the flipside is your parental figures were never consistent in their love and validation, so fundamentally you don’t believe love and attachment can be consistent and secure. Another guardian sweeps in to warn you that any love is too good to be true - there is always abandonment waiting right around the corner. This guardian is set to find this threat before it creeps up on you and takes you by surprise - no matter what it WILL protect you against this. Hence why in my example I start getting jealous for no reason, feeling paranoid, insecure, and feel that I want to push away. My guardian(s) know(s) that attachment figures pose a threat to my very well-being, because of the wound still remembered. Somewhere inside is a child frozen in time, an Exile, crying in the basement of my mind, feeling unloved, abandoned, and completely worthless. The guardian, hired to protect this inner wounded child, will not have this pain re-lived or doubled - so it attempts to sabotage, devalue, and push away - and against its own logic, achieves all it set out to avoid.

Unless of course the recruiter (or set of recruiters) set in to save the day. Panic fills my chest, and before I know it I am acting like a little child, seeing my partner as this rescuing parent who mustn’t leave me, no matter what. Yet again, I can’t stand facing the possible pain should this person actually leave me. And so back and forth it goes, while another voice fills my head - another guardian, set to protect me against these other two guardians (or collective guardians in two opposing teams), as their inner struggle is clearly harmful to me. If I could only trust that nothing will ever improve, nothing will ever be right, that I am worthless and doomed, if I would only kill myself, I could be protected forever against any pain ever again. To this guardian its own logic makes a lot of sense - and to all guardians their way is the best way.

So where are you in all of this? According to Peter K. Gerlach, your true Self is when you feel calm, collected, ‘serene’ - and with borderline you feel anything but. Our subselves never learned to protect us in healthy ways due to the childhood invalidation that left us clueless as how to deal with our emotions. We’ve been put into strict “protective custody” by our immature and toxic subselves, and thus, from a very early age, and growing up, never knowing who we are. But here we are, nonetheless. If we can learn to recognize these voices as subselves - as a collective “False Self”; that behind all of these scared, frightened, angry, and emotionally intense subselves is a Real you - we can realize that our emotions, thoughts, and behavior are not us. They are the product of fear and a natural yearning towards validation and love. And once in a while, when our subselves are calm, we may see glimpses of ourselves.

So how can we learn to manage them so that they may stay calm? So that perhaps these inner schemas which we self-verify by can be challenged? Well. What I have learned so far is that the first step is learning to listen and observe these voices - which is basically mindfulness in action, but a little more advanced - and as you listen to them, acknowledge their presence and their concerns, these voices have a tendency to calm and lose power over you. They are like little mini-you’s, all wanting to be heard, seen, and understood. They have serious concerns because they were created to care and protect you - and if you listen to their concerns, acknowledge these (but don’t necessarily agree), these voices will lower the intensity to which they are yelling inside your head. This is the same thing that happens when we are angry, and someone makes us feel heard, seen, and validated, and we manage to calm down. The anger is a guardian with a very serious concern, however far from logical reality, which has felt it has been taken seriously. Learn to validate your inner subselves with time, and you WILL achieve more calm and serenity, even if it will be challenging. (Note: Meditation also works to achieve calming of your subselves, hence why you ‘clear your head’ - it just doesn’t face and deal with these voices directly).

Now, as a final note, I just want to touch on retroactive jealousy (when jealousy is a form of OCD). It seems a common issue among us with BPD (and others who struggle with general insecurity), and I know how many dream for a solution to lessen this specific mental torture. Even with IFS, RJ remains a challenge, because it doesn’t work quite like other distrusters. I’ve had to apply tons of scanning and analysis on this issue to just somewhat comprehend its root cause, and I want to share my findings in the hope that it may help any of you suffering with RJ as well.

To my understanding so far, retroactive jealousy is not your typical guardian, but is rather recruited by another guardian. Consider the push-pull effect. You feel too close, so you push away. If there are no concrete issues, but your guardian is convinced there MUST be a threat (because there always is, according to its inner conviction - its ‘schema’), it must conjure something up. So it hires a specific kind of guardian - a scanner. Retroactive jealousy is nothing but a compulsive scanner activated to find any type of threat so that you will push away and leave your partner before they leave you. There is no use inspecting this guardian because the only function it has is to draw you into its world of threats and make you insanely jealous - the only thing you can do is acknowledge its presence, and investigate the schema its using to scan threats with. This serves to make you able to separate specific convictions from your ‘True Self’ (because you logically know the jealousy is nonsensical), so that you can recognize when it is in fact a guardian activating - and not you.

