Chapter One:  I have what??

 

            In November of 2023, i decided that things were no longer working for me in the sense of keeping everything held together as everyone seemed to think i was doing (and thought i was doing well).  Once that realization hit me, i went onto my insurance website just to see what options were available to me to talk with someone.  Even then, i wasn’t ready to admit that I needed “therapy;” i just needed to find someone to talk some things through with.  When the option for “text messaging” with a therapist through an app was an option, my thought process was, “This will just be like texting with an acquaintance and it’s not going to be like therapy-therapy where you lie down on a couch and spill your guts to someone with a clipboard, asking, ‘and how do you FEEL about that?’”  BARF!  Been there, done that after my divorce, NOT going down that road again!  Little did i know at that point, i would soon be spilling my guts via text messages and journal entries to a therapist and having her message me back, “and how do you feel about that?” and me being okay with answering.  What was happening to me?  Was i really committing to do the “therapy thing” again?  How did that happen?  What was i thinking?

 

            Looking back to the beginning of recommitting to the “therapy thing” again (i was in therapy for almost a year after my divorce and my therapist mostly sided with my ex-husband and tried to convince me why he was right - - more on that later….), i was terrified.  i knew of the inevitability of having to bring up things from my past from more than 20 years ago but those unfortunate events have shaped me into who i am today.  Those traumas from my past are in direct correlation with the forming of my borderline personality disorder.

 

            Before diving more into my story, you might be asking yourself, “what is borderline personality disorder?”  Honestly, i had never heard of it before i was diagnosed with it.  There are nine criteria to borderline, and to have it, you must meet a minimum of five; me, being an overachiever, i meet eight out of the nine criteria:

• Chronic feelings of emptiness
• Emotional instability in reaction to day-to-day events (e.g., intense episodic sadness, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
• Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
• Identity disturbance with markedly or persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
• Impulsive behavior in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)
• Inappropriate, intense anger, or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)
• A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by extremes between idealization and devaluation (also known as “splitting”)
• Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-harming behavior
• Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms

Thankfully, the one i don’t have (which in my personal opinion is the best one NOT to have) is “recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-harming behavior.”  All the other ones check the boxes to describe my personality.  As soon as i read this list, things clicked into place for me - - until my therapist told me that borderline personality disorder is classified as a mental illness.  Nope.  Not me.  i’m absolutely NOT going to admit to having a mental illness!  My therapist had to gently remind me at that point that “technically” i already had two mental illnesses – anxiety disorder and depression – if i wanted to admit them or not.  It honestly took some convincing for me to admit the term “mental illness” to my vocabulary but i have since embraced it as part of – not all of – who i am.

 

Before i got to the point of fully admitting to having the mental illness known as borderline personality disorder, or BPD for short, i had to realize what all it entailed.  i was confused by some of the terminology at first – how could i have a personality that was on the borderline?  Did that mean i only had a mild personality?  Part of a personality?  A dysfunctional personality?  What i came to terms with it meaning is i have a personality where my emotions and thoughts run differently than other people and the name they have assigned to this way of being is BPD.

 

When i shared this discovery with certain people in my life, my dear friend R, my sister-in-law "Evie", and my brother "Short Stack", they weren’t as taken aback as i was.  There responses were more along the lines of, “okay, now we have a name for how your brain and emotions work, let’s move forward.”  How could they be so blase about it?  i was spilling my guts to them that i was diagnosed not only with a mental illness but a personality disorder and their responses were so casual.  Granted, if they would have panicked or freaked out about it, i don’t know what i would’ve done because i was already expecting the worst – abandonment….  i expected, on some level, that the naming of it was going to be too much for them to handle and they would just say, “nope, peace out!  Good luck to you with this mess that’s now your life!” but none of them did that.  They have stood by me even though i have a name to what’s different about my brain/emotions and i’m grateful for that.

 

 

Chapter Two:  Journey to the Past

 

      You know how in a good movie there is often a cut scene to a character’s past, or their past somehow comes to bite them in the butt, so you learn about it?  Well, along my therapy journey, this came to light quickly as a root cause of my “issues.”  Here goes….

 

i have been in three significant relationships in my life.  One was in high school, one was in college, and one was right out of college.

