Dear noname:

I had too many windows open on my computer, and accidently deleted one where I was preparing a post for you following many hours and two days worth of work, a post that included a detailed response to your Jan 7 post, and the compiling and retyping of quotes from all your threads all the way to Dec 8, 2019. Although I wrote to you yesterday that I didn’t intend it to be a long post, it was going to be a long post.

But now, that I have lost it all (except for the last quote I copied, lost, and recopied- below), it is going to be a shorter post after all. It will be based on what I read, retyped and lost, and it will be written in a more casual, straight forward style. I think that it will be difficult for you to read, especially because of what you shared in your post yesterday: “I generally disagree with diagnostic criteria, and refuse to pathologize people’s adaptive behaviors as some sort of ‘disorder'”, but if you read to the end, it may be of benefit to you:

This is the one quote that I was able to recopy, Dec 8, 2019: “I read over journal entries from the past year, and 95% of my entries say the same damn thing, that I’m hopeless, tired and lonely. Looking back over the past 10 years it’s all really been the same story”.

I noticed this as well, you really do sound the same month after month, year after year, March 15, 2017- January 7, 2021: same thoughts, same expressed emotional experiences, same behaviors. All this fits with what personality disorders are about, as MedilinePlus. gov puts it: “Personality disorders are a group of mental illnesses. They involve long-term patterns of thoughts and behaviors that are unhealthy and inflexible. The behaviors cause serious problems with relationships and work. People with personality disorders have trouble dealing with everyday stresses and problems. They often have stormy relationships with other people”.

The mayo clinic. org reads: “A personality disorder is a type of mental disorder in which you have a rigid and unhealthy pattern of thinking, functioning and behaving. A person with a personality disorder has trouble perceiving and relating to situations and people. This causes significant problems and limitations in relationships, social activities, work and school”.

The website then lists the symptoms of one of the Cluster B Personality disorders, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): “Impulsive and risky behavior.., Unstable or fragile self-image, Unstable and intense relationships, Up and down moods…, Suicidal behavior or threats of self-injury, Intense fear of being alone or abandoned, Ongoing feelings of emptiness, Frequent, intense displays of anger, Stress-related paranoia that comes and goes”.

I understand that mental disorders, and particularly personality disorders, are artificial classification of symptoms into groups. No one is born with a personality disorder- a person comes to fit a personality disorder usually in early adulthood after suffering years of emotional injuries in childhood.

I am not a professional. My understanding about personality disorders comes from having been diagnosed with one myself. I attended quality psychotherapy for the first time in my life in 2011. There I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Based on this diagnosis, my therapist at the time came up with a treatment plan (he gave me the printout of the original treatment plan and later, printouts of edited/ adjusted plans). This is where these diagnoses do come handy: they make it possible for the therapist to put together a treatment plan that will address the most challenging issues to the client at the very beginning of therapy and onward. In the case of a person diagnosed with BPD, the most challenging issue is emotional dysregulation, and therefore my therapist focused on emotional regulation skills from the very beginning, in every session and in between sessions (homework).

Personality disorders indicate a long-term pattern of rigid ways of thinking and behaving that cause a lot of distress, misery, and dysfunctional lives. A person correctly diagnosed with a personality disorder has to take his/ her mental health very seriously because the issues will not resolve by themselves. Sharing/ venting here, on your thread, and analyzing (which both of us have done)- is great, but healing needs to start in a professional setting, with a therapist that will put together a treatment plan specific to you, following evaluating and diagnosing you.

Again, as you know, I am not a professional of any kind, and I can not and am not diagnosing you. I am suggesting that you see a professional for a possible diagnosis of a personality disorder, for the purpose of receiving an effective treatment, specific to your most demanding challenges.

Almost 10 years after my diagnosis with BPD- I no longer fit it, I no longer fit a personality disorder diagnosis. That’s a relief!

anita

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