Without letting yourself inspect its specific (hurtful) findings about your partner, ask yourself what it scans for specifically - what over-all schema does it play into? What is its ‘triggers’? What convictions are these findings based on? What does it say about you, your partner, or attachment figures in general? You may find that this schema is like an emotional lens for you, distorting your very reality (and this is what it does). The jealousy scanner wants to find threats, so you won’t have to relive a pain you may have experienced in the past, or which you fear experiencing due to inner convictions about your own self-worth. But what you must bear in mind is - none of it is real. It is a distortion. It is meant to protect you, but it’s misguided and hurts you instead. Circle those convictions, those feelings, and thoughts, and realize that they are NOT you. All you can do is acknowledge the concerns of the initial guardian that recruited this scanner guardian. It is very worried about you, because even if it is inspecting the past, it is doing so to protect you from the future. Doing this may (hopefully) make it calm its horses. And when you find the scanner activating again, you look for this first ‘activating’ guardian, and you listen to its concerns. It wants you to push away? You understand it is afraid for you. But you have everything under control. It’s all A-OK.

Acknowledging and validating (but not necessarily agreeing) with guardians (distrusters as well as recruiters) is the way to manage your inner rampant voices. Play out conversations in your head, listen to them all as if you were attending a meeting in a village for concerned citizens and play the mayor - and hopefully find yourself in all of this. I’m sorry that this long-ass post doesn’t delve more into the practical way of applying IFS, but everything starts with the theory. Either way, I hope this will aid you in your first step at attaining some serenity, if only for a little while.

[volatil9]

The first step to conquering Retroactive Jealousy

I really want to write a more extensive post about what you can do to battle retroactive jealousy, but if I keep thinking that way I don’t think I’ll ever manage to make one. So instead I just want to share with you, in my opinion, the most important tip for curing retroactive jealousy. As I mentioned in my first post about retroactive jealousy, it’s like a constant circle that keeps itself alive. You experience intrusive thoughts which in turn make you act upon them in hope of relief, and then this relief only lives on until the next intrusive thoughts appear. This is the circle that we need to break. You cannot stop your intrusive thoughts by telling yourself, “stop thinking about them!”, as it’s the same case when I tell you not to think about a pink elephant. You WILL think these thoughts. Even more so if you try to ignore them, yet ironically, by giving into them they grow ever stronger. This is what makes retroactive jealousy seem so hopeless and so torturous.

So what can you do? In order to rid yourself of this mental virus, the first and most important step is to stop giving into the compulsions. You have to stop asking your loved one questions that fuel your jealousy. Stop bringing up the topic. Stop providing yourself painful details. Stop snooping in their things. Stop giving into your fear. The topic of your partner’s past is now out of bounds for you. You cannot stop your thoughts, but you have the power not to act on them. This is where you can make a difference.

Of course this seems easier said than done. But it IS the first place to start if you want to feel instant relief. As soon as I imagined never having to talk about, think about or bring up the topic of my partner’s ex, I felt in me a deep relief I’ve carried with me ever since. I’ve had several relapses but nothing as serious and painful as it once was. I can’t tell if this is a step that will work as well for you as it did for me, which is why I want to make further suggestions at a later time. But for now, I urge you to take that step. Stop giving in. Talk to your partner about it, gain their support, have them help you cut the compulsion. Giving in to asking questions in the hope of finding relief, but instead creating stronger, more vivid images of hurtful, imaginary scenarios with your partner and their ex(es), fuel the entire machinery of OCD jealousy. It is like feeding a green monster in the corner of your mind, where it grows and thrives and eventually becomes so big as to ruin your mental well-being and your relationship. Once you stop feeding it, you’ll realize it is rapidly shrinking. It may never disappear, and it may always attempt to ask for treats, but it will not hold the power over you it once did.

Now, I know what enabled me to take this advice seriously and follow through with it was because I had already exhausted all possible questions to the point I was repeating myself and just continuously torturing myself. There really was nothing more for me to learn, and if there was, I suppose I will never know. That’s the thing with trust, it has no ultimate assurance. Retroactive jealousy not only pulls you out of living your life while you have it, but it also brings you into a world that does not at all resemble anything that truly was your partner’s past. Your partner’s memories are quickly fading, and you weren’t there, hiding in the closet, taking notes. I like Zachary Stockhill’s analogy (I can thank him for giving me this really important tip - do check out his site if you will, retroactivejealousy.com; he’s got an e-book on the entire topic): memories are like an impressionistic painting on which the paint is wet and running - memories don’t exist in HD format that you can replay in your mind like perfect, vivid movies. Whatever you imagine in your head about your partner are your own projections, created in a mind full of fear, low self esteem, and perhaps many past hurtful experiences. Your partner’s past becomes a painting of YOUR mind, not theirs. You will never know exactly what happened, only that they are with you now and have chosen you over everyone else. And that you’re the one thinking waaay more over their ex(es) than they are. If they did, they’d definitely not be worth staying with. We are the ones constantly bringing their past back up into the present. And all there is now is the present moment. The past is gone, a sum of ourselves, but it’s no longer there, only through some vague, blurry memories that continue to blur and to fade, seen through the eyes of the present. Also, another good point that Jeff Billings (another retroactive jealousy person with an e-book) got that I thought was quite comforting was the idea of how our pasts brought us here together. If we could go back and erase the past of our partner it could mess with the entire space time continuum and our paths may have never crossed, and even if they had,  we may have continued straight ahead, never looking in their direction. Our past is the reason we are here today, loved by them, and loving them. Yet the past is in the past, it’s gone, nonexistent, and the only thing that matters is what you have now. Hm, yah. I’m sure I failed to put it as eloquently as they did, but yes, these are the words of advice I have for you that I always try to remind myself.

