Dear lil.lilly/ Reader:

My experience with BPD: I grew up with a borderline-and histrionic- personality disordered mother. It was hell. When she was in a good mood it was wonderful to see her happy for a change, I had a break, I could relax a bit. But not for long and not entirely, because … well, you never knew when, but you knew it’s going to happen sooner than later, the next explosion of her misery, or rage. Those explosions were scary as she went out of her way to express her misery and rage using many words and images. She used the most hurtful words she could find, most humiliating, elaborating on humiliating themes, shaming me best she could, going on and on and on and on and on… and on, for hours. Sometimes she hit me too, hands across face, hands punching anywhere, feet kicking. She went on until she was exhausted and then she stopped- complete withdrawal, going eerily silent for a few days, until she returned to her normal. Normal meant that she was how she was between attacks, very talkative, indiscriminately talkative, no break from her talking unless she was asleep or out at work. And in all her talking- never a mention of a single attack.

I understand now, as I understood then, that she suffered a lot, that she had a horrendous childhood and a difficult life as practically, a single mother with no financial help from anyone, working so very hard cleaning homes and offices, hands raw from scrubbing, body hurts from exertion. I knew the details of her misery very well, because, as I said, she went on and on… and on and on, expressing her misery to me in any and every possible way, and blaming me for the parts of her misery that she said I caused.

Growing up, all I saw was HER misery, All my empathy was for her and all I wanted was to make it up to her for all her misery.

Fast forward decades, all the way to May 2015- now, in which I’ve been posting here, I still struggled, for a long time, with being able to see ME in the picture. In my own mind, I didn’t exist, or didn’t have the right to exist. Fast forward to now, I can SEE ME then and now… the girl I was, oh no, she was not the evil entity she said I was.

The fear of my mother manifested in the first decade of my life as severe dissociation, severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), severe Tourette Syndrome (TS), poor cognitive abilities (very poor attention to details, poor ability to focus and maintain focus, poor ability to process and absorb information, poor memory), disordered eating and more.

As a child and a teenager, I was made fun for the tics (TS) and I felt very weird because of those tics and the many compulsions I performed as part of OCD, but I never heard of TS or OCD before I was 20, so I just figured I was very weird, inferior and unacceptable. I was ashamed about the tics, in particular. Fast forward decades and as I sit here typing these words, the vocal tics I am performing (“hmmm” vocalizations) and motor tics (moving my shoulders around) still, as always, go together with a distressing feeling, an elevated stress experience, and this is a way of living for me every day, every hour of the day, multiple times per minute.

My mother deserves to receive empathy, of course she does. Only not from me because truly, she has caused me so much suffering, suffering which keeps going and going every minute, every day for over half a century.  I still feel love for her, and it’s possible for me to feel it because I haven’t been in any contact with her for over 8 years. The last direct contact with her, a phone call, happened almost 9 years ago, in March of 2013. The amount of guilt and anxiety that I felt about not being in contact since was almost as great as the anxiety and guilt that I felt when I was in contact with her… until I managed to see ME in the picture long enough to see that I matter too, that my suffering existed for so long, and shouldn’t have.

It helped me to feel less guilty when I realized that if I did reconnect with her, it wouldn’t make her any happier than she was all these years when I was right there in front of her.

As a very young adult, I behaved as if I wasn’t there, and making choices was a foreign concept to me. I continued to live in a dissociative state and surprisingly I am still alive. I was handed a few mental health diagnoses by professionals, added to my collection of OCD and TS (both diagnoses made by a professional in my 20s for conditions that started at the ages of 5 or 6, or so). The additions, in order made and approximate dates, I received the following diagnoses: major depressive disorder (1995), borderline personality disorder (2011), dysthymia (2012), anorexia nervosa & bipolar disorder (2012). Fast forward 10 years since the last diagnosis, and I believe that the only diagnosis that still applies to me is Tourette Syndrome.

In regard to my own BPD diagnosis- I suspected it many years ago, when I was in my twenties, as I read the DSM-4 entry on it. The anger is what stands out to me, which made me a very disagreeable person to be around. The first I remember being angry was when she was hitting me on the face, right cheek, left cheek, back to the right cheek. I remember I felt that my face was hot, not just from the hitting, but from the anger I felt. I remember how intensely that anger stirred withing me, anger at her for hitting me. She told me at the time when she hit me: “the only thing I like about you is that you are looking down at the floor, that you are not saying anything back”.

In all of my life, I never said a bad word to my mother, never raised my voice to her, never hit her, but the anger was there all along. It had a life of its own. I couldn’t tolerate people for long because I got angry at every person, either immediately or not long after. The result- no relationships, really.  I was very alone and very lonely the vast majority of the time.

