Comparing ourselves to others

This is something I’ve been working on a great deal in order to make my personality more stable and to lessen my feelings of insecurity. I thought it might be helpful to me and others if I wrote a post about it.

Practically everyone compares themselves to other people to some degree. One of our basic emotional needs is to feel accepted by the society we live in. It is therefore natural that we compare ourselves to others to check whether we are doing ok or not. Unfortunately, like a lot of normal habits, if we’re low on self-esteem it can get out of control and start to cause us damage instead of making us feel better. It can even become distorted and end up as a way of punishing ourselves when we already feel inadequate.

The trouble with comparing ourselves to other people is that we never have a full picture of what another person really is, even if we know them well we can never fully understand the multitude of experiences that went into making that person the way they are today. It is also impossible to ever really understand how another person feels or how they comprehend the world around them and that’s a difficult fact to grasp, we’re more comfortable with certainty, not ambiguity so we make assumptions about people and those assumptions are often wrong. In fact, in my experience, they are wrong most of the time.

To make matters worse, we identify parts of ourselves that are lacking in some way. We tend to think that if we were prettier, skinnier, smarter, fitter, richer, in a relationship, had more friends, were better at small talk, funnier, taller, shorter, wiser or less anxious then everything would be ok. We focus on our perceived short-comings and convince ourselves that they are the answer to all our problems. This is a very normal way of abdicating responsibility for ourselves, we ignore the fact that people can be perfectly happy without any of the qualities we long for. I know this to be true for myself, I have long believed that if I were prettier my life would be better, conveniently ignoring the fact that peoples’ attractiveness is no way related to how happy they are. Supermodels are among the most insecure people on the planet and if you don’t believe me, watch this –>

So what tends to happen is that we see other people who have the attributes that we are convinced would make our lives complete and we make the assumption that they are ‘sorted’. I have learned over and over again that this is quite simply not true. I had a friend once who was so pretty that people on first meeting her assumed she was a model. The moment she had one glass of wine however, she’d spend hours telling me how fat and ugly she was; she was in fact bulimic. She also had a glamorous career and was great fun at parties (if she didn’t catch you alone). People thought she was sorted, they saw the things she had that they wanted for themselves and they assumed she was happy. As a close friend I only occasionally saw the panic attacks and forced purging that told the real story.

Another friend of mine was so successful in her career and personal achievements that she was almost intimidating. I know that other people looked at her and assumed she had it all. I knew her intimately and I know that deep down she felt like a fraud. Everything she achieved was done to prove that she was worth something and no matter what she did nothing was ever enough. She had grown up believing that only perfection was acceptable and she measured herself by the most stringently unfair standards, but it was never enough. Her problem was on the inside where no-one could see it, she was driven by a deep sense of inadequacy and the only way she knew how to deal with it was to achieve more and more. Sometimes the people who seem to have everything, are driven by the same fears that hold others back from achieving anything.

That leads to another important point, what really matters in life is not what we do, but why we do it. What drives people to have careers, raise children, travel the world or work really hard at a sport? Are they doing it because if fulfils them with a deep sense of meaning and satisfaction or because they think those are the things they should be doing, things that are expected of them? Do people make lots of money because it gives them a sense of security or because they’re lucky enough that what they good at is also highly valued by society? It is our motives for doing things that govern how we feel, not what we achieve (although obviously we should enjoy and be proud of our achievements). Some of the happiest, most well-balanced and smartest people I know have achieved very little on paper. Some of the most attractive, popular, accomplished people I know are deeply unhappy.

Comparing ourselves to others is a way of judging ourselves; we feel that in order to be acceptable we have to obey certain rules about what is right and what is wrong. Judging ourselves completely undermines self-acceptance and self-validation and we need to be able to accept and validate ourselves to feel whole and happy. We need to be able to find within ourselves the strength and courage to be who we are rather than who think we ought to be in order to be accepted. I know how difficult this is; these habits become part of ourselves at a really early age when we are trying to establish our identity. If we have been damaged in any way while growing up we are likely to crave the approval of others even more so it is even more likely to become a key part of who we are and is then very difficult to shift.

I have been working on this for quite some time – when I first became aware of the habit and realised it made me feel worse about myself and not better I made an effort to start chipping away at it. Because I brought the habit into my conscious awareness I started to recognise myself doing it and when I did I stopped myself. The best way is to completely stop what I’m doing: I put on the radio or TV, phone up a friend for a chat, pick up a book, or simply force myself to think about something else. Before long I was noticing the habit more often and becoming aware of it sooner so it didn’t take hold so much and had less power over me. Overall, I’m developing my belief that I am enough, that I am a good person and I don’t need to spend excessive amounts of my time comparing myself to others whether it’s in a negative or positive light. I have learned what is important to me, I’ve decided that I’m ok with who I am and that’s all that need concern me. At one time I wouldn’t have thought this possible but it takes patience and persistence, two qualities I have also had to acquire for myself on the road to recovery.

More Power of Vulnerabilty

If you enjoyed the TED talk by Brené Brown then this longer talk is definitely worth a watch. Here she discusses the importance of vulnerability, the difference between guilt and shame, empathy and sympathy. The need for self-validation, the ‘blame trap’ and many other things crucial to building self-worth and meaningful relationships.

How to build self-esteem – part two

So here are the other things that I’m doing to raise my self-esteem, the skills I’m building that are helping me to feel more sure of myself and stronger.

The door was open all along..

Responsibility for self – This is one I struggled with for years. Quite simply I wanted someone to fix me, I was broken, I was unwell, someone please save me! It doesn’t happen. It’s not possible. I was unwell but just like someone with diabetes who needs to change their diet to feel better, I had to change my habits, my ways of looking at the world and my beliefs, no-one could do that for me. It took some tough talking from my ex to get me started which wasn’t nice at the time but I eventually learned to start taking responsibility for myself and that is such a powerful thing. I’m no longer a victim, things don’t just happen to me, I’m in control. If my life is a mess it’s because of things that I have done. This isn’t a question of blame – I wasn’t bad or wrong – I just hadn’t learned how to live in a way that made me happy. If someone didn’t learn Japanese as a child you wouldn’t think they were ‘bad’, if they decided to learn it now you’d probably respect them for it. Life skills are just the same and like learning languages, the older you are the harder it is but it’s still absolutely worthwhile.

Now I’m not saying everyone recovering from mental health problems is going it alone, I absolutely believe that they should grab every shred of support they can get, but no matter how much or how little support there is they can still take control of their recovery and start moving forward. That simple act will boost their self-esteem and give them a sense of self-determination – the opposite of feeling like a powerless victim waiting to be rescued.

Could have done with some work on its self esteem.

Self-validation – Validation is a big thing when it comes to BPD, if you have BPD, chances are you were invalidated when you were a child. Invalidation is when someone behaves or talks to you in a way that makes you feel ‘wrong’. My parents were good people but they often invalidated me, they didn’t understand my strong emotional reactions and they often either said I shouldn’t feel what I was feeling or acted as though my feelings were silly. So, I grew up thinking I was just plain ‘wrong’ in some way. It was then natural for me to look to other people to validate me because the more you’re invalidated the stronger the need for validation is. And of course my focus was on getting that validation from others because that’s what seemed most important, it was what I had been lacking.

Like all things a balance is the best approach, I’m not aiming to become completely self-validating, it’s normal to want the love and acceptance of others, but if that’s all I rely on my personality becomes very wobbly. If I feel I’m being accepted by others I feel good, if I’m not getting that validation, I feel bad which leads to, of course, mood swings and that horrible empty feeling. So how do I self-validate? First of all, I’m learning to stop judging myself, judging is the opposite of validating and it’s what we do in order to fulfil some idea of being ‘right’ or ‘good’ so others will approve of and validate us. That is a cycle that I’m breaking down and it has a lot to do with acceptance (more on acceptance here). Taking apart life-long habits is a long process and at times it can seem impossible but persistence is the only answer. One thing that may help is to write down a list of things that validate you personally, for example: “My feelings are totally valid, they are telling me things I need to know and I will listen to them.” “I am not bad or useless, I am a kind caring person who is doing my best with difficult circumstances.” Perhaps think about what you need validated about yourself and write them down, practice looking at the list regularly to break the habit of self-judgement.

Another critical part of self-validation is recognising damaging beliefs and challenging them. Like I said before, we have ideas of what makes us ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and we try to comply with the rules so that others accept us. The trouble is that these ideas form when we are very young and don’t understand the world very well, when we still see it in black and white terms as a child does. We’re also not usually consciously aware that we have these beliefs – they often clash with what we rationally know to be true. So that is why I used to feel that I had to be perfect and make no mistakes despite knowing that no-one is perfect, and that I have to look like a model in order to not be rejected by people despite knowing that looks are not the reason that people care for each other. The only way I know how to tackle this is to constantly ask myself “Why?” (like an annoying three-year-old). Why do I feel this way? What am I really scared of? What is the belief under all this that is making me so unhappy? Again, it takes time to get rid of these beliefs but there are ways of working on it. Once you have identified some of your damaging beliefs you could write a list of the arguments against them: “I do not need to be perfect, I can be loved the way I am like everyone else.” “I do not need to look like a model, people do not love others because of their looks.”

He’s not fooling anyone.

Be Authentic – This is a more challenging one and is something that happens gradually as your self-esteem grows (advanced self-esteem). Everyone has defenses to some degree, masks that they hide behind. At one point I was almost nothing but defenses, when I was with people I became what I thought they wanted me to be, when I was alone I quite often felt empty and directionless. Now that I’ve been working on the things that matter to me – focusing on what I want rather than pleasing others I feel a stronger sense of self. I’m learning to like and accept myself more and that is becoming more important to me than what others think of me (I still care what others think but it’s not all I care about). As this feeling grows I feel more able to be myself around others and don’t put on an act to make them like me or think about me in a certain way or to hide the real me. I can’t control what other people think but I can control what I think and that’s now what I focus on. I constantly remind myself that if I don’t allow people to see the real me then how will they ever grow to like me, I don’t want to be liked for an act that I put on. The more I do this the more grounded I feel and the less of a ‘strain’ it is to be around other people. Take care of loving and accepting yourself, everything else falls into place after that.

So self-esteem is about many things and they all link to each other and overlap. I personally feel that is a great thing because I see good self-esteem and  a feeling of self-worth as ways of ‘underpinning’ my personality. They keep it stable and from collapsing when things get tough. The more things I can do to prevent that happening the better as far as I’m concerned. If you would like to read more about ways you can build your self-esteem I highly recommend this book.

How to build self-esteem – part one

I’m always talking about self-esteem as one of the most important aspects of recovering from BPD, it is relevant to many mental health problems though and in general, good self-esteem is necessary for a happy life. I know that for my own recovery building my self-esteem has been one of the most crucial things I have done and I’m still working on it. I no longer have the mood swings and feelings of emptiness that used to dominate my life and I no longer struggle with attachment the way I used to. I’ve learned about ways to work on self-esteem through reading many books and observing people who are more skilled in these matters than I am. I’ll try and share with you what I have learned.

How can it possibly get better than this?!

Meaningful Activities – I’m discovering as many things that are meaningful to me as possible and doing them as much as I can, these can change over time, and some things come and go but this is a rough list of what I’m  focusing on at the moment:

• Being creative – for me that is art, craft, baking, cooking, making my home a nice place to be, DIY etc.
• Writing – expressing myself through written words is very fulfilling for me and of course is creative too
• Learning new skills – particularly software skills, I tend to enter ‘flow’ state when I do that and it’s why I’m going to study graphic design at college, it will also be a creative outlet for me
• Supporting people – I try to do that through my blog and on twitter and of course in real life too
• Relationships with others – I am learning how to build lasting genuine friendships and how to be more skilful in my relationship with my boyfriend
• Having goals in my life – I have started to write a book about my recovery and I have applied to do a counselling course, my dream is to one day set up a healing centre for those with BPD and similar problems
• Educating myself – I love reading and learning very deeply about the subjects that interest me
• Looking after my health – eating well and getting some exercise and showing some pride in personal appearance are all important for self-esteem (I’m struggling with this one at the moment!)