 

The relationship in high school was about half of Junior year and some of Senior year.  At the time, i was overweight compared to my classmates, dressed nerdier than most, and was a book nerd/choir geek/theatre geek all wrapped into one me.  So, when my boyfriend, K, decided to “teach me” what it meant to be a good-girlfriend, i let him.  Bruises were left on my body in “strategic” places (e.g., could be covered very easily with clothes and even hidden easily while in the dreaded gym locker room for required P.E.), bruises were left on my psyche (when he would tell me in all the ways i WASN’T good enough), and he raped me repeatedly (by forcing me to perform oral sex on a regular basis), all in the name of “love”.  When he left bruises, he would always apologize by giving me at least one (but usually a small bouquet) of red roses – to this day, i can’t STAND to be given flowers but roses especially make me shake.  Did i tell my friends or parents or anyone what was going on?  Of course not!  i didn’t want my dad (or my brothers, even though they are younger) to end up in jail and the time it was happening in earnest, my sister was moving out of the house unexpectedly.  Needless to say, i stayed in the relationship believing him that he was “teaching me” how to be a better girlfriend the entire time and he is the one who finally broke up with me when i became “distant” after my sister moved out (we’re Irish twins and shared a room our entire lives up until that point).  My parents ended up finding out the truth about K approximately 9 years later when my slimeball ex-husband threatened to tell them in the divorce but more about the slimeball and that story to follow….

 

In college, i was in a relationship with someone for almost 3 years and while it progressed to engagement status, it can best be described as a relationship of “indifference.”  i’m not completely heartless and do feel at least a little bit bad writing that word down to describe our relationship but looking back, it was one of indifference.  i viewed him as “safe” after my boyfriend in high school and we progressed to be an engaged couple because that was the next step to take.  We thought we were in love, said we were in love, but we didn’t really act like we were in love.  We didn’t have any of those serious, in-depth conversations before marriage that two people should have.  We were engaged for a year and made no wedding plans (yes, i subscribed to bridal magazines and bridal websites but that was it).  When he came into my work to call off the engagement, i only cried for maybe 30 minutes and that was because i was more mad/embarrassed that he came into my work to call things off than i was heartbroken that the engagement was over.  What was wrong with me?

 

Onto the man that i married.  B and i met at my brother’s wedding while i was engaged to the other guy.  B was leaning against the wall acting too cool for what was happening at the reception so i asked my then fiancé (who obviously didn’t want to be there, and he broke up with me like 3 days later) if i could dance with my brother’s friend.  He feigned indifference so i went up to B, grabbed him by the tie, and told him to come and dance with me.  Two days after my fiancé and i called things off, i got a phone call out of the blue from B telling me that he liked my daring in pulling him off the wall and that he wished i wasn’t engaged to the “tool” who didn’t want to be seen with me on the dance floor.  When i told B we were no longer together, he cheered, and we proceeded to talk for about three hours on the phone that night.  The rest, as they say, was history.  He was in the Navy, we did the long-distance relationship thing for less than a year (he was in training, i was finishing college) and we visited in person i think 4 times before we were engaged (he took me for a drive to look at the stars and asked me i if i would be his star forever as he held up the diamond ring – aww!); four months later we were married.  Didn’t know much about one another but we knew we loved one another and figured the rest would sort itself out.

 

What i didn’t know at the time is he is most likely a narcissist who looked like the doting husband to outsiders, but he was abusive behind closed doors.  He was a master manipulator whose favorite forms of abuse were psychological and emotional (his loved to give me the silent treatment and to withhold all forms of affection, especially sex, when his was “displeased” by something i had done).  Did i tell anyone that it was going on?  No.  Because if i could just learn to be a “better” wife, i wouldn’t have to worry about those things continuing to happen.  i even developed night terrors about torture while we were together, and he would slap me to try and awake me because he couldn’t stand to see me that way – he always turned things into how HE felt.  Even when we were unable to get pregnant and i was devastated, it became about me “denying” him his right to be a father.  My self-esteem was so low that i believed the garbage he was telling me, and we stayed together for five years.

 

After five years of marriage, he decided that my “hang ups” from the past (from my relationship with K) were more than he wanted to continue to deal with, so he left me in a letter, and two weeks later i received divorce papers.  Me being me, tried to beg him to stay with me (how sick and twisted is that?) and that’s when he told me that he was going to tell my parents just how damaged their daughter was or that i could tell them.  i called him some choice names and decided i should take it into my own hands at that point and tell my parents about K.  They, of course, were devastated that i hadn’t told them and that they hadn’t guessed it was going on.  It wasn’t until recently that i told them about the things that B did to me and i still am unsure if they are disappointed that i didn’t tell them or that i allowed the things to happen again.  They both loved B and he was more than just a son-in-law to them.

 

With all of those experiences and trauma in my past, it’s really no wonder that i developed a personality disorder because of it.  For years i blamed myself for the things that K and B put me through and i am just now coming to terms with the fact that it wasn’t that i allowed the things to happen to me it was a flaw in their character that made them think that those ways of showing someone love was acceptable.  i haven’t been in a relationship since 2008 (November of 2008 is when B left me in the letter and our divorce was finalized in September of 2009) and i don’t necessarily foresee a relationship with anyone, other than finding me, in my future.