I thought I’d blog some more about myself and my mental illness. I have been diagnosed with Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Psychosis.
These disorders make my life very hard.
Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder is the new title for what was formally known as Borderline Personality Disorder. This is a fairly new diagnosis to me, as I was only told I have this a couple of months ago. I don’t fully understand the diagnosis, but when looking over the diagnostic criteria it fits me to a tee.
The following paragraph I have taken from the Mind Website:
Below are the symptoms of borderline personality disorder according to government guidelines (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence [NICE] 2009). A doctor may diagnose you with borderline personality disorder if you have five or more of these symptoms and if the symptoms have a significant impact on your everyday life.
- you have emotions that are up and down (for example, feeling confident one day and feeling despair another), with feelings of emptiness and often anger
- you find it difficult to make and maintain relationships
- you have an unstable sense of identity, such as thinking differently about yourself depending on who you are with
- you take risks or do things without thinking about the consequences
- you harm yourself or think about harming yourself (for example, cutting yourself or overdosing)
- you fear being abandoned or rejected or being alone
- you sometimes believe in things that are not real or true (called delusions) or see or hear things that are not really there (called hallucinations).
I thought I would break down these symptoms into each individual one and put how these are fitting for me.
- you have emotions that are up and down (for example, feeling confident one day and feeling despair another), with feelings of emptiness and often anger
I spend my life living on a roller coaster with my emotions. One minute I can be absolutely fine, the next I am sobbing hysterically and the next laughing my head off at something funny. This could be typical for many people, but for me I go from the extremes of one emotion to the extremes of another within seconds or minutes. I get angry easily, and could be laughing along with a joke one minute and the next I am shouting or swearing because something (or sometimes nothing specific) has made me loose my temper. I often feel like I am out of control because my emotions change so rapidly. This is both scary and frustrating for me and those around me. As for feeling empty, I sometime feel like there is cotton wool in the place where my brain should be. I will feel numb when I should feel emotions and feel emotion when other people wouldn’t. It really does feel like a roller coaster ride just getting through each day
- you find it difficult to make and maintain relationships
Well this is a huge part of my life. I find it so hard to make friends and often when I do make a new friend I lose another 3 in their place. I haven’t really had a successful romantic relationship, in fact I have put myself in many negative friendships and relationships over the years. This has lead to me being abused, bullied even raped as a result of my bad choices in relationships. I lost a very close long standing friend last year, and I put this down to my complete social ineptness. I am useless at maintaining good friendships and over the years friends have come along slowly as I am wary of making friends and left very quickly as a result of being unable to cope with my illness. I also just don’t know how to have a good friendship and as a result have hurt and been hurt by many people.
- you have an unstable sense of identity, such as thinking differently about yourself depending on who you are with
In other words, I change depending on whose company I am keeping. This is another reason the people around me find me difficult. I mimic the behaviours of others, I am easily influenced by others behaviours and this makes me feel like I don’t have a true and real ME. I also fail to see my good points and see bad points as the be all and end all of who I am.
- you take risks or do things without thinking about the consequences
I am always doing silly things. I am a self harmer, I have been for 13 years. I will self harm without realising I am doing it. I also do risky things like attempt suicide by overdose, hanging or cutting myself open. I don’t think about what might happen when I do these things. They just sort of happen. This is scary, and I hate this. I also scare other people when I do these things.I am not good at avoiding risks, I often forget to look when crossing the road, I go out walking on my own in the dark, I do things that are dangerous without even thinking what may happen. This can be both exhilerhating and terrifying. I have found myself in some horrible situations as a result, including being the wrong side of the railings of a motorway bridge in Sheffield, or like a few weeks ago, slumped at my door frame having impulsively taken a large amount of my medication. I know this frightens and scares people, but having had this as part of my diagnosis might explain why I do these things. I also broke my back as the result of attempting suicide by drop hanging. This was the ultimate impulsive action, where I did not consider the consequences of my actions. The rope wasn’t strong enough and snapped. As a result I broke my back and now suffer chronic pain and sciatica. Two things I didn’t even consider when I let myself drop onto a dressing gown cord trusting it would kill me.