Even if this step doesn’t work for you, and these words of comfort didn’t comfort you, don’t give up on hope. The real issue is our self esteem. That’s the next step. And phew, that aint gonna be easy to improve, but it’s certainly not impossible. Hold on, dear retroactive jealous fellows of mine, we shall conquer the green beast roaming in our minds, and we shall find joy in the present.. one day. Soon. These two authors did it - though they don’t have BPD... but still! It’s possible. I’ve improved by following just this one step, and so you too will find the step that works for you.

[volatil9]

The torture of “OCD” jealousy

Suffering from BPD means that jealousy has always been a “natural” part of my life. It took years even to recognize that my jealousy wasn’t well-founded, that it was indeed an issue within myself. Yet with BPD, jealousy can become an extremely overwhelming force. Minuscule things seem to fill my vision, and my heart races fast, injecting me with acid-like adrenaline. It feels overwhelmingly real, this threat my mind has presented to me. It becomes near impossible to hold onto any shred of logic or rationality, as reality transforms into a fifth-like dimension of emotion. Past, present, future, it all merges together, it all feels the same, and I can’t distinguish real from fear. It all feels real, and I feel ugly, worthless, and betrayed. Jealousy is the worst feeling in the world, and I really mean that. It’s like rage, but it’s not. It’s something more than that. It’s malicious. It starts right in your heart, like a thousand needles, all hot or acidic, and spreads like lightening through your nerves. You feel it in your temples, and a strange, hot, acidic belt straps across your forehead. It burns in your cheeks. But most of all, it hurts. It hurts so bad. Like the air was punched out of you, you can’t breathe, and it’s like you just died a little. But most of all, you’re mad. So fucking mad. Jealousy is a strange mixture between complete and utter fear, overwhelming rage, and a black and bottomless sadness, like grief. It’s like all the worst basic emotions compressed into one lethal emotion.

I’ve learned to expect this as an inevitable part of any intimate relationship I’m in. Feeling easily threatened, questioning my partner’s commitment, ruminating over his comments, wondering if he wished he was with somebody else, if he’s thinking about someone hotter than me, constant feeling of low self worth, etc. It’s just how it is. A ‘natural’ part of who I am. Fear being the very essence of my existence, jealousy my natural poison. Yet as much as this may seem draining, I never knew the torture my mind was capable of conjuring up, all on its own. I don’t refer to the mental gymnastics that BPD is a master at. Our minds can stretch far and wide in its scan for threats, to the point it will grasp at anything just slightly similar to something that has ever left a scar on us in our past. It will observe all these slight similarities through the lens of suspicion and fear, and all will be twisted to fit its conspiracy theory. But there is a different type of jealousy where the rules of physics disappear and time collapses. I’m sure many find regular BPD jealousy does just that, and, well, it does to an extent, but when it comes to what is called “retroactive jealousy”, it is that and more. Much more. What “retroactive jealousy” does is, it places you in a dark, dirty room in your mind, puts you in a straitjacket and straps you down into a chair, then puts on a video of your loved one having the most amazing, fulfilling, orgasmic sex with their ex-partner and makes you watch the entire show, over, and over again. All the while you feel that exact reaction as I described above, over, and over, and over again, till you’re about to collapse. And there seems to be no way out, no matter what you do. As soon as you think you’re better, it comes back, replays, and makes you feel the same thing again and again. And it’s torture, absolute torture. Not only because you’re seeing your loved one with someone else, as if you’re watching them betraying you through a hidden camera in your bedroom, no, because you, as a borderline, is absolutely skinless. ‘Cause we have little to no emotional skin. Especially when it comes to intimate relationships. It feels like a jagged knife carving along our hearts till we erupt into piercing screams. And what’s worse is all we can do is sit and watch. We are slaves to our minds.

I know I’m getting awfully gloomy in this post. And perhaps I am. I’m absolutely sick and tired of the pain that is retroactive jealousy and I’m not even sure words can describe how it’s like. As I’ve described in my earlier post about retroactive jealousy, it is a form of OCD which separates itself from regular, painful enough, jealousy. This makes jealousy a constant, recurrent pain, and it’s so goddamn draining. Retroactive jealousy on its own is painful, jealousy on its own is painful, borderline personality disorder is painful, but mix it and you have a toxic recipe for mental torture. Not just because I can’t help but imagine retroactive jealousy without emotional regulation will be that much more extreme, but also because our reactions to this kind of pain will be equally so. Having borderline personality disorder can feel like being on fire, and you will desperately want to do anything to douse that pain, even if it means calling your loved one the worst names in the book, throwing shit, or harming yourself. And retroactive jealousy re-lights that fire continuously, sending you hurtful images and videos that further push you away from your partner, and you further into a pit of despair and anguish. It literally feels as if your partner has wronged you, been unfaithful to you, or has told you that their ex-lover was that much better than you. Even if he or she constantly tells you the very opposite. No reassurance will douse the flames. Perhaps for a little while before they blaze up again to consume you. And on and on it goes.