I’m not saying that baking a cake suddenly infuses me with a powerful sense of inner confidence. But if I just spend time doing as many things as I can (big and small) that give me a good feeling my life feels like it has purpose and meaning, my sense of self-worth has gradually grown and I have gained a stronger sense of who I am. If something goes wrong, such as feeling rejected, I know that my life is about many things and is not just focused on how others feel about me so I am much more resilient. I keep a list of the things that make me feel good so I can keep reminding myself of what to do. What’s on your list?

Discover your Principles – I’ve been very lucky when it comes to this, the way I was brought up and my habit of reading widely has given me a strong sense of what my principles are from an early age. Principles make up a big part of who we are – they are the rules we try to live by and they give us guidelines when we’re not sure what to do. If you understand what your principles, or values are, you feel stronger inside. I think of it as a supporting framework for my personality. Recently my values have been very important to me, I had some really difficult choices to make a few months ago but because I really understand my personal values that made it easier for me to decide what to do. I made decisions that some people didn’t agree with but I am happy that I made the right choices in accordance with what matters to me and I feel stronger for that.

Many people grow up and adopt their parents’ values automatically, or maybe values they learned from teachers or other influential adults. They don’t question this and later in life they may behave in ways that contradict those values and end up feeling guilty or ashamed of themselves and not even understanding why (a lot of problems with sexuality stem from here). This is a sign that they need to think about what their values are, what is important to them. I went through a period of questioning whether my parents’ values were relevant to me – some of them were and some of them weren’t – that process was part of me growing up and deciding what was meaningful to me personally rather than simply accepting others’ ideas.

If you’re not sure how to figure out your own values, my suggestion would be to think about things that make you mad, such as a news story about an animal being treated badly, or maybe something about how refugees are dealt with? What feelings come up? How you feel and the strength of those feelings will tell you what your values are. It might be a good idea to write down the things that affect you strongly and work out your values from there. Also, bear in mind that our values change over time – I was a vegetarian for eleven years because of animal rights beliefs but as I’ve grown older those values have become less significant to me and because I’m aware that my values have changed I don’t feel guilty if I have a steak.

She might need to think about that one..

Friendship boundaries – This is about how you let people treat you. I’ve never been a doormat but for years I tried to do too much for friends because I thought I had to give everything to make them like me. I didn’t feel worthy of being liked just for who I am. This isn’t the case anymore. I realised that patterns kept repeating themselves in my friendships so I must have been making some mistakes. I looked to other people who ‘did friendship well’ to learn lessons and I’ve now taken them onboard. I was one of those people who always ends up looking after everyone on a night out, talking someone out of a panic attack whilst everyone else was out having fun on the dance floor (and at the time I didn’t think I minded). I had a friend who told me she loved coming to my place ‘to chill’ but never invited me on her numerous nights out. People came to me with their problems and when their problems disappeared, so did they. I  wasn’t being a friend, I was providing a service. Friendship isn’t about letting people take all you have and hoping they appreciate it and stick around when you need them. It’s a give and take situation and both parties have to set their own boundaries.

Now, I still really want to help the people I care about but I realised quite recently that if I make all of myself available to people all of the time, I have nothing left for myself. Then I get stressed out and can even end up resenting the other person and the friendship suffers and dies out. Having healthy boundaries is what makes a friendship last and it benefits both people. I have finally come to understand how much of myself I can give, we all have to figure that out for ourselves, but please bear in mind that we all have limits – not one of us is a saint. I avoid going out with people who get drunk and have an emotional crisis just when my favourite song is coming on. Going from one drama to another seemed fun when I was very young, or it seemed like it made my life more important and interesting but it gets boring after a while. I’m now more interested in having good solid friendships, I have no problem supporting a friend if they’re having problems but that is not all I’m there for.

I think this kitten needs to be a bit clearer about its boundaries.

By this point in my life I’ve got quite good at spotting people who will only take from me and not give back (‘emotional vampires’) and I avoid them completely. I no longer rush into getting really close to someone as soon as possible because it can cause problems – by the time I realise that my new friend is going to expect more support than I can possibly give I’m in so deep it’s hard to step back. I’m not saying that I don’t care about people who are really struggling, I care a lot but I now understand how I can help in a way that is good for them and me. I focus on letting them know that I care for and accept them no matter what and that I will be there for them for years to come, not just for the next bumpy six months. I also don’t feel the need to ‘fix’ people any more or find solutions to their problems, I just accept them and love them as they are and through that they will hopefully learn to feel the same for themselves.

The trick with boundaries is that you set them and the you allow the other person to decide whether they accept them or walk away. It’s a risk you take but it’s better than losing friends over and over again and it really does make friendships more stable and long-lasting. Now that I have learned these lessons my friendships are much more stable and I never worry that my friends will desert me. I support them when they need it and they support me but mostly we just enjoy being friends.

Dear Stephen

Today I read Stephen Fry’s blog post about the reaction to his recent suicide attempt and his seemingly ironic loneliness. I’ve never written to a ‘celebrity’ before but I felt strongly that I wanted to respond to him, this is what I wrote:

Dear Stephen,

I’m not going to tell you how marvellous I think you are, I believe that it will only sound hollow to you. I’ve chosen to write this despite the apparent futility due to the simple fact that your words spoke to me and now I want to speak back.

I too used to experience this particular kind of loneliness, and still do to a lesser extent. I would spend time with friends, enjoy their company and then come home to the emptiness that was me. For reasons I won’t bore you with I grew up not liking myself very much and not feeling that I deserved to be happy. I  wanted other people to like me though of course, so the last thing I would do was show them who I really was. I’m a pretty smart person, it was quite easy for me to figure out how to get people to like and admire me and they generally have. I’m not a woman who’s ever been short of compliments, but they seem hollow. And if anything, the more praise I get, the more I dislike myself and the more empty I feel. My entire personality formed around manipulation: not the nasty sly manipulation of someone who sees others as objects to be used, but the desperately needy manipulation of someone terrified of seeing their own self-loathing staring back at them from someone else’s eyes. And because I know deep down inside that I can make people like and admire me, their liking and admiration is meaningless and so sometimes I just want to shut it all out, to be on “my lonely ownsome”. Well, in my darkest moments it is meaningless. But, of course, I still want it. Stupid vicious circle. So despite my ability to elicit affection and love from other people I never actually made any real connections. How could I? The real me is hidden away so well I don’t even know if she actually exists. But now that I’ve become painfully aware of all of this, I’m trying to put it right. I cling on to the knowledge that I’m not really a bad person and I’m slowly learning how to be a real person. I have to try at least.

I think this answers the question, “How can someone so well-off, well-known and successful have depression?” But perhaps I’m simply seeing too much of myself in you because I crave that connection.

Fondest wishes,

Clare

I feel ugly

I’m going to write something that is extremely difficult for me. Most of my blog is about obstacles that I’ve overcome, today I’m going to write about something that I still find really difficult. I actually consider this my last ‘major issue’ – I have plenty of issues but I’m talking about the stuff that impacts on my daily life negatively and gets in the way of me being happy. It isn’t really part of BPD but I do think it is something that most people can relate to. What I’m going to do is attempt to work through this like I would normally do in my journal but do it for all to see. Firstly, because speaking my shame is the quickest way to get rid of it (no matter how hard it is) and secondly, because I hope it might be useful for readers to really see exactly how I try to work through these things for real. I have not spoken to anyone about this before. I actually feel sick right now..

Here goes. I feel ugly. Deep down inside I feel very ugly. When I catch a surprise reflection of myself it can devastate me and send my mood into a nosedive. I am terrified that when people see me they think, “Urgh, she’s ugly.” There, I said it. I’m going to take some deep breaths now.

Oh God, I can’t believe I’m doing this.

On one level it might seem that this is a very shallow, superficial problem, but the effect is anything but. These feelings have affected me for as long as I can remember and it is actually harder for me to confront this than all the BPD stuff such as my attachment issues, jealousy, my sense of emptiness and the plain fact that I wasn’t who I thought I was. The one thing I have in my favour is that I know when I’ve faced my deepest fears before I’ve always managed to work through them and come out feeling better and so I have faith that this will help me, no matter how painful it is. A few weeks ago I couldn’t have brought myself to say the words “I feel ugly”, to myself, never mind publically, this is a process and I’m choosing to go through this process.

My first step is to understand why I feel this way. Like most people who were bullied at school I was ridiculed for my physical appearance and often called ugly. The only boyfriend I had at school dumped me after a week because all his friends were laughing at him (he told me that to my face). There were many boys who liked me at school and confided in me but they would never have considered going out with me because I was not pretty or popular. I left school at sixteen because I had been so unhappy there (although I was accomplished academically). At about this time I started to ‘blossom’, I actually developed a nice figure and men, not just boys, started to notice me. I loved the attention and started to dress to play up my figure (flattering, not tarty). I remember always thinking, that I wanted my body to be a distraction from my face (and still did until I put on a lot of weight recently). I assumed everyone looking at me thought “She’s ok… From the neck down.”

I’ve talked about my attachment issues before: when I was little I only felt safe with my mum and when I started getting involved with men, I transferred that attachment to them. If I was attached to someone I would only feel safe when I was with them, if they weren’t there I would feel lost and empty until they came back. Obviously because of these feelings being attractive to men became extremely important to me. I guess it comes down to my all-or-nothing personality – my black and white thinking, I wanted all men to be attracted to me. Or maybe to express it in a better way, the more men that were attracted to me the better I felt. I can’t believe I’m telling you all this..

And it wasn’t just about my physical appearance, I shaped my whole personality to be attractive to men. I didn’t want them just to fancy me, I wanted them to fall in love with me. Particularly as I know I don’t have a conventionally pretty face, I felt I had to give everything to making men want to be with me. I have always been good at reading people and I learned how to manipulate at an early age (I confessed that sin here). But this wasn’t a conscious manipulation, I just knew how to make men like me and my personality formed around that. It wasn’t something I deliberately planned and plotted, it was just what I became, it was what I did to try to fill that emptiness. I effectively packaged my whole self to appeal to as many men as possible and I had no idea that I had done it until just a few years ago.

I was quite good at it, too good in fact. Many men I just wanted to be friends with ended the friendship because they wanted more. Not only that, I totally alienated women. I’ve had very few female friends and the ones I did have never stayed around long. Again, it is only relatively recently that I understood why this was the case, I always just told myself that I wasn’t a ‘girl’s girl’. This is where I point out one of the important lessons I’ve learned in life: what you desperately want and what drives you isn’t always what will make you happy. I wanted men to want me and they did, but did it make me happy? Hell no.

Go away! I’m hideous!

But back to the ugly. It’s not even that I don’t think I’m pretty, I don’t even think I look normal. I won’t go out the door without doing my hair and make-up and very carefully choosing an outfit – even just to the shop around the corner. I can’t stand having my photo taken and the thought of being filmed makes me feel sick. I have anxiety attacks when I am getting ready to ‘be seen’. I learned to deal with anxiety by pushing it into the background and getting on with other things (when possible). This anxiety is low level however and has never gone away. These feelings are something I’ve been able to live with, but it has always been there eating away at me and I don’t want to feel that way anymore.

*cries for a while and tries to avoid thinking about it all*

So, what do I need to do to make this go away? First of all I can see that I’m holding beliefs that aren’t true i.e. my belief that all men have to be attracted to me or the sky will fall. Of course, rationally I know that is nonsense but how do I get myself to feel that way. Well this has obviously been a way for me in the past to boost my low self-esteem, to fill the emptiness inside of me. So how can I do that in a way that is better for me? (I started writing a list of the ways I’m working on my self-esteem but this post is going to be really long as it is so I will make that a separate piece to follow soon, stay tuned). As well as working on how I feel about myself I am also going to challenge my false belief about needing all men to be attracted to me whenever I feel that is it present in my mind.

