Dear noname:

You are welcome. As to you not knowing how to make a brighter future for yourself, I believe that the first thing for you to do, is to greatly improve your emotional regulation skills. Becoming overwhelmed with emotion/ hijacked by emotion- has been the major factor fueling your suffering in life.

(I will be away from the computer for a couple of hours).

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by .

Dear noname:

I will read your recent post and reply in about 12 hours from now.

anita

Dear noname;

“For whatever reason I can’t shake the feeling that I will be alone forever. I struggle to maintain closeness in friendships and can’t find/ choose a good partner. Without love and belonging what is the point? I need to come up with some kind of plan to build relationships  in my life”-

– you are alone, and have been alone pre-pandemic, because that which you need the most (“closeness.. a good partner.. love and belonging.. relationships”), you also fear the most.  It is not that every woman you got involved with was a bad-partner material, but that you intensely feared every woman you got involved with.

I mentioned earlier that at your core there is a fear of separation/ abandonment. That fear keeps you alone. The nature of this fear is the same as what is in the core of Separation Anxiety Disorder. A sentence you wrote yesterday indicates it: “Anytime I’m alone for more than an hour or two with no way to distract myself the despair sets in”. Separation anxiety in earlier life predates the development of Borderline Personality Disorder in young adulthood. You were diagnosed with BPD: “I was diagnosed with BPD as well. I fit the diagnosis very well”, Jan 8.

Your pattern has been to be alone for a long time-> feel very lonely and desperate for a relationship with a woman-> get together with a woman-> rush into intimacy with her-> panic that she is about to abandon you/ that you are about to be destroyed by separation from her-> quickly exit the very beginning relationship any which way.

How can you maintain a relationship when you fear a relationship so intensely, when for you, a relationship= abandonment, pain and devastation.

You mentioned coming up with a plan to build relationships. My input and quotes from Wikipedia: the plan should be based on your BPD diagnosis. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) was  developed by Marsha M. Linehan “to help people increase their emotional and cognitive regulation… Linehan developed DBT as a modified form of cognitive behavioral therapy in the late 1980s to treat people with borderline personality disorder…

“DBT has been used by practitioners to treat people with depression, drug and alcohol problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries, binge-eating disorders, and mood disorders.. including self-injury… DBT combines standard cognitive-behavioral techniques for emotion regulation and reality-testing with concepts of distress tolerance, acceptance, and mindful awareness largely derived from contemplated meditative practice… DBT.. is the first therapy that has been experimentally demonstrated to be generally effective in treating BPD”.

anita

Dear noname:

When I quoted to you from Wikipedia about Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), I knew that I was not introducing a new topic to you. I  know that you are a professional psychotherapist in the U.S., and I am sure that you spent many, many hours studying and practicing DBT in the classroom and with patients.  The reason I quoted to you about DBT is because (a) there may be someone else reading my posts and it may help them to know, and (b) because there are different levels of understanding of a topic: if you re-read something with “a beginner’s mind”= with a new light, you can see things you didn’t see before.

“I am curious if talking with me feels hopeless to you? It’s starting to feel that way to me. It doesn’t seem Like I’ve made any progress and it’s really getting old”-

– no, talking with you does not feel hopeless to me. After all, I was diagnosed myself with BPD, I suffered decades of miserable, very short term .. what do you call them, instant-ships (just came up with the term), and now I am much healthier.. finally I feel sane, what a relief! Well, same is possible for you.

Because you are a psychotherapist and familiar with the skills you need to practice, all you have to do is practice these skills persistently and for long enough. What you are lacking is the motivation, I understand this part.

anita

Dear noname:

You are welcome. “I have the.. skills and can’t find a good enough ‘why’ to use them”-

– we are born with emotion regulation skills, such as crying- crying lessens strong emotion. Crying is an inborn emotion regulation skill. Every person, no matter his/ her mental pathology has good moments. Every person, at times, is calm and regulated. Similarly, in the past, you felt calm and regulated here and there, and when introduced to learned skills such as reality testing, distress tolerance, radical acceptance and mindfulness awareness- at times when you were not too overwhelmed with emotion ,you were able to practice these and felt regulated.

I think that the problem is that you have very little experience practicing these skills on a regular basis, every day, and therefore, too often you get emotionally overwhelmed. The more overwhelmed you get, the more difficult it is to regulate, sometimes it may be impossible. You have to regulate on a regular basis, so that eventually  your baseline of emotion is lower and you no longer get overwhelmed.

“What exactly do you understand about lacking motivation? From my understanding humans always have motivation, just that it may be blocked by other things on our minds or hearts”- I think that you are motivated to have a relationship with a woman but you are  blocked by fear and the anger that closely follows the fear. You are blocked otherwise because you repeatedly failed to succeed in your attempts to (1)regulate your emotions, (2) to choose thoughtfully instead of impulsively, ex., you aimed at taking it slowly with a woman, and you failed, again and again.

Repeated failures to have control over your behavior and therefore, over your life is scary and very frustrating, and no surprise it kills the motivation to try again. I’ve known this great frustration all to well, personally. It is necessary for mental health for a person to have confidence in his/ her ability to exercise basic control over one’s behavior, to trust oneself this way.

anita

Dear noname:

Addictive behaviors are about regulating emotions when overwhelmed=  self-destructive emotion regulation efforts.

“The fact that I struggle so much makes me feel  like a fraud… How am I supposed to be helping people if I’m like this?”- if all therapists had to be emotionally healthy before they were able to help their clients, there would be way fewer therapists out there, and way fewer people helped. See to it that you do-no-harm and help others best you can: it makes a big difference for the people who without you- would receive no help at all.

anita