Dear miyoid:

“I thought I should be working on my ego like everybody else, it’s a toxic thing to have much of it”- ego as a toxic thing means to have an overly high self-esteem, viewing others as less worthy of respect than oneself, being bigheaded, that is, having an exaggerated sense of one’s own abilities, qualities, and importance; putting other people down.

– I don’t see any connection between this common use of ego and you. Do you see a connection?

“What do we do then? Do we have to distract (ourselves) from these unjust details and focus on other stuff? I felt like distraction is just a denial you will always be coming to that thought later”- I agree, distracting yourself from something that significantly bothers you will work temporarily at best. But there is a place for distraction- it is a tool that my therapist introduced to me as a way to manage my emotions, so it has a place. But for long-term peace of mind, we do have to resolve issues that significantly bother us.

You work 9 hours a day, then spend 2 hours getting ready and traveling to and from work, that’s 11 hours a day, leaving you 13 hours for sleep and anything else.. how is your sleep these days, I remember that you shared not long ago that you don’t sleep much during the night?

“We really need people who care about to put up with that.. power comes from our strong connection”- correct, it is our social connections that give us the motivation to carry on unpleasant and/or difficult life tasks.  How is your live-in boyfriend doing, and how is current relationship with him?

anita

Dear Miyoid:

This will be a long post and I know that you work for many hours, so please take your time with this post, read it when you have the time and ability, take as many days as you need to.

You suspect that your boyfriend fits the Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) because he fits these nine criteria (the quotes are what you posted about him specifically): (1) he is very worried about people abandoning him, (2) he has very intense emotions that last from a few hours to a few days, intense emotions that cannot change quickly, “a single word can change his mood enormously”,  (3) he doesn’t have a strong sense of who he is, and his sense of who he is can change significantly depending on who he is with, “He doesn’t know what he wants, then he questions that so much that he decides he just doesn’t want to exist.. dwelling on that indecisiveness”,

(4) he finds it very hard to make and keep stable relationships, two out of the three relationships he had in the past were long term but “not stable at all”, (5) he feels empty a lot of the time, (6) he acts impulsively and does things that could harm him, such as binge eating, using drugs or driving dangerously, “Very much indeed”, (7) he often self harms or has suicidal feelings, “Very much, indeed”, (8) he has very intense feelings of anger, which are really difficult to control, (9) When very stressed, he may also experience paranoia or dissociation, “these got stronger or happened after a doctor prescribed him tranquilizers and SSRI” and then told him that “she cannot work with him after giving all  those medications.. and let him alone with those meds”.

My thoughts: I think that you and him share #1, 3 and 5: you both fear abandonment, you both feel empty, and you both don’t have a strong sense of identity. Also, neither one of you has a history of healthy intimate relationships.

What the two of you do not have in common are #2, 7, 8: he experiences intense negative emotions, including anger,  for hours or days, unable to calm down/ feel better. Because of this inability,  he acts impulsively by self-harming, making suicide gestures, etc.

Regarding 9: the two of you suffer from dissociation,  but I imagine that he experiences an extreme dissociation at times because of his intense/ extreme emotions.  Intense emotions–> intense dissociation. Paranoia is also related to feeling negative emotions too intensely.

The reason he obsesses/ dwells on issues of his self-identity/ emptiness while you do not (#3) is because he feels intensely bad for a long time, and for that long, he tries to figure things out. Intense negative emotions over an issue for a long time–> obsessing/ dwelling on the issue for a long time.

The key issue of BPD (and I know because I was diagnosed with it by my therapist at the time and my therapy was based on this diagnosis. I no longer fit the criteria) is an inability to adequately regulate one’s emotions: a person experiences negative emotions too intensely,  for too long and can’t calm down/ distract/ move on. Feeling intensely bad for so long, a person gets desperate trying to feel better by drinking heavily, using drugs, eating too much, getting special attention by performing suicide gestures, etc.

Looking back at your previous thread, in July 2020 you shared that you and him were 22, that you were depressed and he understood you so well because he had experience with depression (“he understood me so well”), showed you empathy that you didn’t experience before (“I have never saw this kind of empathy, transparency in a relationship before”), you lived together during the pandemic, he was depressed, obsessed and suicidal, and one day in July he attempted suicide or made a suicidal gesture (“I prevented him from a suicide attempt the other day”).

In August, you wrote: “He relapsed today and I stopped him from taking 6-7 sleeping pills… It’s like he cannot stop thinking… he says that he cannot control himself… they prescribed a calmative drug for crisis and also an antidepressant.. Today, he wanted to break up because he is sick of himself for harming me emotionally”.

In September you wrote: “Since I don’t have anybody I feel this much intimacy with, and also because I don’t have anybody that understands me… I choose to stay in this relationship.. He considers himself a lost cause most of the time”.

In November you shared that after the Earthquake,  he “stopped using his antipsychotic drugs for just 2 days to feel more awake in case there would be more earthquakes. This made him worse and worse, resulting in him wanting to be hospitalized so that he won’t hurt anybody.. He was attacking himself during the episodes and the ER gave him tranquilizers”.

In December you shared that his psychiatrist told him that she couldn’t work with him, “after giving him all those meds to him and making him addicted.. we have gotten worse and worse.. it feels like he doesn’t want to change at all.. I’ve wrenched a rope from him the other day because he was preparing to commit suicide. I also got razors from him during the summer”. Most recently, you’ve been working for many hours and you spend time with him for only a couple of hours in the evening before you sleep. “I feel like he doesn’t like this idea but he respects my wishes and my work… he is trying to adjust.. For now, he distracts himself sometimes and gets better. But in a few days, he starts thinking about the same thing.. and this thought loops makes him angry, broken-hearted.”

Closing points:

1. Regarding BPD you/ he can look up Emotional Regulation Skills– there are online resources as well as books, maybe workbooks as well. Key for a person who cannot regulate his emotions is to learn and practice these skills over a long period of time. It can be done successfully.

2. I see a difference between you and him: as a child and onward you managed to shut down your emotions quite successfully, (you overly regulated your emotions= dissociated to a large extent). This left you chronically depressed and often apathetic (“This can also be about my apathy… I can behave like my mother. She used to/ still gets away from the problems.. stopped trying when she understood something cannot be solved”).

He did not shut down his emotions as successfully (he under-regulated his emotions= dissociated to a lesser extent), therefore he often experiences negative emotions so intensely and for so long (obsessing keeps the negative emotions going, and the negative emotions keep fueling the obsessing), that sooner or later, he resorts to desperate/impulsive acts so to feel better.

anita