I feel ugly, but not this ugly..

I’m also going to give some more thought to what I really feel, if I don’t face these feelings because I’m scared of them they will always control me. So I stated that I “feel ugly” but ‘ugly’ isn’t an emotion, what is it I’m really feeling? A lot of shame. I’ve dealt with shame before – the best way to beat it is to speak it (this post is radical therapy). I used to whisper the things I was ashamed of in the dark under a duvet to my boyfriend, you do what you have to do. It really worked for all of my BPD issues and I know it will work this time. What am I ashamed of? I ashamed of how I look. Why am I ashamed of how I look? Because I was told I should be ashamed by those bullies at school; because the media tells me I’m not pretty enough. But is it me that’s ‘wrong’ or those bullies, or our image-obsessed culture? I’m pretty sure I am not ‘wrong’ for looking the way I do, why should I feel wrong? Why should I feel ashamed? I’m getting angry now, how dare these shallow, un-caring people make me feel bad when I’ve done nothing wrong?! I am not wrong, I am fine as I am. I will not feel ashamed.

I am not ashamed of how I look.

What else do I feel, when I say I feel ugly? I feel afraid of rejection. I hate the thought that people look at me and dismiss me because of the way I look. But I’ve dealt with fear of rejection before with my other issues. I know that my fear of rejection is really my fear that other people will confirm how I feel about myself deep down inside. This is about acceptance, if I don’t accept myself who will? Is it more important that I accept myself or that others do? I want other people to like and accept me but I can’t control how they feel. I can control how I feel (even though it takes work). I can work on accepting myself for the way I look. I will stop comparing myself to how others look, I will stop analysing and criticising my appearance, I will stop shying away from my reflection as if I am hideous. It will take time to break these habits but it can be done, I’ve done it before. I haven’t done anything wrong, I don’t deserve to be rejected. I am not going to reject myself anymore.

I accept my appearance, there is nothing wrong with me.

I’m not going to write much more, this has been an exhausting process and I have already dealt with what seem to be the most important points. I feel tired but relieved. I do actually feel a little different about my image now, I feel a little more compassion, my feelings towards that part of me are not quite as harsh as they were when I started writing this. By confronting these feelings and fears I’ve been dragging around for years I have taken a huge weight off myself. It was painful and there’s a lot of soggy hankies sitting beside me but I have learned that pain is temporary and not to be feared. I have learned that facing the things that hurt the most makes the biggest difference to how I feel. I have said this is a process, I have just taken a huge step writing this and an even bigger one will be publishing it *feels sick again* and I know I have a lot of work to do to break down these habits down but what is the alternative? To let these fears control me for the rest of my life? That is not who I want to be.

Self-doubt and where it can get off

Clearly, no-one had shown El Greco how to paint properly.

Recently I have been struggling a bit with self-doubt in regard to the direction and goals in my life. I’m pretty sure that nearly all of us have these doubts from time to time and we all have to resolve them in our own way. At the moment I am reading a book called ‘On Becoming a Person’ by the very influential psychologist Carl R. Rogers; last night when I was quite overwhelmed by my self-doubt I came across this passage and thought I would share it. I found it profoundly helpful and hopefully others will too. I certainly couldn’t phrase this any better than Rogers has so I will quote at length:

“TOWARDS TRUST OF SELF 

…Watching my clients, I have come to a much better understanding of creative people. El Greco, for example, must have realized as he looked at some of his early work, that “good artists do not paint like that.” But somehow he trusted his own experiencing of life, the process of himself, sufficiently that he could go on expressing his own unique perceptions. It was as though he could say, “Good artists do not paint like this but I paint like this.” Or to move to another field, Ernest Hemingway was surely aware that “good writers do not write like this”. But fortunately he moved toward being Hemingway, being himself, rather than towards someone else’s conception of a good writer. Einstein seems to have been unusually oblivious to the fact that good physicists did not think his kind of thoughts. Rather than drawing back because of his inadequate academic preparation in physics he simply moved towards being Einstein, towards thinking his own thoughts, towards being as truly and deeply himself as he could. This is not a phenomenon that occurs only in the artist or the genius. Time and time again in my clients, I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust in the process going on within themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings, live by values which they discover within and express themselves in their own unique ways.” 

 

Insight into the healing process

Aww, all safe and secure.

I’ve just had an insight which I think is quite valuable and that I would like to share. It is in regard to the very stressful period I went through in April when I was looking after my mum. As I said in my post there was one afternoon when I had a bit of a meltdown and ended up crying on the bathroom floor. For a few hours I was in a panic and felt terribly insecure. My attachment issue resurfaced and all I could think about was being with my boyfriend again so I could feel ‘safe’. As I mentioned, this state of mind lasted only a few hours and then I went back to feeling calm and secure (still unhappy about the situation I was in but feeling I was able to cope and get on with things). It has puzzled me a little that I could feel so much turmoil, so much desperation to escape my situation and such a clingy, overwhelming need to see my boyfriend and then for these feelings to pass without my situation actually changing at all (as I said before, I forced myself to stay where I was and to hide my distress from my mum). I think I have now figured out why this happened.

Because I have done a lot of work on accepting all my feelings no matter how painful or difficult, I did not fight how I felt that afternoon. When I have these feelings of extreme anxiety and insecurity I think of it as my inner child being in distress (I write about Little Clare here). When I was first working on healing myself I used to think of little Clare as almost a separate person who I happened to share a body with, this was a necessary part of the process as it helped me understand that part of myself more and start to feel compassion for myself. I would think in terms of how would I react towards Little Clare if she was a child I had found wandering the streets alone. That perspective allowed me to start caring about myself in a way that fostered healing, by starting to feel compassion for my damaged self. As time has gone on, I have not felt the need to separate Little Clare out as much – because I am healing and accepting that part of me it is becoming more integrated into my ‘self’ and now it is rare for me to be troubled by those fears and insecurities that dominated my life before.

In April, however when I was under a great deal of stress Little Clare reared her head again and her feelings were impossible to ignore. But what was different this time was how I reacted. In the previous stage of my recovery I would have thought something like, “Ok my inner child is really upset right now, this has really triggered her and she’s finding it very difficult. I’m just going to allow her to feel this and when it passes I’ll figure out what to do.” So you can see there that I’m not denying or fighting my inner child as I used to, I’m accepting her and allowing her to feel whatever it is she feels, but I’m still thinking of her as a separate part of myself – to some degree I am still disowning her. What was different during the last meltdown was that I thought more like this, “I’m really upset right now, I know this isn’t rational but so be it, I’m not always rational. I’m insecure and feel clingy and that’s who I am right now, my boyfriend should understand that, it’s part of who I am, he should get his arse down here and take care of me.” And that is how I felt, I didn’t think of my feelings as being a part of me, I thought of my feelings as being exactly who I was right then in that moment of time. And that is why I think it passed so quickly, I have moved on to the next stage of healing – my inner child doesn’t feel disowned anymore. By thinking in terms of it being me who was feeling that way and not my inner child, she is finally feeling the acceptance, unconditional love and validation that she didn’t get when we/she/I (this is so confusing sometimes!) was a little girl. And because she is now feeling valued and accepted, she is no longer insecure and lost and can cope much better in all situations. I can cope much better, because I am healing and no longer so fragmented.

It is my strong belief that to recover from Borderline Personality Disorder you have to heal the damage that was caused when you were growing up. This is something I have gradually been working on over the last few years and I hope by sharing the process, by letting you see how it develops and progresses that it might help you in that healing process too.

Some myths about recovery

Sometimes it’s difficult to recall a lot of the things that worried me when I was trying to overcome my mental health struggles, that’s because letting go of old beliefs and thinking patterns is a major part of recovery. Recently a few different comments on Twitter reminded me of some of my old fears and how they are obviously shared by many others who are still struggling, I thought writing a post about them might be helpful to a few.

One of the most difficult concepts to really understand is acceptance, it seems simple on the surface but to really grasp what it means fully only comes when you actually do it. It’s almost a Catch 22 situation and is extremely frustrating. I learned to accept gradually over a long period of time, and I seem to have got pretty good at it. I will try to explain what it actually means in real terms and the changes it’s brought about in my life.

There is a misconception that acceptance means giving up, or learning to like parts of yourself that you’re not happy with. Neither of those things are true. Acceptance means not fighting who you are any longer and ironically, when you stop fighting who you are you have more energy to change the things you don’t like. When you fight the way you feel or a part of your personality you get caught up in an unhealthy cycle that only leads to more self-loathing

I’ll use a fairly simple example: in the last eighteen months I’ve put on quite a bit of weight and I’m not happy about that. The old me might have thought, “I can’t believe I’ve got so fat, I feel awful. I’m so lazy and greedy and now I’m paying for it. I hate myself. I’m going on a strict diet, I have to lose this weight or I’m a total failure.” Here I am judging myself, treating myself without compassion and setting myself up for failure, which of course will only make me feel worse and worse. The new me is more likely to think something like this: “Ok, so I’ve put on some weight – last year was hard and I lost sight of looking after my physical health. I really want to feel healthy again so I’m going to have to change my habits. I know I’ve been eating the wrong things and not getting enough exercise but I’ll start to make some changes and gradually I’ll put myself right. This isn’t going to be easy and I’m bound to make mistakes but I know I can get there in the end.” This time, I might sound a bit cheesy but I’m accepting the situation realistically and with compassion and instead of beating myself up about it I’m figuring out how I can actually achieve what I want. Do you see that acceptance is actually more likely to lead to change? It’s the very opposite of giving up.

Accepting difficult emotions is also crucial to recovery. I used to go to great lengths to avoid emotions I didn’t like, in fact most of my life I lived in complete denial of my difficult emotions and that lead me to make the same mistakes over and over again. Eventually I got to the point where denying them wasn’t possible any longer because I felt awful most of the time and my mood swings were out of control. I finally worked up the courage to admit all the things I didn’t like about me. I wrote a long entry in my diary and literally listed everything that I could think of that I hated about myself and were so painful to me. Then I cried a lot, an awful lot. This started the long process of acceptance. It still took quite some time to move from self-loathing to acceptance but I chipped away at it a little at a time. I find it useful to visualise these challenging processes as a brick wall that I have to dismantle piece by piece. At the beginning it seems almost impossible but if you focus on just removing one brick at a time, before you realise it you’ve made some real progress and it starts getting easier.

The diary entry where I finally let it all out, dated almost exactly three years ago.

Along the way I learned to accept all of my emotions, one of the hardest was fear of abandonment. My ex might tell me that he was changing his plans and I wouldn’t be seeing him when I expected to. My stomach would go into knots, my knees would feel weak, my whole digestive system would go into meltdown and I’d be close to being sick. The thought of not seeing him would send me into panic and I’d frantically start thinking about how I could get him to change his plans. I was convinced I couldn’t cope without him, that I couldn’t face the emptiness I felt when he wasn’t there. Then I would feel weak and ashamed, “Why am I so pathetic and clingy like a little child? I can’t stand being this messed up. I hate myself, he must hate me, I’m so pathetic, I want to die.” Sound familiar? This is how I learned to think instead: “Ok, I have a fear of abandonment, I’m working on that but this is really hard right now, I feel awful. No point fighting it though that’s just going to make it worse. I’m going to just sit here and let it happen, If I need to cry, so be it, there’s good reasons why I feel this way and I’m not ashamed of myself. I’m going to take deep breaths and let it pass. It always passes, this time tomorrow I’ll be thinking about something completely different.” Then I would just give into it and ride it out. I’d ask my ex to give me some time and once I’d recovered from the emotional storm and felt calm again I would think rationally about my response to his changing plans. Soon I learned not to fear these overwhelming emotions and now I barely ever experience them. Learning to accept even the most unpleasant feelings helped me get through the fear and move on to the place where these things don’t control me any more. I have now got to the point where I fear no emotions at all (within reason), I just accept them, I think of it like surfing, just ride the wave and let it take you wherever you need to go. It’s very liberating letting go of all that fear, I’ve lost a massive amount of the physical and mental tension that made me feel so weighed down before.

