Diagnosis: Borderline Personality Disorder

Published on January 17th, 2016

December of 2014 was when I got the official diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. However, the first time it ever got hinted at was during my first psychiatric hospitalization when I was 15. As I was leaving the hospital, they listed my diagnosis and put that I had traits of. Technically BPD can't be officially diagnosed until someone is 18 years old so until then they label you with traits.
There are 9 characteristics of Borderline Personality Disorder:
1) Fear of abandonment
2) Unstable or changing relationships
3) Unstable self-image; struggles with identity or sense of self
4) Impulsive or self-damaging behaviors (e.g., excessive spending, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating).
5) Suicidal behavior or self-injury
6) Varied or random mood swings
7) Constant feelings of worthlessness or sadness
8) Problems with anger, including frequent loss of temper or physical fights
9) Stress-related paranoia or loss of contact with reality

These manifest in my life in the following ways:
1) Fear of abandonment. This means that I cling to relationships almost to an extreme. If I feel like someone is pulling away, I will cut off or at least try to cut off the relationship. Better me cut off the relationship than someone else cut it off. This comes from a need of control and the fear of being hurt. This leads to the next one.
2) Unstable or changing relationships. With the fear of the abandonment looming, I will go from quickly valuing someone very highly to not liking them at all. I will also bounce between the two. People in my mind are either all good or all bad. There are certain people in my life who I view in two lights and the light I view them in depends on the situation. This means that I rarely keep friends for very long or if I do relationships are rocky.
3) Unstable self-image; struggles with identity or sense of self. This has two components to it. The first one is an unstable self-image. This can include intense self-loathing and hate. The other component is a struggle with identity or sense of self. This means I have a wide variety of interests and it is difficult for me to make long term plans because my interests change so frequently. When I started college, I was a music education major. Now I'm an early childhood education major. I've also considered going into psychology or math education. With my current major of early childhood education, I have multiple options that I can take. I can either go into elementary school teaching or become a director of a daycare. One day I will know what I want to do, the next day I will want to do something completely different.
4) Impulsive or self-damaging behavior. This is one I really don't struggle with as much. Most of my impulsiveness is related to the next symptom.
5) Suicidal behavior or self-injury. I started cutting when I was 15. Since I started I have gone through periods of time where I haven't self harmed for multiple months and periods of time where I self harmed every day, sometimes even more than once a day. The severity of it has also changed throughout time. In addition to that, suicidal behavior includes suicidal thoughts and attempts. I am chronically suicidal and suicidal thoughts are on my mind constantly and there really isn't anything I can do about them being there. I have attempted suicide 5 times, two of which have landed me in the hospital and ICU for several days to make sure I was medically okay before being sent to a psychiatric hospital. I have been hospitalized for suicidal thoughts or attempts a total of 16 times since I was 15. 12 of those came in a span of under a year. This is something I really struggle with.
6) Varied or random mood swings. This is so me. I will wake up feeling pretty good and feel like I want to die by the end of the day. I will go from feeling totally fine to feeling horrible in a split second for no apparent reason. This makes life difficult to manage and can lead to me self-harming or isolating or other destructive behavior.
7) Constant feelings of worthlessness and sadness. This is something that I struggle with. It seems like every wrong thing in my life backs up my feelings of worthlessness. This leads to suicidal thinking because I feel that the world would be better off without me. Every relationship problem just backs up my feelings of worthlessness and that no one could or would ever really love or even like me for being me.
8) Problems with anger. I really don't struggle with this one. I tend to stuff my anger down and not deal with or if I do deal with it, I usually hurt myself instead of someone else.
9) Stress related paranoia or loss of contact with reality. This is very true. If I am stressed, I think people are talking bad about me behind my back and plotting against me. I also can dissociate which means that I run on auto pilot and am not totally focused on what I'm doing. Think driving somewhere and all of a sudden you don't remember driving a certain stretch of road.

Of all the symptoms of BPD I have 7 of the 9. Many symptoms are related to one another and cause life to be extremely difficult. One person described someone with BPD as someone with no emotional skin on and so they are over sensitive to everything around them which makes it harder to control their emotions. This is the heart of BPD. There are so many aspects of BPD but these are the main ones. In my next post, I will go over other disorders and treatments.