I was literally being driven mad. And with this prospect, I couldn’t imagine my relationship to the greatest guy on the planet working out. Here I was, finally having found someone who would treat me with respect and shower me with love, and I was self-sabotaging everything, against my will, helplessly, while very much aware, observing my own demise from some dark, pitiful corner of my mind. So have I gotten better or worse since? Well, as you can see, sometimes the feelings overwhelm and I go through the motions again. But yes, it has. It’s just hard to remind myself that when I’m in one of these dark moments that it is not always like this anymore, and that I’ll get out on the other side with renewed hope again. That slipping up once in a while, even if it’s nowhere near as bad as it has been, won’t mean my partner will leave me.

I know so far I’ve painted retroactive jealousy as a deadly force you can do nothing to fight against, but it’s not true. At first I mistakenly thought I had to face my triggers, my pain, my fear, which meant I ended up asking my partner about every detail I could think of, only to make things that much worse. I asked him for so many details I had finally exhausted myself to the point of just repeating my questions, or going in circles with my jealousy, commenting on his every past action with my judgmental eyes. “So you really liked that, huh? Was she good at it? Did you moan? Do you still dream about it? How did she look at you when she did it? Is that all you care about? Is that all you want? Was she better? I’m just an ugly bitch, aren’t I.” It was pretty obvious there was no solution to this. Nothing had improved by me receiving answers or by me continuing my questioning. It had only fed the green monster feeding off my mind’s toxic waste. And it was killing me. And it was killing him. But I literally felt like offing myself.

I don’t honestly know what I would have done had my partner not told me to try and google “OCD jealousy”. Results about “retroactive jealousy” immediately appeared, and seconds later I knew what kind of demon I was dealing with. I bought both online books by Zachary Stockhill and Jeff Billings in a jiffy. I can’t say I’ve quite followed their advice as much as I probably should have, but there were a few simple things that changed everything about the torture I was in. First of all, I knew what it was. Just getting it gave me tremendous relief. Second of all, I stopped indulging. This is how you break the circle of OCD. You stop giving into the obsessive thoughts and you break the compulsion that enables the circle to go on. These two didn’t and haven’t of course cured it entirely. But they have diminished the pressure to such a degree that I can actually breathe and exist without ending up having to down some shots to control my anger or steering clear of sharp objects all the time. I’ve tried to enforce more positive thoughts, by trying to feel thankful for what I have, attempting to chant to myself that I am safe and alright, that my partner loves and supports me, day after day till I got completely sick of it. I really, really tried to choose betterment. It’s just.. an extremely draining process when your brain defaults to negativity and negativity is me in my relaxed state. But deciding to stop indulging in the interrogation slammed the door to the nasty room with the straitjacket and the projected videos (the videos projected by my evil, creative fantasy that in no way even reflect reality as it was), and it provided me with much needed relief knowing I wasn’t going to be talking to my partner about this anymore. Well. Okay. I’ve failed a few times, but the slip ups have been so minor in comparison to what ruled before, and with the constant push-pull effect always at work when you have BPD, it’s only to be expected that hard times come and go.

So yah.. If you suffer from retroactive jealousy, I highly recommend you to stop interrogating. Discuss and talk it out with your partner. Help them understand what you’re going through. Stop blaming yourself. I know you don’t want this. None of us do. Nobody chooses pain. Believe that by stopping the circle by not giving into the compulsion that your obsessive thoughts can and will lessen. That you will be able to breathe again, even if it doesn’t ever completely go away. But it can become tolerable. I see retroactive jealousy as an addiction. You can get better, you may even feel you conquered it, but it’ll always be there in the back of your mind, threatening to come back when times get tough. And that’s okay. If you can accept the monster you’re dealing with, you can learn to tackle it. By simply ignoring it altogether, it will find its way back. Knowing the monster means knowing that the problem lies not within your relationship, but within yourself (unless it really does, and you should consider leaving your partner, but that’s another story). Your jealousy is the result of your fear of what may happen in the future (not of the past, which is where your focus has been), because you simply believe you are unlovable. If you are unlovable, then anything will be  a threat to your relationship, even the past, because the core fear of BPD is abandonment. Now, healing that broken BPD self esteem will be a tough nut to crack, and don’t hesitate to pick up the bone if you have an easy-pie solution at hand you wanna share. Rather, it won’t just take a few simple solutions to fix, it’ll likely require a mixture of many. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It just means that I, personally, am yet to find an answer.