This leads into the other myth about recovery that I wanted to write about: the idea that to recover means losing who you are, that you have to change your whole personality in order to get better. I’ve even heard people say that messed up people are more interesting, that to be mentally well balanced is to be boring. That is nonsense, boring people are boring – they come in both healthy and unhealthy varieties. I have not lost my personality, if anything it is stronger than ever. What I have lost is all the beliefs and feelings I had that made me miserable. I am now freer and more able to be myself than ever before. I’ve always had a strong personality but it wasn’t built on firm foundations – it wobbled around depending on what was happening around me. I learned to build myself up from the inside out and now it takes a lot more to knock me over.

When I talk about the foundations of personality I mean things like self-belief, self-esteem, self-validation and self-awareness. These are all areas I have done a lot of work in and the reason why I don’t go into a tailspin of panic if my bf changes plans on me or even if we fall out and he is clearly upset with me (something that would have induced a category ‘A’ emotional meltdown in me at one time). It takes time and effort to really strengthen the core of who you are but it is possible and it is more worth it than you can ever imagine. Recovery is not about changing your personality, it’s about getting rid of damaging beliefs, thoughts and habits and learning how to accept and enjoy who you are rather than being in constant turmoil over it. I will write more posts about exactly what I have done to achieve this, in the meantime take a look at my list of recommended books (more on Pinterest) and watch some of the video talks I have posted here.

The importance of empathy

Do you struggle with being “too sensitive”? Sensitive people are extremely empathetic, watch this fascinating video about the role of empathy in positive social change, both past and present.

Insights into depression

*Trigger warning – mentions suicide and suicide ideation.*

I’m going to share some of my insights into my experience of depression. Depression is an extremely complex illness and I won’t claim for a moment to understand everyone’s experience of it. I simply hope that my insights might be useful for some who are unfortunate enough to have to live with it.

As I have mentioned before, I experienced my worst ever spell of depression last year, at its most intense at the beginning of the year and gradually fading away by Christmas. I have had depression on and off since early childhood, although of course I didn’t know that then (the same is true for anxiety). It was first diagnosed when I was fifteen and in the following twenty-plus years I have been given many medications and treatments, none of them effective. The tricky thing with depression is that it takes many forms; you can have it once in one form and think you know it well but then it comes back in an entirely different guise and you don’t recognise it all. The way it hit me last year was with the complete inability to enjoy anything (anhedonia); a total lack of motivation and interest in all things; an overwhelming feeling that I, and everything else, was utterly pointless; a terror of all the empty days stretching ahead of me into nothingness and a complete preoccupation with wanting to end my own life. I did make a sincere attempt at suicide at the end of February 2012, but only managed to render myself unconscious for a day. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could end my life whilst only having a minimal impact on those who cared about me.

At the time I was going through this bout of depression I had no insight at all. I was in survival mode and did what I could to make it through each day. I wasn’t thinking or analysing and I definitely wasn’t putting into practice any of the things I’ve learned about dealing with and fighting depression from the many books I have read on the subject. There was no fight, I was beaten.

But now, I have recovered and gained some distance from the experience I am able to understand what lay beneath the depression. It is my biggest hope that these insights will prevent me from having to go through that again and if there’s any chance they can help someone else then that would be incredible.

Although I couldn’t see this clearly at the time, my illness was preceded by a series of rejections (or perceived rejections) in various areas of my life over roughly a three year period. I moved to Aberdeen in June 2008 with my ex partner who found work here; I started work as a technical administrator for a marine engineering consultancy in September. The relationship with my ex was a very unhealthy one and I ended it and moved into my own flat in the November of the same year. I was very happy – I’d finally got away from the awful area where I grew up; I was free from a damaging relationship that had gone on too long; I was earning more money than I ever had before; I was making new friends and had a great social life.

For my new job I had to learn a lot of technical skills which I enjoy very much, I also did a great deal of work outside of my job description that benefitted the company on an international level. The problem was that I expected to be rewarded for this. I arranged a meeting with the director in charge of my department and put the case to him that I deserved promotion and a pay rise, he shook his head. His problem was that he would have to create a new role for me which would cause him a lot of work and there was no advantage in it for him. Many managers and other directors tried to intervene on my behalf but he stuck to his guns. My bubble burst.

During this period when things were going well I actually became hypomanic (not something I realised at the time). I was full of ideas and extremely excited about all the (imagined) possibilities ahead of me, I couldn’t switch my brain off and I barely slept more than two or three hours a night. It is clear to me now that this job fulfilled my need for meaning in my life at the time; when things didn’t work out the way I envisaged them, my mood plummeted and I struggled with anxiety, I was signed off work and referred to a psychiatrist who diagnosed Bipolar Disorder. This however was still back in 2010, there was plenty more to come.

I had met and became close friends with a man I will call H in early 2009. We were both very deep analytical thinkers who rarely found others who we could really connect with. After about a year of friendship we fell in love and decided to give a relationship a go. The catch was that he already had a partner of sixteen years; but with her full knowledge and consent we tried to make a polyamorous relationship work. The attempt tore me apart. It was through this relationship that I learned who I really was and how much I needed to change. Before I was with H I dealt with my emotional problems by completely ignoring them, I was in total denial over who I was. Instead I had created a fiction based on what I wanted to be. Due to the incredible emotional pain of trying to share the man I loved with another (attractive and extremely successful) woman, this fiction totally collapsed. It was during this time that I was actually working on my recovery. I was trying to fix myself so I could be with H and be happy. Ironically, instead I slowly realised that the only way I could be happy was to let go of my fictional self and the man I loved and who was also my best friend. That really hurt.

That’s not all I’m afraid, during this period I became very good friends with a woman at work. I have never been good at ‘girlfriends’ but we became so close, she was like the sister that my sisters never were and I was so happy to have a friend like that at last. She was struggling financially and moved in to my flat with me. After a good few months of living together she left with no explanation. She actually moved out whilst I was in my bedroom doing my hair and make-up one morning. It was a bit of a shock. Then there was the ‘friend’ who wrote me an email telling me all the things she didn’t like about me a few days after I split up with H and had asked for her support. There were a number of other similar incidents but I think I’ve covered more than enough.

Now, reading all that, you might think “No wonder she got depressed”, but it’s not that simple. The reason I got depressed was not because of what happened to me (far worse has happened to others without them getting depressed). It was my beliefs about myself and the fact that they didn’t stand up to reality that caused my depression. I will try to explain what I mean: like most people who are treated badly as children I grew up thinking there was something just plain ‘wrong’ with me. I believed that in order to be loved and accepted I had to be perfect and make no mistakes. These beliefs are not conscious, because of course rationally I know that no-one is perfect and that we all make mistakes and we can still be loved in spite of that. But deep down that it is not what I felt. And because I feel the need to be perfect in all things, when I suffered a series of what I, with my unhealthy way of thinking, perceived as rejections, I got into a cycle of thinking I was a useless failure. When you are a perfectionist, when you see the world and yourself in black and white terms it’s easy to interpret things as rejections, it is natural to see setbacks as signs of failure. And when you think in black and white extreme terms like that your moods tend to swing in extremes too, according to whether reality is matching up with your beliefs or not. When things are going well you live in a little fragile bubble (quite often this takes the form of hypomania or can just be a very good, elated mood) when reality intrudes and bursts that bubble, you get low mood. If it keeps happening and you do nothing to break the cycle you are likely to end up with depression.

For me, the only way to beat this is to get all analytical, figure out what unconscious beliefs I hold and start taking them apart. Once I become aware of them it becomes easier to dispute them and gradually, over a long period of time, I can break them down until they cease to exist. This is a process I have been working on for some time now and I definitely feel that I am having success. I no longer get mood swings (not outside of the normal range anyway) and because I am very self-aware due to all the work I did on myself I can avoid falling into old thinking patterns, such as getting carried away with ideas that aren’t based in reality. Recovery is a wonderful process – the more work you do to build firm foundations under yourself the more your life becomes stable and the less work you have to do. It eventually takes care of itself. But when it comes to depression, I will always be cautious and vigilant. That was the worst experience of my life and I will do everything I can to stop it from happening again.

Hello, I’m back =)

Nice to be back

I have taken some time away from my blog this year, it wasn’t entirely intentional but I think it was good for me to have that time and space to think about how I want to move forward now that I feel my life is no longer dominated by the symptoms of BPD. I thought I would kick off my return to the blog with an update on things that have been happening in my life and some decisions that I have made about my future.

First of all, I moved in with my boyfriend in January. This was obviously quite a major change in my life and it seemed to mark the end of a chapter. I had gone through a great deal of heartbreak and the worst spell of depression I have ever experienced in my old home. But it is also where I worked so hard to overcome all the things that were holding me back from being happy and managed eventually to recover from BPD. I was keen to move on from that ‘phase’ of my life and start living the new, happier, more stable life that I feel I deserve at last. Living together is working out very well and although I was concerned at first as to how I would feel moving into someone else’s home (boyfriends have always moved in with me in the past) after a period of adjustment things are fine and this feels like my home and that I have a stable base for my new, happier life.

Less happily my physical health has not been very good recently. I go through periods in my life where lethargy is a big problem for me and this doesn’t appear to be connected to my mental health (although, of course the two can cross over at various times). I won’t go into too much detail but I think the problem is hormonal; I have a chronic incurable gynaecological condition called endometriosis (I’ll let you look up if you want to know more). Although I did have surgery about seven years ago the only long-term treatment for it is hormonal, unfortunately for me (as my gynaecologist put it) I don’t seem to be able to tolerate any kind of hormone treatment, and I have tried a few. I gain weight, feel lethargic, irritable, sore and achy and I also lose my inner ‘spark’ – that indefinable little thing that makes us feel ‘ourselves’. I recently stopped the treatment that I was on and I am now waiting for things to hopefully return to normal so that I have energy to do more with my life and hopefully get reasonably fit again.

In April my mum who’s seventy-eight and suffers with severe arthritis underwent knee-replacement surgery. This is something that obviously takes a long time to recover from and I went to stay with her to look after her. A little necessary background information – my son (who’s about to turn eighteen) lives with my mother in the house I grew up in a few hundred miles from where I live now. My dad died in 1998. I have two older sisters and an older brother who live in various locations in the UK, I choose not to have any contact with them as interactions with them have always been very detrimental to my mental health (I’m being polite)

Going to stay with my mum was very stressful for me for a number of reasons; basically I had to deal with a whole pile of triggers simultaneously. Firstly, being away from home is something I intensely dislike, because of my emotional sensitivity home is where I ground myself and seek refuge from the multitude of things that overwhelm me, I’m happy to go out and interact with people but I always want to return home to just restore balance. Second, my entire life has been dominated by my attachment issues and whilst I seem to have overcome them, when stressed I really want to be soothed by my boyfriend’s presence and being away from him in a situation I found difficult was an added trigger. Thirdly, I don’t like looking after people, as I said, I need a lot of quiet alone time so being on call to someone who is dependent on me twenty four seven is very stressful. Another difficult factor was simply that seeing a parent grow old, frail and helpless is horrible; there were a few occasions when I had to hide tears of sadness from my mum as I watched her struggle with something as simple as having a wash. On top of all this I simply hate where I grew up, I was bullied all through school and was never happy there. It is a small rural town where everyone seems to feel entitled to know your business, not because they care about you, but because they want entertainment. A lot of bad things happened to me there and I would never go back if it wasn’t for my mum. Moving away was one of the best things I ever did. One other thing I find difficult in staying with my mum is that I cannot maintain the distance from my siblings that is essential to my mental health (at one point my mum spent the afternoon telling me all the nasty things one of my sisters had said about me behind my back).

