Also known as – Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD)
It has taken me three days to complete this because digging around in my own diagnosis and finding out things I didn’t know before and relating to them and then replaying my own experiences in my head as I type them really is mentally draining. I’ve had panic attacks writing this, bursts of tears and episodes of physically being sick. I have argued with myself about even posting it. So please if you are reading this remember that there are many people with this disorder and how hard day-to-day life is for them and how hard it was for me to post this.
DISCLAIMER- I am in no way a qualified mental health professional I and just simply someone who suffers from mental illnesses and has a little knowledge about the subject. if anything I write is inaccurate please sound off below!
I initially had my personal experience written out before I started putting my research on BPD but then decided that it would be better to put it first so if you want to skip to just my personal experience its at the bottom.
Okay so Borderline Personality disorder is what I am diagnosed with and I still don’t actually know the ins and outs of so hopefully with my personal knowledge of the disorder and the research I do for my blogs I myself will come to a better understanding of it.
Pre-warning this is going to be long as fuck because I have some issues let me tell you that (right here is where the crying laughing emoji would be) so if you actually read this to the end you deserve some sort of fucking reward.
Once again I want to say that this week is Mental Health Awareness Week, I cannot stress enough how important it is to get awareness out there. Mental Health disorders are so common and yet not enough people know about it, from my last blog you seen that sociopathy is as common as 1 in 25 people. Some people are so scared to reach out for help because of the stigma attached to mental health that they go so long if not all of their lives without being diagnosed and having the help that they deserve.
I have to mention to anyone with BPD or any other disorder not to take the “my personal experience” part too seriously, I literally take the piss out of myself and my diagnosis as a way to deal with all the shitty stuff that’s happened and the way my diagnosis effects me.
BPD Overview And Symptoms
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a mood disorder that effects how an individual interacts with others and themselves. It is the most commonly recongised personality disorder.
Someone with a personality disorder will differ significantly from the average person in terms of how they think, perceives, relates and feels to others.
There are multiple symptoms that come with BPD but can be grouped into four main areas, these are;
1.Intense but unstable relationships with others – Family/Friends/Partners
This can be a result from feeling that people are going to abandon them when they need them the most or that people get too close and smother them. When people with BPD feel threatened that someone is going to abandon them they can make frantic efforts to stop them from being left like;
- Constantly calling or texting.
- Making threats to self harm or kill themselves if a person ever leaves them.
- Suddenly calling someone in the middle of the night.
- Physically clinging to a person and refusing to let go
Alternatively, they may feel like others are smothering or controlling them which results in intense fear and anger. They are known to respond in ways that will make them people leave them alone like using verbal abuse, emotionally withdrawing and rejecting them.
Because of these two emotional patterns they can provoke “love-hate” relationships pretty quickly.
People with BPD don’t see the “grey” area of life. Its either absolutely amazingly perfect or it is its doomed and the person is awful, its either black or white. They also have a very “please don’t go/go away” state of mind.
2.Emotionally instability – also known as “Affective Dysregulation”
People with BPD experience a range of very intense often negative emotions such as;
- Long-term feelings of emptiness and loneliness
- Rage
- Terror
- Shame
- Panic
This leads to severe mood swings. Its also very common for people with BPD to feel suicidal with despair and then feel extremely positive a few hours later. Their moods swing in unpredictable ways.
3.Impulsive behavior
Their are two main impulsive behaviors for people with BPD and these are;
- An impulse to self-harm, for example; cutting themselves, burning their skin with things like cigarettes and suicide attempts.
- A strong impulse to engage in reckless and irresponsible activities like; binge drinking, drug abuse, unprotected sex, reckless spending and or gambling.
4.Disturbed patterns of perception and thinking.
There are three different types of thoughts that mainly affect individuals with BPD;
- Upsetting thoughts – feeling like they don’t exist or are a terrible person, they may need reassurance that these feelings are not true.
- Brief episodes of strange experiences – hearing voices outside of their head that last minutes of a time. These voices my often feel like instructions to harm themselves or others around them and they may not be able t tell if these voices are real or not.
- Prolonged episodes of abnormal experiences – these include hallucinations (hearing voices inside of their head) and distressing beliefs that no one can talk them out of including believing that their friends and family are trying to kill them)
Causes Of BPD
The causes for this disorder are still unknown although it appears to be a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Traumatic events that have occurred during childhood are associated with individuals developing BPD. The majority of people who have been diagnosed with BPD have experienced parental neglect and or physical, emotional or sexual abuse ad a child.