Anyway. I have no clue if my post made you feel worse or better. It’s most of all meant as an expression of the occasional despair I experience, but I couldn’t help but end it on a hopeful note, because despite all, I have gotten better. Way better. That doesn’t mean I don’t live my life in constant BPD fear of being abandoned by my loved one though, and that in itself can make me have my weak moments where the room with the videos and straitjacket gain a little too much power. In the end, that room is powered by fear and fear alone. Remember that. There is a root cause to the creation of that room, and it is your fear of not being good enough, of having to compete against something to which you know you’ll lose, and of your partner realizing what a terrible, rotten human being you are and leave you. And any one time where you feel extra stressed, extra scared, feel that your ‘distruster’ has picked up on signs of possible abandonment, this room may power up just to give you the courage you need to leave him or her before they leave you. In the end I think that’s what it’s all about. Avoiding a threat before it catches you. So find solace in the fact that as much as your illness and your jealousy seem to make no sense, it actually makes perfect sense. From some twisted evolutionary perspective, we are acting quite reasonably. Heh.

Alright. I think I’ve said plenty (is it just me, or are these posts getting longer?) Take care, all of ya.

[volatil9]

The black and white protectors of your mind

So there’s a thing I’d like to share with all of you. I read a post some years back that really opened my eyes to understanding BPD, and I find its essence relevant to anyone who may have trouble understanding what’s going on inside themselves. It will help to explain the so-called push-pull effect which happens to everyone with BPD, the constant ambivalent feelings of “I hate you/I love you”. If you are not very familiar with the push-pull effect, this post may help to make it clear, otherwise excuse my confusing ramblings.

What I want to talk about ties a lot into my previous post about childhood invalidation. As borderline, we’ve experienced or perceived abandonment in our childhood and possibly onwards. Since we are all wired to desire validation and to grow and thrive in a validating environment, we will do what we can to protect ourselves against invalidation. Invalidation is seen as a form of inconsistency in your environment, something you can’t predict or trust, and something that is essentially threatening you as a being, whether it be physical or emotional. As humans we are programmed for survival, so what do we do when we experience or perceive a threat? We defend ourselves against it.

As I mentioned in my previous post, invalidation doesn’t need to be visible and obvious, it can be subtle and hidden. The fact that you feel you cannot be you, want what you want, need what you need, or just be you, is traumatizing. It is painful. And when you grow up, you carry that trauma with you. You relive it constantly, even when you know it’s irrational. You react and feel towards something in a way that is hardly understandable to you. It is as if you don’t even have control, over what you feel, how you act, or even over who you are.

And why is this? It’s quite interesting actually. Our minds are truly complex. The trauma we experienced can be so hurtful that we try and put it away in our minds. But it doesn’t ever go away. We try and avoid that trauma, because it carries with it pain we didn’t know how to deal with at the time that we experienced it, and which we still don’t. The trauma is referred to as ‘exile’ or ‘exiles’, rather, as for the person with borderline it isn’t just one hurtful event, but a life of hurt that haunts them. You can envision the exile as a small, scared child sitting in a dark corner in the basement of your mind (and as the unified symbol of the several memories of trauma which have been exiled) - and outside the room you find the ‘protectors’, guarding the entrance to this hurt and lonely child. The protectors are like a form of older siblings, left to deal with a younger sibling all on their own. What they are truly longing for is someone, a parent-like figure, to come and take over their burden and release the exile from its mental prison, and to find true peace and healing.

Only, it isn’t so easy. There are two specific protectors which you, if you have borderline, will be extremely familiar with and may recognize as you read this. The first one is known as the ‘recruiter’ - this protector is set on trying to find someone who can truly love you for who you are, someone who will see through you, through all the barriers, and rescue you. Someone who will take all the pain away. A ‘redeemer’. And they will idealize any such potential recruit and it will cling to them, fiercely, like a little, scared child would. But both protectors are immature and one-sided; all they care about is protecting and finding the help the exile needs, each from their own very narrow perspective, all the while they have no realistic clue how.

The second protector is the ‘distruster’. Though the ‘recruiter’ can be a strong mental force, the distruster is ever more powerful, dedicated, persistent, and absolutely destructive. As a side note: I have a tendency to see the distruster as a ‘she’ since I happen to be female, but I also enjoy personifying the distruster solely because it enables me to separate it from ‘me’. You may want to do this too if you find it helpful. Anyway. She has been the force behind my rage, my jealousy, my distrust, my despair.. Miss Distruster is a strong, tireless entity that will stop at nothing to protect me. And that is what the distruster does. It protects you. As much as it will look like self-destruction, it is always a form of protection. And once that becomes clear, perhaps you will be less hard on yourself and that part of you. Perhaps you will learn to separate it from yourself, to have conversations with it, and to calm its concerns (this is also known as the IFS process which can be quite effective for those with BPD. But I strongly advise against it for retroactive jealousy. Seriously, don’t go there. Ahem. I’ll explain why in a separate post about retroactive jealousy).