Unfortunately, this list of triggers was the least of my problems, at the time I was staying with my mum an extremely difficult family situation arose that I had to take care of. I can’t go into detail because it would betray many confidences, I would have loved to have not been involved at all but I had a moral responsibility to look after my mum and son in this situation and I could not turn my back on that. The whole thing now seems to have mostly blown over but it has caused a further major fracture in my family, fortunately I don’t have to dwell on that now that I’m back home.

So why am I telling you all this? Mostly because I want to make the point that my recovery has stood up to a great deal of testing. Although I am confident that I have resolved most of the issues that caused me to develop BPD, I still have an occasional nagging fear that if circumstances conspire against me, old feelings and patterns of behaviour may return. There was one afternoon when I was at my mum’s where things just got too much for me. I sat and cried on the bathroom floor and thought many irrational thoughts, the part of me I think of as my inner child (Little Clare) resurfaced and had a full scale tantrum. I listened to everything she had to say, I shared a good deal of it with my poor boyfriend over the phone and I allowed the feelings to take their course. I didn’t fight how I felt, I simply accepted it. Yes, I did have a bit of a panic that I just couldn’t cope but instead of giving into my impulses (to abandon my mum and go home immediately or to manipulate my boyfriend into coming to my rescue) I chose to stick it out. I hid the tears from my mum because I didn’t want her to feel guilty that I was struggling with looking after her and I forced myself to focus on other things. Eventually Little Clare calmed down and went quiet and I got on with things feeling stronger for it. And that is the one positive thing from all that stress, I know I can cope. And if I’ve come this far, so can you.

A quick note about decisions for my future: I have started writing a book about my recovery from BPD, it is going to take a long time for various reasons and I’m sure I will write a post explaining that and more about the book itself but this post is not the place. Secondly I have applied to go to college full-time in September to study Graphic Design which I am very excited about. I finally feel like I have some stability and direction in my life and I look forward to sharing it with you all.

Why you hate yourself and think you deserve to suffer

Let me out of here!

All children are programmed to trust adults. This makes perfect sense as children are dependent on adults for all their needs for a long time. But unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world – not everyone who has responsibility for a child is up to the job, and even very good parents inevitably make mistakes. If you were mistreated as a child in any way – abused physically, sexually or emotionally or had your feelings and experiences invalidated it would be natural for you to think that you were the one at fault. And of course, we know that the nastiest abusers take advantage of that tendency by explicitly blaming the child and provoking even more feelings of guilt.

So as a child if you are being made to suffer by an adult it is normal to assume that it is your fault – maybe there’s something wrong with you? Are you bad? Is it because you told a lie? Wet the bed? Got upset? Maybe you’re just bad through to the core, evil even? Of course you’re not, but little minds don’t understand how the big bad world works and that is quite often how they end up feeling. And if a child feels that way about themselves how would they behave? Maybe they withdraw and don’t speak to anyone because they’re afraid of being ‘found out’. Maybe they feel so bad they can only bottle up the feelings for so long before they hurt someone else, someone who can’t defend themselves. Maybe things are so bad they can’t stand being there at all so they end up living in another world inside their minds to escape it all. Maybe they try so hard to be good in the hope that people will stop hurting them, they become terrified of upsetting someone; they might think that if they do everything perfectly every single time they will get the love and attention they need and want so badly. Or maybe that child just tells themselves that they really don’t care anyway, they don’t need anyone else.

And the child grows up, but only in a way, because they haven’t had everything they need to develop to emotional maturity. Like any living thing, people need nurturing to develop healthily and for humans that means in an emotional sense as well. What happens if the don’t get adequate nurturing is that part of their psyche gets stuck in that deprived place and it can’t move forward. That hurt, damaged child (or possibly teenager) (or both) is stuck inside you and that’s tough to live with. We’re talking about a child who is hurting and thinks they deserve to hurt, they are bad after all.. But how do you deal with that much emotional pain? Do you hurt yourself because physical pain is the only release? Do you take big risks and do dangerous things to distract from the pain? Do you try and keep it under control but end up lashing out and hurting others? Or do you suppress it all more and more and become increasingly depressed? These are all manifestations of self-loathing. And you know there’s a part of yourself that causes you all this misery, makes you hurt yourself and other people, makes you do silly things and you hate that part of you, you reject it. Of course you do. But that makes it worse. Your inner child is starved of the love and acceptance that all children need to be happy and healthy and even you hate that child. How terrible is that child if even it’s grown up self hates it? The two (three, four..) of you are trapped in a horrible cycle. Self-loathing leads to hurting yourself and others, leads to more self-loathing, leads to.. And so on.

You may have disowned your other self or selves so much that they have taken on their own personality, they name themselves and have all their own characteristics and behaviours. When the pain gets too much they take control, they do what they have to make it stop, to survive. But that makes you feel worse, that’s not who you are! That’s not who you want to be! So you disown and reject even more and the pain gets worse and someone has to take control and do something about it.. And so on..

The most terrible irony is, is that it is because you are so desperate to be a good person that you have this constant battle raging inside you. Bad people don’t struggle, they just get on with being bad, they don’t care. You are a good person desperately trying to do your best but you can’t always win the battle. So what is the answer? The answer is to stop fighting. The only way these fractured parts of you will heal and move on is if they get the unconditional love and acceptance they were starved of so long ago.

I know how impossible that sounds. I hated my inner child and blamed her for everything that was wrong with me. When I started reading about what was wrong with me and learned that the only answer was self-acceptance I thought it was all over. There was no way I could accept this horrible, manipulative nasty child. But if you’ve been reading my blog you know that I did. I shall try to explain how. It’s not something that happens overnight, it is a gradual process that takes work. We’re all different and some people might take longer with this than others. There’s no right or wrong way. When I realised I had a damaged inner-child at the heart of all my misery I did some research and learned that most of the guides that have been written on the subject were for survivors of sexual abuse. I looked at many books and bought one by Penny Parks. Penny Parks is an American woman who was herself abused as a child and now lives in England where she has set up a clinic to help other survivors of abuse using the techniques she developed to heal herself. Although this book did help me I am hesitant to recommend it. It is very triggering – there are a lot of case histories in it that reveal in vivid detail some extreme accounts of child abuse. I skipped large parts of these but of course I read enough to be very upset and I find those kind of details tend to linger in the my mind. There are a number of exercises and techniques in the book, from visualisations to help ‘rescue’ your inner child, to writing letters to them, and also ways to deal with rage and distress (pillow-punching being one of them). I did try some of these exercises but found I was better off just using my journal to work out my feelings. I mention this book as these techniques may be of value to others, and Penny Parks has had a lot of success with her methods. There are a number of books written along similar lines and it may be a good idea to have a look at reviews of them. The book that really helped me with accepting my inner child was ‘How to Raise Your Self-Esteem’ by Nethaniel Branden which I review here. It also contains a number of writing and visualisation exercises which could be very powerful tools, it is aimed at the general reader but absolutely relevant to BPD and other mental health problems.

I think the key to me accepting my inner child was to understand why she was the way she was. I analysed my experiences so I could appreciate why she was so hurt and needy and I did this mainly by writing in a journal and speaking to those I could trust. If you don’t have someone you feel you can talk to I would suggest trying to speak to online friends. You can remain anonymous, and yet talk to those who really understand what you are going through. Twitter has a very supportive mental health community and there are also many online forums.

For some time I separated out my inner child and talked about her as if she was an entirely different person, I looked at photos of me at different ages and remembered what it felt to be me at those different times. This was partly so I could blame her for the bad things in my life but I think it also helped me to think of her as I might do any child, and when I understood why she felt so bad it was easier for me to feel compassion towards her. If you found a lost and hurt child wandering the streets alone, what would you do?

Eventually I was able to accept certain parts of her, for example, why she got so upset when she felt like she might be abandoned. I accepted her bit by bit the more I understood her and now I accept her nastier side too. And it works. I feel better about myself and calmer and happier than I have ever been before. I am still a work in progress but self-acceptance has been a massive step forward. It’s a difficult journey to get there but the rewards are absolutely worth it.

Nathaniel Branden – How to Raise Your Self-Esteem

Tiny but awesome!

I love this book, it’s tiny and only 160 pages long but it’s packed with life-changing, down to earth wisdom. Written by a psychologist with many years of clinical experience it is aimed at the general reader but so very much of it is relevant to the particular problems of BPD such as self-identity, accepting and healing the inner child and self-validation. That is because so much at the heart of BPD is about low self-esteem, as with many other mental health problems.

A central theme running through the entire book is the idea of taking responsibility for your own state of mind, which is crucial for anyone who wants to recover from mental illness whether they are getting professional help or not. This idea may be scary for some but once you accept it it is very liberating – you are in control, no-one else. Branden goes through a number of aspects involved in building good self-esteem such as Living Consciously, Learning Self-Acceptance, Liberation from Guilt, Integrating the Younger Self, Living Responsibly and Living Authentically. He explains exactly why all these concepts are important and illustrates each one with a number of case studies so that you can grasp the real-world value. He also provides a large number of exercises that the reader can do to help them understand themselves better and realise what they need to do to increase their self-esteem. These are mostly sentence-completion exercises which he has used many times with his own clients with great success.

When I read this book I was really struggling with the idea of self-acceptance – because I didn’t like my state of mind at the time I didn’t see how I could accept it. But Branden takes you through a series of steps that lead to self-acceptance, for example accepting the fact that you can’t accept a part of yourself (perhaps anger). It is a very poweful and effective method and helped me a great deal with this. I can remember thinking at the time that I would never achieve self-acceptance but I have come a remarkably long way with it since which has been a crucial part of my recovery.

The concept of the child-self is also covered in this book. Branden explains that many people with low self-esteem reject who they were as children, they don’t like their inner-child. He takes you through a series of visualisation exercises that can help with this and bring an end to that internal struggle. It is another form of self-acceptance and a very critical one. It was through reading this part of the book that I really started to think about my inner-child and why she was hurting so much, once I accomplished this it was a gradual process to accept her as part of myself which has been so liberating for me.

Let me hear you roar!!!

The book also focuses a lot on self-validation – this is moving towards a place where you can feel good about yourself in your own right without having to rely on others to build you up. Although it is important to feel loved and valued by others it is not possible to rely on them for your self-esteem, this is a particular problem with BPD that leads to those awful feelings of being lost and empty and for some to not even know who they are when they are alone. This used to be a really big problem for me, I have major attachment issues and in the past have felt utterly lost and hopeless without a significant other to cling to. This book coaches the reader to really explore who they are and what values they hold. This is very significant as we hold oursleves to account by our values and yet if you examine them you may find that they are not even your own – it is very common to carry our parents’ values through life with us even if we don’t rationally agree with them. A really great exercise to help with finding your own identity is to sit down and write about what you really believe, to learn about your principals. Once you have discovered what your true values are, as long as you live by them your self-esteem and sense of identity will grow regardless of what others say or do or the circumstances in your life. This is being true to yourself.

Branden expands this idea with the concept of living authentically saying, “The lies most devastating to our self-esteem are not so much the lies we tell as the lies we live.” He talks about the importance of facing up to the reality of life and our fears rather than merely sleep-walking through a fog which is what many people choose to do as it is the easiest way to deal with the harsh realities of life. However, the easiest path is not always the best path, not if you truly want to change yourself and heal.

Guilt is also addressed very effectively in this book, an issue that I know holds many of us back. Branden talks about why we experience guilt, how to work out whether it is justified or not and how to move on from there. Integrity is discussed here – what it means and how to live by it. This is both useful in establishing a sense of identity and building self-esteem.

I got a great deal out of this book and cannot recommend it highly enough, if you are attempting to overcome BPD then working your way through this book would be invaluable (I believe the Kindle version is a little over £4 at the moment). If you are willing to work at it you will gain a much stronger sense of identity and self-acceptance and start the journey to feeling a great deal better about yourself. If you would like to ask me any questions about the book or my experience of it, please feel free to comment below.

It’s official, I’m recovered

There’s a lot going on in there..