In the quote from Wikipedia, in the previous post, it says: “BPD is believed to be the one psychiatric disorder that produces the most intense psychological pain and distress…  chronic and significant emotional suffering and mental agony” – true. That was my experience for decades. Now the agony is mostly the tics, plus the physical consequences of my disordered eating which included binge eating, using laxatives and over-exercising.

Like lil.lilly, none of my travels made my life any better, not for long. Nothing did, not until I attended my first experience of quality psychotherapy, in 2011, 11 years ago (2011-2013). It’s been a long, long process of continued healing since. I managed to contain my anger, to regulate my emotions, to eliminate destructive impulsive behaviors, and to be able to form and maintain a healthy enough relationship. And here I am. There is much more to my story, of course, and more healing to be done.

Here is the part of my story that is most interesting to me: all of the world events that happened in my lifetime, from wars and terrorist attacks in the country where I grew up to the pandemic and escalated climate change of 2020- now (I watch the news and I personally suffered from the escalated climate change by breathing in the smoke of wildfires summer 2020, experiencing a record high heat wave summer 2021, flooding in winter 2021 and the heaviest snow storm this last December), the political unrest and radicalization in the U.S., and the move toward autocracy in the U.S. and elsewhere, including the currently ongoing Russian invasion into the Ukraine- and in all this, what scared me the most, and by far, is my mother. Of all my fears, the fear of her is the greatest. In my brain and body, nothing feels as dangerous as she has been, in my life.

A few comments in regard to what lil.lilly shared. She shared in Aug 2014 that her love interest didn’t talk to her after she “freaked out on him and had a meltdown“. Next, she wrote about him: “he’s a liar… He hurt me a lot, I mean emotionally abused me… I do not think it’s fair that he gets to go out of state and study when he has been such a bad person” – she had a very positive view of him earlier, viewed him as a good man who deserved her love, but after she abused him during one of her BPD meltdowns, and he reacted to her abuse by withdrawing from her, she then changed her view of him, and suddenly he is the bad guy/ the abuser, and she is the good guy/his victim. And fitting with this new view, in her mind, he deserves what bad people deserve- misery==> this is the core experience of being in a relationship with (and worst, being born to) a BPD person- you will be loved for a little while and then you will be punished. Walking on eggshells, you try to prevent the latter, but you will fail. And when they are displeased for whatever reason, they will give you the misery that, in their minds, you deserve.

“I am always crying, I feel so weak, like a baby” -The BPD person takes her power back when she attacks her victim. Power is intoxicating.

“I just love loving, you know? I love to love all the time… feeling so robotic in this routine life“- she loves loving until she loves hating. BPD explosions are a welcomed change from the dominant robotic, bored, depressed feeling.

“We clicked immediately, and we are very intimate with one another…  Today, he came and saw me after church and told me he could not see me anymore… How many times do I have to go through?” – the socially isolated and/ or lonely BPD person is eager to connect, so she connects quickly and indiscriminately, and then the connection ends because she connected to the wrong guy, not even knowing who he is. If he is a good person, and she stays with him long enough, she’ll explode at him nonetheless and the connection will end as a result.

“I feel so lonely… I am scared to be alone… I almost feel alone all the time” – My dominant adult experience of social isolation and feeling lonely have been the consequence of my indiscriminate connecting and hateful BPD behaviors toward others.

“I did it again. I ruined a friendship with a friend because I lashed out” – the explosions, the lashing out- it’s about the anger that never goes away and it’s about the need to feel powerful, different from the same-old-same-old weak, depressed, lonely and boring dominant emotional experience of life.

“After thanksgiving, I freaked out on him. I felt that he felt distant… My fury started” – when she felt that he was distancing himself from her, she felt weak/ powerless to do anything about it, so she lashed out, feeling the power she needs to feel.

“I said, ‘I hated him, f** you, etc., he’s a coldhearted person.’ I tried to incite him… I ruined it; he probably thinks I’m crazy… I feel used, played, betrayed, hurt. I want to address it before he goes, wish him good luck, and give his x-mas present” – her self-identity shifts quickly, within a few sentences, from that of a crazy person to that of a victim. His identity, in her mind, changes quickly from that of a cold-hearted person to that of a person who deserves a present. Also, her affect changes quickly from being hateful to loving.

“I also tend to see the goodness of people. So, when I feel betrayed, then my anger lashes out. It’s the same for friends or with men in general” – the BPD person tends to see the goodness in people because she hopes that these people will make her forever happy, so before she even knows who a person is, she quickly puts the person on a pedestal. But then… the person always falls to make her forever happy, and as a result of this unpreventable failure, she kicks the person off the pedestal and proceeds to punish the fallen one, giving him/ her hell.

And that BPD (and histrionic) hell that I experienced, scared and scarred me more than anything did since and still, now in the present. I am not in contact with her anymore, but the fear she instilled in me, that fear that got caught in my brain-body, it’s still here, every moment, every day.

anita