What is interesting about the distruster is she can almost split in two. I call these two separate functioning distrusters Miss Blue and Miss Red. Miss Red is outward angry. She is a super-detective always on the look out for the smallest sign of abandonment, of rejection, of anything that the exile has experienced before. She will do anything to help me avoid that pain again, even if it means sabotaging whatever I have built up for myself. She will inspect my loved one, over-analyze his facial expressions, accumulate little evidence over time and suddenly explode into rage, and she will devalue. A lot. And when this happens, it can be hard as hell to reason with me. Logic and the like fly out the window, and everything is on fire, or at least it looks that way through my eyes. And if that evokes any negative reaction from the person she’s targeted, she will only have ever more reason to be hurt and distrustful, and thus angry as hell. Sometimes she is just present in a passive aggressive mode, spitting drops of acid from the corner of my mind. Sometimes she can be handled and rationalized, other times not at all. The exile’s pain and anger from past abandonment will be directly connected to her through some form of a mental umbilical cord, from which everything will be relived. Any pain from the past, anything at all, will come to the surface at once, connected like a form of mental domino. But she does this because she wants me to be safe. Knowing that helps with my self-loathing, which I will expand on next.

Miss Blue is a lot like Miss Red. She wants to protect me, and she can get very angry and hostile. Only, it isn’t towards others. She is angry inwards. At me. She will call me all kinds of names, tell me what a loser I am, what a failure, a mistake, a stain on human history. That I’m worthless, unlovable, undesirable, unworthy of everything and anything. She is the very embodiment of the voices from past trauma, even the voices that never spoke so directly, but hinted at it through their actions. When someone ignored what I said or my attempts at communication, I rationalized that they did so because I was boring, lame, an idiot, unworthy of attention and love. That this was what was truly on their minds. When someone said “don’t be so sensitive”, I heard “get a grip, get over yourself, because you’re a whiny, attention-seeking loser”. And so forth. I internalized these hurtful actions or voices, not only because I thought that if anyone could treat me this or that way, it must be a rational thing to conclude I was worthless, but also as a means to protect myself against ever being hurt again. If I reminded myself that I was worthless, stupid, a waste of oxygen, then I would steer around people who may hurt me this way again. “You’re an idiot for even thinking he loves you”. “You’re so naive, what did you expect? You’re worth nothing, you knew it, and yet you still tried. This should teach you”. So Miss Blue can be extremely vicious and hurtful.. and self-destructive.

(Mind you, I’m not trying to describe an over-reaction to a few random comments in my life, but my negative reaction as a result of continuous and traumatizing invalidation throughout my life, to the point that any invalidation, big or small, would leave a painful scar - because a borderline’s pain is connected to all of the pain they ever experienced)

I suppose for some they could see Miss Blue and Miss Red as the one and the same distruster. It’s possible. I guess I prefer dividing the voices in my mind so to better understand these so-called protective forces that otherwise seem so destructive. In their quest for peace and safety, they destroy it. While trying to find (and recruit) the person who will finally love you and see you for who you are and take care of the burden which is the exile, they avoid, push away, and devalue.

What is then the most confusing about being borderline is when you observe these two protectors, the recruiter and the distruster, in action, fighting each other like enemies. And you may end up believing that when you are in recruiter mode that everything is safe and better, or will get better. That you will get better. But it is just the other side of the coin. Black/white, good/bad, idealize/devalue. The recruiter is not to be trusted either, as she is blinded by her idealism, and her hope for salvation. She represses all flaws and threats and pulls hard and close, until you feel engulfed and suffocated. Then the distruster will take over, push away, so that you may breathe again, feel like a separate individual, but be completely miserable. And round and round it goes.

Now, I’m not saying we are only slaves to these two opposite magnetic forces. We can find ourselves a little in between, before any of these two protectors set in again. But it’s about recognizing when one or the other is active. But they’re strong forces, and it’s darn hard not to give in to either one. But this ability can be trained and strengthened. Learning self-soothing coping mechanisms for one can help you stabilize (DBT). Learning to converse and rationalize with your protectors (IFS) is also possible. Everything is possible. What it requires though is self-awareness - and a willingness to face the exiled pain. These must be learned first. This can be difficult if your protectors are super strong, and you’re very walled up. But it’s alright. You are walled up because you care about yourself. Because you matter. These protectors, seemingly destroying everything you love and your life, actually care about you. They are just.. young, lost children who need to learn how to cope like adults. Everyone else learned subconsciously and indirectly throughout their validating childhoods and later life how to cope well with emotion and challenging situations - and oh, do I envy them - but we must make the hard journey to do this consciously. To alter our subconscious while fully aware. And damn, does that make us strong and awesome. Seriously. We deserve some credit. Because in the end, none of us chose to be hurt, traumatized, and ‘broken’. It was never a choice, so we must not blame ourselves. Anyone else who would have lived through the same experiences would have come out the same. So all we can do now is make the courageous choice to get better.