On Thursday I saw my MBT* therapist for the first time since before Christmas. I have been seeing her for fifty-minute weekly sessions since Autumn, before that I had been on a waiting list for just under a year. At this week’s session my therapist told me that I won’t be seeing her after the end of January, she thinks I am doing fine and that I wouldn’t benefit from further therapy. We discussed this, I stated that it would be my preference to keep seeing her because I find it useful to have her objective input, I am used to being ‘disordered’ so I find it comforting to have a professional confirm to me that the coping skills I am using now are the ‘right’ ones. A safety blanket. My therapist actually says that I have developed skills and abilities that most ‘normal’ people never usually do, and it would seem that the NHS budget does not stretch to providing safety blankets and so I am to be left to my own devices. After talking it over with her, I decided that I was fine with that, and it is indeed, a very good thing.

So what does recovered mean? What should someone with BPD expect from life after treatment ends or they have done the work themselves as I have done? I still experience mood swings but they are no longer severe and traumatic. I am mostly in a calm, happy state of mind, occasionally I have lows when I feel flat for a day or two at most but from what I can tell, that’s pretty much normal for everyone. If you have BPD you are most likely a sensitive person and that will not change. There is strong evidence to suggest that it is ‘hard-wired’ into the nervous system. So I experience strong reactions to things that others have no problem with (e.g. watching the news) but I have fully accepted this side of me and also appreciate its positives. I like being sensitive. Sometimes I am still triggered by events in day to day life, Little Clare is still healing and that takes time – she is very alert to any sign of abandonment and that can cause tears and turmoil for a little while. But what has changed is how I react to these moments. I no longer deny or fight my emotions, I know why I react the way I do and I simply allow it to take its course and then decide what to do about the trigger. This might be something my boyfriend has said so we will talk about it and I explain why it upset me and we’ll figure out what to do about it – I may have misinterpreted what he said or he may have said something he shouldn’t and will apologise. I have learned that since I have been able to accept myself as I am, I am also able to help others understand me and I also feel a great deal more comfortable ‘being myself’ around others. Self-acceptance is crucial to recovery.

Identity is a major issue with BPD, I know many feel like they have no identity of their own, or that it moulds itself to suit others – we can be very chameleon-like. This is one of the reasons why feeling lost and empty plague us so much. I am delighted to say that I have not had those feelings for some time now. I am a lot more sure of who I am. This is because I am no longer afraid of who I am, I have faced all my deepest fears and worked out where they come from – they no longer have power over me. I have also worked out what things I love to do – things that give me a sense of fulfilment and purpose, these interests have always been there but drowned out by all the fear and crises. The more time I devote to these things the more ‘whole’ I feel. I have always considered myself as having a strong personality that was built on wobbly foundations, I am now rebuilding those foundations and as I do there is less wobble. I speak to many people with BPD on twitter, every one of them has a strong personality, they are all unique individuals, some just need to do a little work on their foundations so that they can feel that too.

I have found that all the symptoms of BPD (impulsivity, black and white thinking, self-harm, self-loathing, feeling empty etc.) have lessened dramatically as I have gone through the healing process. I believe the traits and tendencies will always be there, they are a part of who I am but having accepted them and worked on my self-esteem, they are very rarely a problem for me. And if a problem does arise, I now have the skills and abilities to deal with it. It’s not that I don’t think I’ll ever have another emotional meltdown, I’m sure there’s plenty of them still to come, but I know I come out the other side stronger. I am also sure these will lessen with time as I consistently practice my new skills.

I have had a few doubts that I have really recovered, I have had ‘highs’ before when I thought I was fine and have turned my back on psychiatric treatment, only to crash back down again. But I have thought this over and realise that the crucial difference isn’t the mood state that I’m in but the new coping skills I have taught myself and how I continue to use them in the future. Essentially, I think that is what recovery is – learning a new set of coping skills and sticking with them through good times and bad.

One final note. I am still seeing my psychiatrist. I am currently on 60mg of Fluoexotine and 7.5mg of Zopiclone. Depression and insomnia are seperate diagnoses for me (although of course, entwined with BPD). I had a long, severe episode of depression last year which eventually lifted without meds, but I have been put on the Fluoxetine mainly to help with my energy levels. It is not possible to say at the moment whether my depression will come back, whether it has been caused in the past by my emotional issues and instability in my life or whether it has a neurochemical cause. My psychiatrist continues to observe me, Bipolar Disorder being a possibility. So, I do indeed still have a safety blanket.

*MBT – Mentaisation Based Therapy

Introducing Dark Clare

Scary down there…

So I introduced Little Clare to you all and got a lot of great feedback, thank you. Many commented on how cute she is and of course I used that photo because I wanted you all to empathise with your inner children as much as possible. We are all loveable and adorable! But, and we all know there’s a but.. Our inner children can cause a lot of ‘dark’ thoughts, feelings and impulses and I think it might be a good idea to talk about and hopefully get rid of some of the shame.

Over the past couple of years I have come to terms with having a very troubled inner child – at first I denied, then I fought and now I accept. One of the things that I have had to accept is that Little Clare can sometimes be very nasty. We all know what children can be like – they think nothing of screaming at their parents that they hate them; they frequently throw tantrums (mostly in supermarkets, it seems) and they constantly want what they want when they want it. Children are also uncannily good at tormenting other children. I know this only too well as it was being bullied by my older siblings and then by other children at nursery and school that caused a huge part of my BPD.

So, there’s my inner child, she’s not recovered from never feeling safe all those years ago and she’s frightened a lot of the time. Frightened children normally do one of two things, withdraw or lash out. Little Clare definitely withdrew but that doesn’t get rid of all of those awful feelings. She’s angry. She’s hurt. She doesn’t know how to cope. The thing is, she is now part of me, a grown woman who’s seen and done a lot things and has adult feelings and urges.

It’s difficult for me to know how much to say about my darker impulses and feelings, I am not ashamed of them but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to talk about them this publicly (I have chosen not to have a secret identity). What I will say is that I am capable of great violence in my mind. I have no problem with this and never really have done. I think I am lucky because I had very liberal, broad-minded parents which gave me an attitude of ‘if you’re not hurting anyone, then you’re not doing anything wrong’. Live and let live.

I understand that a lot of people with BPD do lash out at others (particularly those they care about) and find it hard to control their rages. I am ‘quiet borderline’ which means I find it impossible to express anger at anyone and instead internalise these feelings and that tends to lead to depression. In either case it’s bloody horrible.

I may not express anger towards people but that doesn’t mean that Little Clare doesn’t want any attention. She wants attention very much but as anger and tantrums were not tolerated in the Bare household she learned another way to get ịt. A sneaky way. She is a gifted liar and manipulator. (Stay with me here.) When I was being bullied at school my parents told me I had to stand up to the bullies and sent me anyway, they thought they were doing the right thing. I would do anything to get out of going, but the easiest way was to pretend I was sick. This also had the added bonus of getting me a lot of care and attention from my mum which I craved so much. I was extremely good at faking illness and felt no guilt about lying, my mum is amazed to this day that I conned her so easily! So my coping mechanism was to lie and manipulate my way out of unpleasant situations and I carried this into adulthood, because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

But then, as I started having adult relationships, I learned that manipulating people made me feel bad and that getting attention by devious means is not very rewarding so I gradually put a stop to the habit. Some of that behaviour is embedded unconsciously though (I didn’t know I was doing it) but as I’ve become more and more self-aware I do see it, I can recognise the times when Little Clare is pulling the strings. I have even been able to sense when she’s about to do it and prevented it (by not drinking alcohol and thus letting go of control). This is one of the reasons I advocate self-awareness as a method of recovery.

I think the first step in dealing with the darkness is to accept that you have these impulses and feelings and to not judge yourself for them. I am capable of very violent thoughts but I am not a bad person, neither are you. I think a lot of BPD misery would evaporate if we all ceased to judge ourselves. We do not need to feel ashamed on top of everything else we go through.

Now I know that if you are prone to lashing out at people that this might sound impossible, but please bear in mind that I’m talking about not judging yourself for your thoughts and feelings, that is the first step. It’s easy to get caught in a vicious circle, to lash out at someone because you are hurt, then feel bad about yourself and experience more self-loathing, more hurt, so more lashing out. The cycle has to be broken and I think that is made possible by forgiving yourself for your behaviour. You might not be happy with who you are now but you can accept who you are, acknowledge that you’re doing the best you can in difficult circumstances. You are not a bad person, you are a good person that bad things happened to. You are doing your best, you can break this cycle.

Another approach I have been using is explaining myself to the people I am close to. BPD can often seem completely irrational to outsiders but if you can explain to them why you’re behaving the way you are then you might find that they accept it and may even sympathise. If you are lucky enough to receive that understanding and acceptance you will be validated and that further breaks the cycle. That may seem impossible to some but I found that by accepting myself I attracted friends who also accepted me and all my relationships have changed for the better.

I’m going to say this a lot but what most of these issues come down to is low self-esteem. Building up confidence is crucial to recovery from BPD and many other mental illnesses. The best way I know how to do this is to find out what you love to do and do lots of it. By doing that you gain a sense of fulfilment and purpose. You find out who you really are, your true identity and grow to like yourself. Maybe even love yourself. When you start taking those steps, everything starts getting easier.

Your Personal Bill of Rights

This is a guest post from the lovely @RayvenMental, who will hopefully be a regular contributor here. It’s great to feature different approaches to dealing with BPD, as we will all respond differently. I love to hear as many points of view as possible.

You’re worth it!

Your Personal Bill of Rights

Everyone has the same rights even though some don’t even know that these basic rights exist. Having your own Bill of Rights can help with various elements of your life, it can help with confidence, self esteem, self worth and it can also help you validate your own needs, opinions and boundaries with other people, it can also help you when standing up to people assertively.

Some examples of your rights:

I have the right to be happy or sad
I have the right to change my mind
I have the right to ask for help
I have the right to say I don’t understand
I have the right to say yes or no without explaining myself
I have the right to decline responsibility for other people’s problems
I have the right to express my own opinions and beliefs
I have the right to feel emotions
I have the right to ask for help and support
I have the right to be treated fairly
I have the right to make mistakes
I have the right to not be judged
I have the right to be listened to and to listen to

You can also add to the list. Its hard when someone is unwell to understand that they have these rights and are worthy of them. An idea for you, print out or write this list down and put it somewhere in your home which you can look at and read.

Introducing Little Clare

Even as a child I was highly fashionable.

Hello, I’d like you to meet someone, I call her Little Clare, she is very shy. Little Clare is a young frightened child, a lot of bad things happened to her a long time ago and she has never really felt safe since. She gets very anxious and sometimes panics, a lot of things upset her and she cries very easily, she is always terrified that the people she loves will go away and leave her. Little Clare feels very vulnerable and thinks she has to protect herself all of the time. Some of the ways she does this are not very good for her but she doesn’t know any better and it’s scary to try new ways. Little Clare can cause a lot of problems with the people she loves but she doesn’t mean to. When someone is very special to her being with them is the only way she feels safe, she likes this feeling so much that she doesn’t want to let go. But you have to let go sometimes and at other times she doesn’t have anyone who makes her feel safe and that can mean she feels very lost and sad and even very, very angry. Sometimes she feels so bad she can’t stand it and she doesn’t know what to do to make herself feel better so she ends up doing silly things because no-one ever showed her how to deal with these horrible feelings in a healthy way.

Little Clare is very sweet though, she just wants to be loved and she cares about people very much, even people she doesn’t know. She is so sensitive to other people’s feelings that watching the news and hearing about bad things that have happened to people really upsets her. She’s very good at sensing and understanding how people feel and making them feel better, sometimes she cares too much but is all the more loveable for that. When Little Clare feels happy she is very good at having fun and being silly with the people she loves.