- you harm yourself or think about harming yourself (for example, cutting yourself or overdosing)
I spoke about these two things in my previous paragraph. I started self-harming at 14 as a result of childhood trauma and bullying in school. I remember the first time I ever self harmed like it was yesterday – I fell into a rose bush and scratched my arm. I sat fascinated by the blood running down my arm, feeling like it was so how making me clean. I liked the feeling it gave me, the pain of the scratch made me stop thinking about the horrible bullying I was facing in school. So I grabbed a thorn from the bush and cut myself with it a few more times. It hurt, but I felt like I deserved to feel the pain. I have now been a self-harmer for almost 13 years. I am covered in horrible scars and injuries. Most recently I burnt myself quite badly. It still hurts alot, requires daily medical attention and looks hideous, but for some reason it comforts me. It makes me stop thinking about the pain in my heart and mind for a few moments. I also self harm as punishment. I feel like I deserve to be punished for all the bad things I have done in my life. It also gives me a sense of release. When words fail me, I turn to a blade or something to burn with. This behaviour has become very extreme. As a result of this, and another self-harm method of overdosing, I have been hospitalised for most of the last 4 and a bit months. I am addicted to self harming. Sometimes I will self harm for no reason. Sometimes I self harm because I have no other way of releasing how I feel. Sometimes I self harm just because nothing else helps. Other times I self harm to prevent myself from attempting suicide. I also hear voices or have “command hallucinations” that tell me to self harm. Every day I go without self harming is a challenge. I hate it. I have ruined my arms and scarred the tops of my thighs quite badly too. It’s not about trying to kill myself. It is not for attention. If it was, half of you reading this would not be suprised to hear I do this. The other people reading this will only know I have told them because I had to, or because I needed help. It is a secretive behaviour, not something I am proud of. In fact I feel very ashamed. I hope one day I will learn other way to cope but for now, every time an emotion overwhelms me I will most likely self harm.
- you fear being abandoned or rejected or being alone
This is a huge thing for me this year. I have pushed away alot of friends and others have walked away. Since 2011 7 people I have known have commited suicide. Other friends have just dissapeared. I am lucky to have the friends I do have, but I constantly fear the are going to reject me or leave me. So I cling tightly to the people I call friends. This sometimes makes it too intense to be my friend. I have had several friends say to me “sorry Sarah, I can’t do this anymore” and I haven’t seen them since. I often feel like my parents have abandoned me too. They haven’t they speak to me at least once a day. I just find it hard since they have moved away to feel like they haven’t abandoned me. I also getting extreme paranoia about my friends and family dying. I feel like everyone leaves me in the end. I also feel very alone. I can be in a room full of people and feel very lonely. It is a horrible feeling. I feel like nobody understands me. As a result of this symptom of my illness I also push people away. I do this out of fear they are going to abandon me one day anyway, so it feels easier if I push them away. This is a very hard part of my illness to cope with. It makes me feel like no-one cares about me. Even my best friends sometimes get badly treated out of my fear of being abandoned. I don’t mean to push people away, but it is truly out of fear of rejection.
- you sometimes believe in things that are not real or true (called delusions) or see or hear things that are not really there (called hallucinations).
This is another huge part of my illness. I mentioned earlier I hear voices. I also can sometimes smell things others can’t. I sometimes see things that frighten me and even though when I am well I know they are not real it often feels like they are really truly there. It scares me to death. It can also be quite amusing. Some of the things I have hallucinated have been so strange it’s funny when I look back. At the time though it is terrifying. The voices I hear are all bad voices bar one. Even he is not pleasant to hear. But this voice protects me from the others. I call and visualise him as a rock. He looks and sounds a little like my Granddad who died when I was 7. The only thing that separates him from Granddad is the fact that he is horrible. My granddad was a very kind caring man. I know these hallucinations aren’t real things, and that nobody else can hear or see them. Sometimes it would be reassuring if they could. These voices have damaged my self esteem tremendously. I feel like no-one likes me, that no-one trusts me or believes what I say. This is the hardest part of my illness. Especially as my voices intend to do me serious harm.
I have written more than enough for this post. I intend my next post to be about PTSD, where I shall share more about my past with my readers. I know this post is long and deep. I know that some of what I have written may upset some people. If I have upset you I am sorry. That was never my intention. I intend through these blogs to help people to understand me more. I also intend for people who are suffering like me to read this and know they are not alone.
Thanks for having the patience to read this post. It is quite long.
As BPD is a new diagnosis for me I am sure I will return to the topic in future. I just felt like this post would help people understand me better, and hope that it may help fellow sufferers of BPD to realise they are not alone in their struggles.
Thanks again for reading. I hope I haven’t traumatised you in the process.
srstanyon 