I hoped this long-ass post (’scuse my language, I’m a trashcan by nature) made any sense. For the future I plan to make a post about how to use the IFS process to calm down your distruster. Credit to whomever was the genius who came up with this understanding of self and the subsequent method of therapy.

[volatil9]

Mental static

w00sh, I must say, I have felt a little overwhelmed. I never expected my previous post to be so.. well received. I thought I was practically spewing out nonsense that no one would think much of or even understand,- or even bother to read. I’m pretty darn glad though to see that my muddled thoughts actually did make some sense.. and that it seems to resonate a lot with people. That’s what I wanna do, write about BPD so that it’s understandable, recognizable, and somewhat.. enlightening. I just need my brain to be on my side. At any sign of pressure, it shuts down. I’m a perfectionist and freeze at mistakes (my own, that is), and all thoughts become splintered and fragmented. I want to use this blog to overcome that mental blockade, say screw the lack of perfect, and just write from the heart, mistakes and all. And realize that maybe that’s good enough, and maybe ‘good enough’ can even make a difference, not just for me but for others. And that’s what matters, a lot. The thought of helping people makes me ecstatic. So yeah, it’s a part of the journey, I’ll bull through and make this an awesome blog with tons of interesting information to anyone who’ll be interested. Hooha. I’m writing this nonsense just to push through my insecurities, laying it all bare, so that I can imagine I’ll be forgiven for any lousily written future post. Sigh. That’s just my AvPD talking.

[volatil9]

Childhood invalidation and BPD

So there’s a reason BPD is such a tough disorder to suffer from. Besides from the obvious of being a personality disorder - meaning it isn’t just a “simple” mood disorder, a form of depression that may pass, a phobia you can practice your way out of it, but something tied to your very ‘self’, your values, and opinions - it is a disorder based mostly on childhood trauma (as are most personality disorders). Of course there’s the possibility of a biological predisposition, a form of sensitivity towards perceived rejection, but the person with borderline is most likely to have been raised in a very invalidating environment.

Being invalidated isn’t always an easy thing to understand, because it can take on so many different shapes - some people with BPD may not even be able to recognize the invalidation they experienced before they are taught to see it through therapy. Invalidation is something which is likely to have happened repeatedly throughout your childhood and not just through a single traumatic event (this is why you often hear ‘complex PTSD’ in relation to BPD, even if they aren’t the same). It can be something as extreme as physical and sexual abuse in which the child is dehumanized and degraded to object (a large number of people with BPD are victims of sexual and/or physical abuse), but it can also happen subtly and as simple as your parent saying to you “don’t be so sensitive” when you try to voice your concern. Being invalidated is an extremely hurtful and traumatizing thing to experience (even if you don’t know it), as children but also as adults. When this is the type of environment you grow up with, you are not mature enough to understand what is happening to you and you internalize this voice of invalidation. It means you believe what all these often indirect hints are saying about you. All the while you have no clue what to do or where to put your emotions.

AJ Mahari describes this invalidation as ‘abandoned pain’. What happens is you will be left with a lot of unresolved pain from this form of invalidation (and what will also be perceived as abandonment) which you have no clue what to do with or how to eliminate. Somehow you will have to abandon this pain. And since no one taught you how to deal with your emotions and your pain in a healthy way, you will do anything to push it away. This can result in a lot of destructive and self-destructive coping mechanisms, out of sheer ignorance of how to deal with emotions and out of utter frustration because of this. In a sense you are completely alone, alone with yourself, your emotions, and the emptiness left when those emotions are pushed aside. You end up feeling trapped on the inside with a burning ache that someone will recognize you,  what you are feeling, and finally validate you. Problem is, since this abandoned pain is based on trauma, anyone capable of giving you love is now a potential threat of invalidation (and hereby abandonment), as registered by your amygdala (the more primitive part of your brain responsible for emotions and keeps a log of anything that ever hurt you so you may avoid it again in the future). This defines all personal and intimate connections as threatening and dangerous, and you are once again trapped inside yourself and the original pain from your past which you will be constantly trying to escape. This is also known as the ‘push-pull effect’ (”I hate you, don’t leave me”). We want so passionately to be loved and validated, yet we assume it is impossible - why? Because we believe to our core that our wants, needs, and our very ‘self’ are wrong, and anyone who ever says they love us must be just as wrong or as invalidating as those before them. This ties strongly into the reason behind retroactive jealousy: that you are fundamentally bad, and that your lover will realize this. Hence why being borderline is like constantly living in a stressful flight or fight situation, always suspecting hurt to be coming your way.

I’ll be delving deeper into the psyche of the borderline, but I best wrap this up before I make it a book instead of a post.