I used to hate Little Clare, I can never have any time away from her and all her mixed up emotions and fears are very difficult to deal with. Especially when she upsets someone I love because she’s so scared of being abandoned and unloved. I used to get very angry with her and want her to go away and leave me alone forever. But then I found out some more about Little Clare and why she feels the way she does, I understand her now and have learned that she needs to be taken care of the way she wasn’t all those years ago. So now I am patient with her, I give her the time she needs to tell me how she feels, even if that means a lot of tears. I listen to her and then when things calm down I decide what would make her feel better. Sometimes I have to be tough and make her do things she doesn’t want to do but only because I know that that will be better for her in the long run. Now I love and look after Little Clare the way anyone would love and care for a lost and lonely child who has been traumatised.

Now that I have been taking good care of Little Clare for a while she is starting to feel better and doesn’t get upset so much. It’s quite a long time since she’s felt lost and really sad. She’s got much better at not doing things that are bad for her. I have figured out the things that little Clare really loves to do such as writing, drawing, reading, all kinds of crafts, connecting with and helping other people and she also really loves to listen to music and to sing and dance. I also know what things upset her so I try to keep her safe from them, we’re very careful about watching the news and we try to not hear about too many bad things that happen in the world because it makes her feels so upset and helpless and that won’t help anyone. She’s happier now and can have lots of fun and even feel one of the best feelings there is, which is joy, I’m very lucky to experience that with her. The more time I spend looking after Little Clare properly instead of being angry with her and resenting her the better she feels and we can live a much happier, more stable life together.

Little Clare would love to hear from more little ones who feels like she does, she thinks they could help each other and have fun together.

This is for any talks that have helped in my recovery in some way or I think will help and inspire others. I’d love to hear about any that you’ve come across too.

Beyond the Borderline Personality

This is Haven’s intelligent and fascinating blog where she explores many issues affecting those with BPD. She has also set up a great forum which is a safe place to discuss BPD and all that goes with it.

BPD Bunny

BPD Bunny’s well-written, candid and inspiring blog. One of those places you can go and realise you are not alone.

Buzzfeed: 26 Moments That Restored Our Faith In Humanity This Year

To be honest, this is just a post that really moved me and cheered me up. Great for when you’re feeling down and could do with some uplifting distraction 26 Moments That Restored Our Faith In Humanity This Year

The Quiet Borderline

I realised I had Borderline Personality Disorder before I was diagnosed, it took me a while to come to that conclusion because I’m not ‘typical’ Borderline, I don’t act out or rage, instead I suppress my feelings and that leads to a lot of depression. Reading A.J. Mahari’s article The Quiet Borderline made me realise that there are different types of BPD. I’ve shared this article with a few Quiet Borderlines and it has helped them feel less alone too, I hope it helps you.

Healing from BPD

I’m sure you’ve all been there but this is Debbie Corso’s (@HealingFromBPD) wonderful website Healing from BPD. Debbie Blogs about how her life has been changed by Dialectical Behavioural Therapy and shares her experiences and skills in a wonderfully warm and engaging way. Debbie also has a new site, Daily DBT where she focuses on DBT skills (@DailyDBT on twitter).

Self-Therapy Made Easy, by Marian Van Eyk McCain

How exciting! My first ‘guest post’, well actually I just pinched it straight from Natpops’ (@NatpopsEvans) fabulous blog. I hope you enjoy!

What this is all about

There are a few established therapies for Borderline Personality Disorder, such as Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) and Mentalisation Based Therapy (MBT), however these are not available to everyone and there can also be very long waiting lists for them. I have a long history of mental illness and realised that I was not going to be ‘cured’ by psychiatric services so I set about fixing myself. I did a lot of writing, read a lot of books and I have come a long way. I would really love to share this process with anyone who could be helped by it. My biggest wish is that this site becomes a collaborative project that many people can contribute to. Although I have focused on BPD, I also have suffered from severe depression and anxiety as well as chronic insomnia and I plan to cover all of these issues.  I would welcome feedback and input from anyone who can share anything that has helped them: books, quotes, videos or their own stories. Feel free to leave comments here or reach out to me on twitter (@clare1305) where you will find a very supportive community.

Happy healing everyone, Clare xx

Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability

I can’t imagine anyone not benefiting from this insightful and funny talk but it is especially relevant to those with BPD who struggle with feelings of vulnerability and shame. I highly recommend her book, I will review it on the site  soon.

Ben Saunders: Why bother leaving the house?

I have no plans to trek across the North Pole, but Ben Saunders makes a very interesting (metaphorical) point here. We can all choose our own challenges, mine is recovering from mental illness, what’s yours?

The Highly Sensitive Person – How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine N. Aron

My cat is not highly sensitive.

The first book I want to talk about is The Highly Sensitive Person – How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine N. Aron. The reason I wanted to mention this book first is because the trait of sensitivity seems to cause many problems for those with BPD and I often see people on twitter giving themselves a hard time for being ‘too sensitive’. I may be wrong (and please let me know if I am) but sensitivity doesn’t seem to be discussed a great deal in conventional therapies for BPD. I read a lot of books that helped me before I realised I had BPD, so I think I have a slightly different view of things than a lot of people and hopefully my perspective can help others.

So, back to the book. Elaine Aron is a psychotherapist, university professor and researcher who has done an enormous amount of work on what has become known as the Highly Sensitive Person, or HSP. There is a test at the beginning of the book with true/false statements such as, “I find myself needing to withdraw during busy days, into bed or into a darkened room or any place where I can have some privacy and relief from stimulation”, “I have a rich, complex inner life.” and “When I must compete or be observed while performing a task, I become so nervous or shaky that I do much worse than I would do otherwise.” She then goes onto discuss the HSP set of traits in detail, citing evidence from her research in order to assure the reader that what they have experienced their whole lives is a valuable asset rather than something to be resented and to feel bad about.

She talks a great deal about the problems a HSP would have encountered growing up: not being understood by others, being made to feel inadequate, having a sense of ‘not fitting in’ and developing low self-esteem. The book covers different aspects of life such as relationships, careers, spirituality and parenting. There also sections on reparenting and healing ‘deeper wounds’. Additionally, she talks about the issue of attachment in infancy and how that is particularly problematic for HSPs, which of course is highly relevant to BPD. The subject of boundaries in relationships is also covered and why this is also challenging for HSPs, yet another serious BPD issue.

I found this book extremely helpful in coming to understand myself and accept these aspects of my personality as important and valuable rather than flaws. Benefits of being highly sensitive are things such as being able to pick up on others’ moods and feelings and make them feel more comfortable; being able to appreciate all the wonderful subtleties in the world, e.g. in nature, music, art etc.; it is also an important component in creativity and when an HSP is in a good relationship/friendship the sensitivity adds a deeper dimension to that.

There were a couple of things I didn’t like about this book to be balanced, firstly I found the author’s tone a little patronising although that’s something I’m highly sensitive to in general (ironic much). Also, Dr Aron also seems to have the attitude that HSPs are superior to other people which doesn’t sit well with me but it does make a change from being criticised for these traits!

Depression and self-discipline

The joys of depression.

**Trigger warning – this post discusses attempted suicide and suicidal feelings**

As I have mentioned before, I went through an extremely severe episode of depression this year. It started around the end of January after a period of very erratic mood swings, was at its worse throughout the Spring and eventually started to lift at the end of Summer. I have experienced depression many times from early childhood, but this was by far the most severe and prolonged episode.

Depression takes many forms, even for the same person at different times. My main symptoms during this period were complete anhedonia (I couldn’t feel anything good at all); I had no interest in or enthusiasm for anything; I felt utterly hopeless – I couldn’t imagine feeling better, my entire life seemed pointless, meaningless. I couldn’t stand being awake, I was desperate each day just to make it through to bedtime when I could take a sleeping tablet and be unconscious for as long as possible. I spent most of my time thinking about suicide, at the end of February I wrote a suicide note and took a combination of roughly sixty pills which I thought would kill me (I did research online), a friend who was staying with me at the time found me unconscious and called an ambulance. I regained conciousness the next day and was discharged from hospital after an appointment to see my psychiatrist was brought forward.

During this time I was in what I would call ‘survival mode’, I tried to take each moment as it came and did what I could to just get through. I read when I could concentrate, I watched a lot of TV as that is good for swallowing up ‘chunks’ of time. I found a little satisfaction in doing crossword puzzles, particularly if I got friends involved by texting clues to them. Of course I had no energy and no motivation to go out and I was in too bad a state to push myself. I allowed myself to eat what I wanted (I was certainly not concerned about my physical health at this point). I had also been put onto anti-psychotic medication which had increased my appetite and unfortunately, when I’m miserable, I have a habit of comfort eating anyway.

My mood is now considerably improved on what is was, although I would still not say I’m back to ‘normal’. But I can now have fun, be interested in things and I don’t feel hopeless about the future. However my physical symptoms are still the same, I have no motivation to do anything physical, I am lethargic and have no energy. I have put on roughly two stone (28 lbs) although I’m actually too scared to weigh myself.

It feels like I have developed some bad habits due to being in ‘survival mode’ for so long. In order to care for my mental health I have neglected my physical health. Unlike a lot of you fine people, I actually find it quite easy to be self-indulgent although after a while I feel disappointed in myself and this leads to lower mood. I need to break the cycle and start pushing myself, the motivation may not be there naturally so I’m going to have to find some self-discipline. Unfortunately, this is not my strong point, but I accept that now that I have finally emerged from the hell of my depression I have to take responsibility for as much of my recovery as I can. I guess it’s time to make some New Year’s resolutions..

The whole issue has made me think about how you know that you just need to take care of yourself and get through each day and when do you know it’s time to grit your teeth and do things that don’t come easily. Does anyone have any thoughts on this based on their own experience?

Meltdown and get back up again.

I do not look this pretty when I have a meltdown.

I have taken a little break from writing my blog recently, a few weeks ago I had what is technically known as an emotional meltdown. It knocked my confidence and I’ve had to take stock of where I am with my recovery. I thought I’d share with you what happened and what I have learned from it.

I was out for the evening with my boyfriend, we went to see The Ladykillers at the theatre. I was feeling very good to begin with because I remembered that when the tickets were bought back in the Spring I had been extremely depressed and suicidal. I honestly didn’t think I would make it through to see the play. I was very happy that I had come a long way from there and those awful dark days seem to be behind me (touch wood).

After the play (which was excellent) we went to the pub for a drink. I had been planning to go away the following weekend to accompany a friend to a wedding. My boyfriend started to ask me about my plans, and as soon as he did I started feeling very anxious. He didn’t notice this at first and asked a few more questions. Soon anxiety turned to panic and I started to cry. It is difficult to remember exactly what happens in the mind during an emotional crisis but I will do my best to explain it. I seemed to have some kind of emotional flashback, to when I was very small. As a child my older siblings bullied me badly and I only felt safe with my mum, I was extremely clingy. Scream-the-house-down-if-she-went-upstairs clingy. Suddenly, sat in a busy pub on a Friday night, I felt the exact same sense of panic I felt when I couldn’t be with my mum, when I felt so unsafe and vulnerable, when those feelings were so strong that they overwhelmed me and my whole life revolved around trying not to feel that way. To not be separated from my Mum. I could even see my parents in my mind’s eye, looking up at them from a child’s point of view trying to get their attention.

I have been aware for a long time that when I got into my teens I transferred that addictive attachment I felt for my mum onto pretty much any boy that showed an interest in me. Feeling wanted emotionally and sexually soothed my intense need to be safe. It eased that terrible emptiness inside. I still have the same attachment issues now although I make wiser choices about who I ‘attach’ to. I have learned to cope with boyfriends going away and leaving me for a little while, but it seems I have not come to terms with voluntarily leaving them. The thought of choosing to leave my beloved when I could be spending time with him sends me into a panic.

The trouble is, on this night the panic didn’t end there. It seemed to induce the good old BPD black and white thinking and catastrophising to maximum effect. Suddenly my entire life was pointless, I was only kidding myself that I was recovering, I was a mess. The friendships that I’d started to make on Twitter were just my attempt at gaining the popularity and approval I never got at school. My blog was a nonsense, arrogant nonsense. I had no right to try and help anyone.

