Borderline Personality Disorder: New Tones of Emotion Regulation
by Shauna

"Emotions for a person with BPD are tidal waves that the moon can’t even control.

But all emotion is, is energy in motion. Thus, came the law of Conservation of Energy."

The first time I fell in love, I fell in love with a person I was in a relationship with for merely 3 weeks. People would ask "how can you fall in love with someone you barely knew". My response would be " The passion and intimacy was so intense that it seemed like 13 years." I felt ignorant to have let my emotions go. After all, I had spent my previous 17 years restraining my love for some ideal relationship while in the process of keeping my sanity in my inconsistent homes of my youth. I had never let my guard down; but then again I really had nothing to guard but my self-respect. And in three weeks, every challenge I subdued in my child hood, every extra mile I ran to release yesterdays torment all caught up with me. I fell hard, and quickly into a world I had never known; A world that had a grip on my soul and emotion for 3 years. Deep within I felt ashamed to be so obsessed with someone, but I was a true romantic and had to believe in love. If I didn’t believe in love, what else was there? Religion was a doorstep that fancied my recognition, but there were too many debates on the content of Gods character. And, I reasoned the simplicity of God had to be love. But, love for another human being was different; it was something I had never known. And when the door opened and shut in my face I was left with this emotion I didn’t know what to do with. These are typical circumstances people deal with I would tell my self. And people would always tell me you never forget your first love. "WHAT? You mean I have to live with this pain the rest of my life". So many questions popped in mine mind during the battle within, "questions concerning my identity, love, life, etc.".

But, the number one question that stood still was "how come everyone else seems to just move on into a career, another relationship, etc.?" During the process of finding out how to deal with this circumstance in my life I had the dark privilege of experiencing every other emotion in the great book of DNA, including a state of non-emotion. Ironic as it may seem, this period of my life was more painful than the pain I remember experience inflicted by others as a child. So I concluded that I was not a victim of others, but a victim of myself, allowing myself to feel this way when my life, logically, was far better off than the previous years of my life. If you made it this far, thanks for sticking with me. So how do we with BPD dance with life instead of drown in it?

I finished Caroline Myss’s book ANATOMY OF THE SPIRIT about six months ago. In her book, she uses a phrase called woundology to describe a commonplace language of intimacy in which we often use to relate to others on a certain level. She further explains that it has become a common conversational piece in our society now days, and that it comes from the "wounded child"- the damaged or stunted emotional patterns of our youth, patterns of painful memories, of negative attitudes, and of dysfunctional self-images. I am making point of woundology because, in my opinion, persons with BPD contain massive hidden wounds that act as an identity lifesaver. The emotions we experience and the intensity in which we experience them are a result of these "damaged or stunted emotional patterns". "Unknowingly, we may continue to operate with in these patterns as adults, albeit in new form. Fear of abandonment, for example, becomes jealousy (sound familiar?). Sexual abuse becomes dysfunctional sexuality.. A child’s negative self-image can later become the source of dysfunctions such as anorexia, obesity, alcoholism, and other addictions as well as obsessive fear of failure (which I am now dealing with)." During my treatment process in which I went into total isolation, I had separated myself from everything I had known, everyone I had know. I stopped searching for knowledge, for new answers, for meanings. I had to begin to trust myself. I had to find an identity without the influence of someone or anything. I simply had to acknowledge that I had BPD and that it was up to me to deal with the challenges instead of quitting every job when problems arose, or trying to control my partners in fear of making a mistake that would cause them to leave, or even more, accept that I wasn’t ready for any relationship with another. Acceptance is freedom. Knowledge alone is not power, but with love of oneself it is. It takes consistence in action and thought. Now, I make it a point to intentionally separate from a

"The wounded child does not understand that within all experiences, no matter how painful, lie insights. So long as we think like a wounded child, we will love conditionally and with great fear of loss. Self-love means caring for ourselves enough to forgive people in our past so that the wounds can no longer damage us- for our wounds do not hurt the people who hurt us." Myss comments. She then gives some steps towards achieving this way of health:

* Commit yourself to healing all the way to the source of the pain. This means turning inward and coming to know your wounds.

* Once "inside", identify your wounds. Have they become a form of "wound-power" within your present life? If you have converted your wounds to power, confront why you might fear healing.

* Once you have verbalized your wounds, observe how you use them to influence or even control people around you as well as yourself. Do you ever say you are not feeling well because of them in order to cancel an appointment? Do you ever control another person by saying that his or her actions remind you of your parents? Do you ever give yourself permission to quit something, or not try at all, by dwelling on your past and therefore encouraging depression? Are you afraid that in healing yourself you will lose your intimate connections to certain people in your life? Are you afraid choosing to heal your self will require you to leave behind some or much of your familiar life? These are questions you need to address honestly, because they are the most significant cluster of reasons that people fear becoming healthy. As you observe yourself through out the day, not carefully your choice of vocabulary, your use of therapeutic language, your fluency in woundology. Then formulate new patterns of interaction with others that do not rely upon wound power. Change your vocabulary, including how you talk to yourself. Should changing these patterns prove difficult, recognize that it is often far more difficult to release the power you derive from your wound than it is to release the memory of the painful experience. A person, who cannot let go of wound power is a wound addict, and like all addictions, wound addiction is not easy to break. Don’t be afraid to seek therapeutic help in getting through this step, any others.

* Identify the good that can and has come from your wounds. Start living with conscious appreciation and gratitude, and if you have to- fake until you make it.

* Once you have established a consciousness of appreciation, you can take on the challenge of forgiveness. As appealing as forgiveness is in theory, it is an extremely unattractive personal action for most people, mainly because the true nature of forgiveness remains misunderstood. Forgiveness is not the same as telling the person who harmed you, "it’s okay," which is more or less the way most people view it. Rather, forgiveness is a complex act of consciousness, one that liberates the psyche and soul from the need for personal vengeance and the perception of oneself as a victim. More than releasing from blame the people who caused our wounds, forgiveness means releasing the control that the perception of victimhood has over our mind.

* Think love. Live in appreciation and gratitude. Invite change into your life, if only through your attitude. Most of all, keep your spirit in the present time.

"TO BE" IS NOT A QUESTION

I want to make clear how necessary it is to never make your self feel wrong for the feelings and emotions you experience. Many people would say "if you would just change your attitude you would change your feelings." For persons with BPD, it is not that simple and "faking it" appears as just that to us. Controlling our emotions is more along the line of identifying and labeling the emotions versus trying to immediately change them. The point of woundology is link the identification process to a strategy in implementing a new personal identity outside of our past influence. Thus, to begin acting in new ways and as a new person.

Permission by Shauna