[volatil9]

Retroactive Jealousy

Here is a topic I’d like to touch on a lot. Retroactive jealousy is not particular to BPD, but when paired with BPD it gets extra nasty. Retroactive jealousy basically means you can’t stop obsessing about your partner’s past sexual and/or emotional history. This leads you to asking excessive details that create imaginative images and videos in your head of your partner and their former lover, imagining something that could only be much better and impressive than anything you could ever offer them. Oh, and it hurts. A lot. And no matter what you do, new questions pop up and you end up with way too much hurtful TMI. So why do you even ask for details? Why do you even let yourself think these thoughts in the first place? Because retroactive jealousy is a form of OCD in the form of jealousy. It’s anxiety based and completely intrusive. So the circle of retroactive jealousy goes somewhat like this: intrusive thought -> anxiety (physical response) -> Compulsion -> Short term relief, and around it goes. So with retroactive jealousy you’ll have intrusive thoughts about your partner, wondering what they did, how they did it, how often, whether they liked it (and liked it better than with you), what it meant, what it says about their character, basically a ton of questions that are completely fear based. This will lead you to experience a ton of anxiety and worry whether any of this is true, leading you to the compulsion of asking and clearing up any worries you have, and, possibly, finding any (short term) relief - or freaking the hell out if you don’t. Spurred on by BPD and you can have some pretty strong, overwhelming feelings, not to mention the fear can feel almost unbearable to counteract. This meant that I interrogated my partner to no end, about every little detail he’d ever done with his previous partner (even if it was a whole decade ago or more), and me having a couple of bad freak outs. I felt threatened, so I wanted to alleviate that feeling, yet it only ever lead to more and more pain. So what I did was I googled “OCD jealousy”, because that was what it felt like - OCD - thoughts you had no control over and that would come and haunt you every single second of the day, no matter how often you tried to banish them, rationalize them, do anything to counter them. Eventually they just seemed so strong and angry, even, for being ignored that I had to act on them. Yet when I found out what was ailing me, some peace came over me. I wasn’t alone, for one, but also, it now made sense why facing it didn’t do any good. I only fed the cycle of anxiety, and the only way to break it was to absolutely stop asking more question. By that time I had also started going in circles and didn’t really have any new questions, so it was about time I stopped. Knowing I wasn’t going to hear anymore about my partner’s ex was a short term relief, until the emotions and thoughts still kept coming back, like some painful lightening striking from a specific spot in my brain and outwards. The physical sensation of jealousy is one of the worst I know. It feels like a thousand needles and knives in your chest, your cheeks burn, and you feel angry, really angry, your heart thumbing like mad, your hands sweating coldly. You feel fear and anger at the same time, but most importantly, you feel less than, and that is the very source of the pain in the first place. When you incessantly question your partner and you twist their experiences into what you think they are, you are projecting your worst fears and possibly your own past experiences onto them. They reflect not the relationship you have with them, but with yourself (that is, if your partner didn’t do something awful to you, like cheating on you, or cheated on a past partner, which I would say would grant you some validity to your concern). And the real issue is not their past, but your fear of what it may mean for the future (which involves you). So if the real root cause of the problem isn’t them or their past, but you, what can we do about it? That’s a pretty good and legit question, one I’ll be exploring in the time to come. But for fear of this post becoming too long, I’ll make separate posts for each little topic, such as improving self esteem and realizing a few things that may help alleviate some anxiety.

As for my last words here, I’d like to say, if you suffer from retroactive jealousy it may feel like an utter endless form of torture - but there IS a way out. Many have made it out to the other side. And even though retroactive jealousy can be partnered up with a beast such as borderline personality disorder doesn’t make it unbeatable. It is a cycle that can be broken and which you can be free from. I’m already getting better despite of the few fall backs I’ve had, and that’s enough to spur on my hope. And yours too, hopefully. Don’t feel bad about it - you are NOT choosing to suffer from retroactive jealousy, just as anyone is not choosing to suffer from BPD, OCD, or any other illness. If you feel at a loss, it is only because you haven’t figured out yet how to deal with it, not because you are refusing to - shame is another beast you will have to deal with as well (a topic I will delve into at a later point too).

[volatil9]

Borderline Personality Disorder

So when it comes to Borderline Personality Disorder, there’s a hell of a lot to say about it. For one, it is a diagnosis not many are familiar with, despite it being more common than most known disorders like anorexia and schizophrenia. It is also heavily stigmatized which means that the information you will find about borderline online is very judgmental, if not to say, cruel. When you’re in a pit and you’re looking for something to provide you answers or something to instill just a little bit of hope in you, the internet can quickly throw wood on the fire. So what I wanna do is provide a mixed source of what is borderline, what hell it can be to live it, different ways of understanding it, and also how to work on getting better. This is the journey I am on, and I want to share what I can as I figure it’ll take me a while and it won’t hurt to be able to backtrack. It’ll be a fragmented account because my brain is generally fried from burn out, so I hope any random reader may forgive me for it. So yah, I’m looking forward to seeing what little posts I can contribute the internet with. To be continued!