By the time all these thoughts had gone through my head my boyfriend had bundled me into a taxi and got me home. I sat and cried like a child on the sofa and then took a sleeping pill and crawled into bed. At some point I also deleted my most recent blog post and would have deleted the whole thing if I could have figured out how to. The next day I couldn’t face my new view of the world, everything was completely broken and wrong and I couldn’t cope. I took sleeping pills to keep me unconscious all day.

But now I am back to feeling as well as I did before the meltdown, in fact better. After my Saturday in bed I started to think over the dreadful conclusions I had come to that night. I decided that I didn’t have to go to the wedding because it was important to take care of myself, although I did feel guilty for letting my friend down. I realised that I am seeking approval on Twitter but that is ok, it is a basic emotional need to feel accepted and valued by others and I have lacked that to a large degree in my life until now. I accepted the fact that I am highly sensitive, and have a damaged inner child who needs care and understanding (as well as boundaries where appropriate). I considered that in order to write a blog that might be useful to others with BPD it has to reflect the whole experience of recovery, it isn’t a straight path and there are a lot of obstacles on the way but you have to keep looking forward. This isn’t the first time I’ve stumbled and it won’t be the last, but each time I pick myself up, learn something from it and move on feeling stronger. We can do this!

Why I have been too successful (;p)

If only it was that easy.

In my last post I made a commitment to review a number of books that over the years have helped me overcome a variety of mental health problems. At the simplest level, I would posit that my poor mental health has been caused by distortions in my thinking and that I have slowly gone about correcting these distortions by reading and thereby retraining myself to think differently. The problem is (and I wish I had more problems like this) is that I have been very successful. I no longer think the way I used to. I am not claiming to be wholly healed or ‘fixed’ but I am definitely a lot closer to a healthy mental balance than ever before.

To give an example, I used to suffer from extreme anxiety and panic attacks. I could not leave the house for long periods of time, I was afraid of people in general (assuming that they were having hostile thoughts towards me). I had a problem with stairs, escalators and lifts (you can see that that caused a bit of a problem). I was really a wreck during this period of my life and it was the main reason for the breakdown of a very good relationship (he eventually told me that he dreaded coming home to me). The end of that relationship was possibly a catalyst for my recovery to some extent, it was a rock bottom that shocked me into re-thinking my attitude. I had to get better. I had to find the strength from somewhere. After a month of hiding under the duvet in my old room at my parents’ house I gave myself a kick up the arse and started going out into the world.

Now, it wasn’t easy. I very distinctly remember narrowly avoiding a huge meltdown in a clothes shop when a song was played on the radio that triggered me. Often all I wanted to do was run home to Mum and I didn’t even live with her any more But one thing was different – I was determined. I was not going to give in to all these neuroses any longer. I wasn’t going to let it beat me. It was during this time that I started buying self-help and psychology books, so I could learn a different way of thinking. And it worked. When I look back at myself then (about fifteen years ago) I see an almost completely different person. I have truly changed myself. And I didn’t just do it then, I have continued to change myself for the better ever since. I am a very different person now to the one I was just a year ago. And this isn’t just about how I feel inside, it’s reflected in the friendships I have and in my relationship. A great deal healthier, stable and more rewarding than ever before.

I still experience a certain kind of anxiety which for me is the most deeply rooted, and that is due to issues with attachment and fear of abandonment but I am working on that, dealing with it better than ever and I am confident it too will fade eventually along with the old anxieties. I no longer have any social anxiety, I can happily walk through crowded shopping centres and sit on overflowing trains without giving it a second thought.

So, back to my problem. When it comes to writing this blog I am faced with the task of separating out my new, self-taught ways of thinking from the old me, the way I was before I started this journey. What I have learned along the way has become so integrated into my way of thinking that it is utterly unconscious. It is just who I am now. And if I can do that, anyone else can. I’m still going to be working on those book reviews for you, but I thought a little warning about how successful they can be might only be fair.

How I might be able to help

Over the years that I have been affected by mental health issues (as long as I can remember) I have tried very hard to ‘fix myself’. Despite all the psychiatrists and other specialists I have seen and all the medications I’ve been given nothing has really helped. I’m a natural problem-solver – if something is wrong I have to find a solution, so I wrote about what I was experiencing in a journal so I could figure out the ‘why’ and I read as much as I could so I could find a ‘how’, how to solve the problem that was me.

Although I will not in anyway claim to be ‘fixed’, I am a lot closer to happiness than I have ever been. I am writing this blog so that I can share what I have learned with anyone who might be helped by my lessons and also in order to consolidate what I have learned. I want to go back over all the reading I have done (missing out the less helpful stuff this time) and piece together a strategy for dealing with BPD, a method out of the madness.

I am aware that are some really effective therapies for BPD out there, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) being the most popular (I have the handbook). From what I have heard, it sounds very effective, however, where I live it is not available and I know other people are in a similar situation. I am currently receiving one-to-one Mentalisation Based Therapy (MBT), its aim is to train patients to think about the thought processes behind their feelings and behaviour and those of others. The odd thing is that my therapist says that I already seem to have this ability – it’s partly just the way I am and partly what I have learned along the way.

My plan with this blog is to discuss the particular books that I have found helpful to me, a very personalised book review I guess. I will outline the crucial points of each book and how I incorporated them into my recovery, how they were helpful to me, and hopefully will be to others. I will also share experiences from my day to day life so I can illustrate how I use the lessons I have learned to help me cope better with BPD and live a happier, more balanced life. I hope this approach will be helpful to anyone reading this and as always, I’d be delighted to receive feedback.

What made me this way

I thought a good place to start would be with my story so far, an analysis of how I’ve become the person I am today. As I mentioned in my previous post, I have spent a lot of time reading and writing in an attempt to figure out why I am the way I am so I can fix it – I’m a natural problem solver. I’m hoping that by writing a full explanation of why I have developed Borderline Personality Disorder it may help others recognise similar patterns in their own life, either that or just bore them to sleep..

It is clear that I was born with a very sensitive personality type (‘The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Survive and Thrive When the World Overwhelms You’ by Elaine N. Aron was particularly helpful in my understanding of this, read my review of this book here). It takes very little to upset me and I find my emotions overwhelming and difficult to tolerate at times. I had three older siblings who didn’t take too kindly to my arrival and who took every opportunity to bully and torment me that they could. I clung to my mother because she showed me abundant love and affection but my mother’s own neuroses bled into the relationship, most importantly her unbalanced view of love being based on self-sacrifice and her constant sense that something is about to go wrong at any moment.

I had a good relationship with my dad whose open-minded and analytical approach to life encouraged my own natural leaning in that direction, however my dad came from a generation typically afraid of the expression of emotion and my temperament often met with dissaproval. My mum’s ‘no nonsense, common sense’ approach also rubbed off on me, however, her reliance on her role as mother lead to her unconsciously encouraging my clingy, needy dependence upon her, in psychological terms this is known as an ‘insecure attachment’ (see Bowbly’s attachment theory) and is a crucial factor in the development of insecure personality types. I felt so bereft and vulnerable without the constant presence of my mother that I screamed hysterically if she even went upstairs without me.

Going to nursery and school was, frankly, traumatic for me. My very apparent sense of vulnerability made me an easy target for bullies, further reinforcing my unhealthy attachment to my mother. In one sense I only felt safe when I was with my mum – no-one could bully me then and I felt soothed by her affection, on the other hand, I unconsciously picked up from her a strong sense of impermanence, of impending catastrophe that left me feeling even more insecure and vulnerable.

My parents did not understand my highly emotional outbursts and often told me that I shouldn’t feel and react the way that I did, I was subject to ‘tough love’ which only had the effect of invalidating my experience, I felt that it was wrong to be me, to feel what I felt.

To cope with this lack of security I contrived mechanisms which allowed me to ‘read’ people and adjust my behaviour in order to minimise the possibility of them rejecting me and leaving me alone and unloved. Essentially I never felt secure enough to be myself around anyone else. Due to my strong, analytical and over-active cognition I even developed fantasy scenarios that all kinds of people could see and hear what I was doing even when I was on my own, so I didn’t even learn to be myself when I was alone. I also developed the habit of constantly conversing with people in my mind, second-guessing their reactions to my thoughts. I developed these behaviours as a very young child in order to protect myself from the universal fear of abandonment and rejection. Being a very young child I was unable to create strategies that effectively addressed the issues I was having. Inadvertently the part of me consumed by fear compounded the damage already done. I never felt safe, I felt uncomfortable around people and not even comfortable on my own. I withdrew; I was constantly under the influence of my mother’s negativity. I became depressed.

Being cursed with more than my fair share of intelligence I started developing ideas about the world; I thought about all manner of things and began to form strong opinions and beliefs. Unfortunately, my rational way of seeing the world clashed rather dramatically with my emotionally immature way of coping with life’s perceived dangers. Instead of trying to reconcile the two I continued with my old strategy – deny myself, deny what I feel. I wanted to be what I was not so I told myself that I was. In essence, I developed a very strong personality but it had no firm foundations to rest on. My sense of self was dangerously fragile and evanescent.

Inevitably, when I started having romantic relationships I transferred the unhealthy attachment from my mother to my new significant other however, I knew if I acted on my clingy, insecure impulses I would become unattractive so I played the game of emotional stability that I didn’t feel. I was alone, conflicted and tormented inside and hated myself for it. I chose partners who were unsuitable for me because I was grateful to be loved and wanted – I equated sex with acceptance. I would continue to cling to men I would have been better off without because of my fear of abandonment.

This is a simplified explanation of how I developed as I did into adolescence, how my personality was constructed. A lot of my blog will be about how I am trying to undo the complex knots that I have tangled myself up in. How I can finally be at peace with myself and live a happy, balanced life. I very much hope that my insights and attempt at recovery will be useful to those with similar experiences to myself.

Why I am writing this blog

I have given a lot of thought as to whether or not to start writing a blog about my mental health problems and recovery. Unfortunately, I have a habit of starting projects, being very enthusiastic for a while and then losing interest. This lack of consistency has a negative effect on my self-esteem as I end up feeling like a failure. Of course, if I use that as a reason not to do something then I don’t stand a chance of achieving anything. I find that when I write I understand more about myself and I gain a sense of fulfilment which is very important to me. I have kept a journal for twenty-two years which has been an essential tool in my recovery process but that is a private activity, writing for an audience is a very different matter. By sharing my story I hope to learn more about myself but also to hopefully help other people experiencing similar problems, even if it just makes someone feel less alone.

For as long as I can remember I have experienced periods of depression and anxiety. When I was a child I didn’t have the understanding or vocabulary to ask for help although I can distinctly remember how awful it felt. I was first diagnosed with depression when I was fifteen (after my second overdose) and have since seen numerous psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and community psychiatric nurses (CPN’s). Of course, I have also been prescribed many different anti-depressants and other psychiatric drugs. A few years ago I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and treated for that, however this year my diagnosis has been changed to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and I’m now undertaking Mentalisation Based Therapy (MBT) with a therapist on a one to one basis.

One of my natural abilities is problem solving, I’m a very analytical person. Over the years when I have felt bad, my instinct has been to understand the root cause of the problem and to learn more about it. I want to fix myself. As I mentioned earlier, I have kept a journal since I was fourteen which has been crucial to this process (if somewhat embarrassing to read back at times). I have also read widely on the subject of psychology and self-help which has provided a great deal of insight. Talking to friends and partners has also been incredibly useful (for me more than them, I suspect). I am now at the point where I have constructed a fairly comprehensive understanding of my psychological make-up – I know why I am the way I am. To me, this is the first step towards recovery. Now that I know myself I am working on trying to accept who I am – there may be some things I want to change but I am focusing on accepting who I am in the here and now, trying to eradicate the feelings of shame, inadequacy and helplessness that have prevented me from being happy in the past. I would like to share this journey with others, it would be very rewarding to get feedback from anyone who is interested in these issues, all are welcome!