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Gardening requires hope--hope for the right weather, hope for good seed, hope for recovery from any unexpected events. In the same way, recovery from borderline personality disorder (BPD) is an exercise in hope.
I was recently having lunch with a woman who has a series of medical issues, including pain management. One of the medications she is on is oxycodone. She said she would like to get off of the oxycodone but when she has tried, the pain has been unbearable and no other pain medication would touch her pain. So I asked her, "if this medication is working for you and other medications don’t work, then why are you trying to get off of it?"
She said it was because of the stigma attached to that medication.
So I told her something important – you can’t let stigma make your treatment decisions.
"There is no shame in having DID," says one woman living with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Using the pseudonym Pilgrim to protect her family, she says she initially felt shame about her disorder. But with the help of her therapist, she now feels there's nothing wrong with having a Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis and wants to pass that message on to others.
I wrote you a story of leaving abuse because sometimes the words of verbal abuse weigh so heavily in our minds and hearts that we no longer hear the good words. Pummeled by negativity, our brains begin to tell us our story of abuse, and in creating it, focusing on the pain, we cannot hear anything else. I call this story of abuse The Foreigners because the kind voices this abused woman hears start as foreign, but become the only voices she wants to hear.
When I say self-inflicted, I don't mean deliberate, nor do I necessarily mean conscious, and I don't mean it in the sense of self-harm, either. I mean it in the sense that anxiety, mental illness, is continuous, forceful injury to the ego - and unavoidably, inextricably linked-in to our idea of self.
If anxiety isn't my fault, then whose fault is it?
The question doesn't help. I'd ban it, if I could. Fault?
I know a forty-something woman who I’ll call Bonnie. For lack of a better adjective, the best way I can describe her is simply “cool.” She’s well-educated (holds multiple degrees), has traveled and lived abroad, is smart, funny, kind, and is an interesting conversationalist. She’s also single as single can be — as in never been married. I’ve often wondered why she’s not in a relationship. I mean, if I were a guy I would probably want to date her.
There is a common refrain that if you looked in the DSM, everyone would have some mental disorder. And in point of fact, many symptoms are fairly generic and can be attributed to many. Fatigue, insomnia, thoughts of death, loss of pleasure and weight loss are part of the depression diagnosis.
But the part no one seems to remember is what’s under that,
The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you."*
A picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words. I'm thinking about a picture that actually rendered me speechless.
Recently I heard a familiar story from someone struggling to understand her dissociative disorder but unable to get any direct answers or explanations from her therapist, who is exercising caution because she doesn't want to reinforce the dissociation. While this is an understandable and common concern for clinicians treating Dissociative Identity Disorder, there is a vast difference between psychoeducation and fostering further fragmentation. When you refuse to fully invest in the former you leave your clients ripe for the latter. If for no other reason than that, Dissociative Identity Disorder treatment must include psychoeducation.
A verbal abuser defines you--he tells you who you are. And if you don't act like the person he says you are, then he abuses you into submission. A verbal abuser does not tire of turning you into someone less than yourself. A verbal abuser will abuse you long after you leave the relationship, if possible. A verbal abuser does not stop trying to make you who he thinks you should be.
Who does he think you should you be? A female version of him. Or rather, the female version of who he thinks he would be if he were a woman. And that is what I deal with today because a verbal abuser and I had children together.
My girlfriend is a mental illness learning how to stop war is a mental illness