My Personal Experience with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
So, I got officially diagnosed I want to say around 5 years ago? I’m really not sure I’m shit with dates. I tried for years to get through my disorder without medication, like it was literally the last thing I wanted to do. I went to therapy, one on one and group, I tried meditation, DBT therapy (I think its DBT cant really remember) but it got so overwhelming and life consuming that I ended up taking antidepressants.
I’ve always known that there was something wrong before I got diagnosed, like I could and still can literally feel emotions in my chest. That sounds daft but all of my emotions are heightened so when I’m angry I am fucking raging and when I’m happy I’m overly hyper, there’s no in between. So going back to feeling my emotions in my chest, its like a weight that doesn’t go away until I calm down, whether its excitement/happy or fucking furious. I also used to self-harm but had no idea why and then would emotionally beat myself up about it.
I also have an extremely short temper, literally the stupidest of things can piss me off to the point that I either smash and break something or physically attack someone. for example; literally the other day (4 days ago) my partner was just sat on FIFA 19 and he was shouting at the tv and I got so pissed off I poured a full carton of fresh orange juice on the laptop completely fucked it and started a huge fight. HE LITERALLY DID NOTHING WRONG. The only way I can describe it is like I’m sat behind myself watching me do it but I cant stop myself. its the same with arguments, I say some fucking awful things in arguments that I don’t mean or want to say but I physically cannot stop myself.
I hate myself, like not the way someone will say jokingly “I cant believe that, I fucking hate myself” no, I literally fucking despise myself. can you even begin to imagine hating everything you are entirely? but then I also think I’m partly a narcist, i’d have to be I mean I do my make up pose for photos and upload them to different social media platforms but then on the other hand I think “am I just doing this to feel normal” or to pretend I’m okay? if you have gotten this far and haven’t guessed all ready I honestly don’t even know who I am and my head is a fucking mess with about 300,000,000 things going on at once.
I feel like I don’t even know who I am because my personality changes so often, my likes and dislikes drastically change all the time, its horrible. Fucking hell, got right off topic there hahahaha! I don’t even know if all of that ties in with my BPD because to be frank I have no fucking idea what it is, I got a diagnosis and not much else. What they did tell me is that “my bucket is already full” let me explain.
So everyone has a bucket and their bucket is empty, so when things piss them off and start to fill their bucket they have more room. Me on the other hand, my bucket is pretty much full so the slightest thing will overflow it and make me explode. Does that make sense? its easier with hand actions haha!
Aaaaanyway I can remember one day, I literally walked into my sitting room sobbing FOR NO FUCKING REASON and all I knew was I didn’t wanna be in this house anymore (BTW I’m still in it) I couldn’t stop crying, you know that type of sobbing where you can barely talk and you look like Kim Kardashian after a few too many rounds with Kanye? literally looks like your in pain? hahaha anyway that was then it basically started, my Nana who I live with rang the doctors, I went down told him my whole life story as I am with you guys BOOM got sent to Merrick House which is in Eastington, County Durham and I got given a diagnosis of BPD Anxiety and Depression.
So I was at DBT which is like a group therapy (Pre meds) at Merrick House and it was on like every Friday, there they explained that I self harm because the emotional pain inside is too much that a physical pain brings the emotional pain down to a bearable level. I hadn’t been in a couple weeks because my cunt of crippling Anxiety wouldn’t let me leave the house. By the time it had fucked off and I went back there was like 10 new people (over aggerated but there was a lot) and my anxiety basically said “no bitch, turn around and get the fuck out of here” so I did, literally nearly crying ran outside, rang a taxi and didn’t go back.
After that I tried to cope on my own, big up the friends and family that actually stood by me and helped me because fuck knows why? I was a nightmare and still can be if I forget to take my tablets, lol. A few months after I quit therapy I tried to commit suicide multiple times nearly got fucking sectioned into a bastard nutty hospital (fuck me this gets dark hahaa!) anyway I’m not going to go into detail, it was fucking stupid and that’s it.
In the end I ended up on Sertraline and honestly they do really help, I can feel the difference when I forget to take them I get irritable and pissed off. After I lost Noah James I was struggling so bad, I went back into a dark place and ended up self harming again. I am still struggling but not with self harm, I feel like I am in a better place but I’m always battling with my BPD. The doctors put my sertraline up to 100mg after the car crash because I honestly went into a state of mind that it was never going to get better, it was one bad thing after another, not just for me but also the people around me that I love and care about. 2018 has literally been the worst year of my life, fingers crossed for 2019.
I feel like I should leave this blog here, its already gotten pretty dark and shit haha.
Love, Demi-leigh x
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