Sometimes, the smallest things in life can cause the greatest pain and physical reaction.  A bee’s sting is almost invisible to the naked eye and yet can easily kill someone when they have an allergic reaction.  A mere critical stinging comment can just as easily send a person suffering Borderline Personality Disorder into “emotional anaphylactic shock.”

When a person has a life-threatening reaction to the poison from a bee sting, an ambulance is called and the person is taken to hospital where they receive treatment for their illness as well as respect and dignity but when someone suffering an emotional reaction to life circumstances presents at emergency, they are sometimes treated with rejection, intolerance and disdain.  People can die from a bee sting and Borderlines can “die” from their own personal rage and self-hatred.  If you present at emergency with a swollen face and throat unable to breathe with all your body organs shutting down, is some doctor or nurse going to say, “OMG, it’s a tiny bee sting, how bad can that be, look at you, get over yourself,” like they sometimes do when Borderlines present at hospital with similar symptoms.

Yet both types of people are in much pain and danger. 

There’s nothing like a good wallow in the confluence of the sticky mud and muck of our past history and current circumstances.  It’s familiar territory for me whenever personal emotional disaster strikes and I dive head-first and bury myself in the warm, dark underbelly of self-hatred, self-sabotage and sometimes self-destruction.  I slither and slide, turning cartwheels and backflips until I am so immersed in the experience there is almost nothing that can draw me back up to the surface again.

At this point I need instant validation of my pain and suffering.  I think we all do.  The reason for the suffering, whether self-inflicted or inflicted by others is immaterial.  For me to be told my suffering is valid and reasonable gives me the invigorating courage to draw myself up out of the murky depths to my full height and start to soldier on.  When someone witnesses my story of pain, abandonment and rejection, the underworld does not feel as enticing as it did beforehand and I start to reflect from an observing ego level or a perspective of emotional distance, that this is old familiar stuff.  I’ve been here before and I’ve let go and moved on many times.  In fact I’ve even managed to transcend the situation several times before descending back into chaos again when life goes pear-shaped.

Reflection, meditation and sometimes just mere background pondering leads me to being able to rise above the situation and see it for what it is; something that happened in the past when significant others let me down.  Nothing on earth, not even Superman can turn back the world and change what happened back in 1975.  I have to live with that history, incorporate and integrate it permanently into my being.  I am not the sum total of what happened to me.  No-one is ever that.  What happened is a mere small part of who I am.  It does not reflect my strengths or my achievements.  It does not define who I am.  It does not make me a victim.  It is simply a minor part of my lived experience.

My therapist …

Six years ago I was officially diagnosed by a psychiatrist in a psychiatric hospital as having…drum roll please…BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER.  He said it to me in the same way he would announce he had a plague of rats infest his kitchen, discovered I had a sexually transmitted disease or that he had just found out I supported Tea Party candidate Sarah Palin.  It was delivered with revulsion, disgust and contempt.

Today I proudly come out of the BPD closet and out myself as having one of the most reviled and hated personality disorders ever constructed by the most esteemed and eminent fundamentalist gentlemen writers of the Psychiatric Bible the DSM – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

After fifteen years in therapy I have many magic moments to remember as well some truly excruciatingly embarrassing ones.  There were times I thought I might have to move to a foreign country in order to escape the sheer mortification of it all.

Here are my top five awkward moments in therapy.

1.  Treading on your Therapist’s Toes – Literally.

Back on July 12th 2006, we had a particularly poignant therapy session and we got up to give each other a hug.  As I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her, I stepped on her foot then almost dislocated my ankle lifting it off so that we could continue the hug.  I left her office hoping against hope that she had not noticed her toes being crushed and mangled into the carpet.  There was no obvious limp as she walked me to the door though.  Although we are both around the same height I weigh considerably more than she does – and I was wearing heavy black boots at the time.  I still blush when I think about it.

When I am in my therapist’s office, there is a definite time warp happening where fifty minutes can feel like fifty seconds.   If you want to slow down this process, just do some exercise with them.  Especially if you loathe physical jerks and find that the time just drags on when you are walking, jogging, bike-riding, playing tennis, doing push-ups or going for the burn at aerobics.

This is where that most peculiar and oppositional phenomena known as therapy time-warp, the parallel universe of the perceptual fourth dimension of time and space between the rapture of therapy and the abomination of exercise, tend to even themselves out and you are finally able to experience what real time feels like in therapy.

When two people get thoroughly engaged in a conversation and it flows to the extent you can feel and see the sparks flying across in the space between them, time is lost forever in the moment.  If the conversation drags or is awkward and there is not enough connection, each second can drag like a two year old in the chocolate aisle at the supermarket.

Eight years ago, after many months of frantic searching, I finally found a photo of my therapist with her family on the internet.  I cut her face out and stuck it on her business card and carried it in my handbag.  Every so often, when I was feeling insecurely dependent, I would take it out and look at it until it became rather worn around the edges.  It was a great source of comfort to me and kept me connected with her through some very dark times.  She never knew about this.

Perhaps it would be a good idea, especially for therapists who conduct Dialectical Behaviour Therapy to have a business card with a photo – a professional one not a personal family photo.  This way clients do not have to ask, beg or grovel and debase themselves asking for a photo from their beloved but reluctant therapist, nor spend hours furtively searching on the internet for an illicit image of someone they are perhaps pathologically attached to.  When you have a legitimate source of something private the guilt and shame of dependency, something which regressed clients seem to feel a lot of, can disappear or at least lessen in intensity.

Death of a spouse, divorce, moving house and losing a job are four of some of the major most stressful incidents that could happen to you.  I’d like to add a fifth one; and that’s making the decision, or having the decision made for you, to leave your long-term therapist.

I don’t need my therapist anymore for therapy – or survival.  I am able to look after myself and be my own therapist.  I can survive in the big, wide world with all the tools and devices I have learned over the years, yet to move on from my therapist would leave a huge hole in my heart.

The more child-like and dependent I was the more I needed her to stay alive, but the more I grew up and matured in therapy the more I relied on myself and less on her.  It’s not about the therapy itself.  That is the giddy part, growing up and away and moving on.  One can only move on in therapy as one gets stronger and eventually that dependence is replaced with independence.  And as one gets stronger one naturally starts to separate, first at an unconscious level and then one becomes aware that the nature of your feelings are changing.

Letting go of the fantasy of a post-therapy relationship with your beloved therapist means you are ready to move on from the transference.  When your mind starts to shift from an enmeshed relationship with another to a singular meaningful relationship with yourself where the focus is now “me” and not “we” it signals a profound shift in cognitive thinking.

There is much self-examination and reflection and untold pain that comes with this.  Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living and I have explored every possible nook and cranny of my inner life.  Letting go of someone you love is the hardest part and this creates a vacuum which needs to be filled with something that is just as meaningful.  Never take a crippled person’s crutch away from them unless you have a replacement that is equally as effective.  But before you do that, you need to reach into all corners of transference options and the therapist who is willing to explore every aspect of your attachment to him/her and their own considerable counter-transference issues and/or attachment to you is doing themselves and their client a huge favour. 

My therapist, who is a great fan of the Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan, has a dog that she loves very much but when he misbehaves or breaks a boundary he is firmly disciplined and because of this he is now a well-behaved dog.  She is pretty much the same with clients who break important boundaries as well – as I found out recently.

I broke a boundary when I asked her an intrusive question.  Seeing as I am about to embark on a career as a peer support worker, my personal boundary issues have to be exemplary so she thought she would, not unkindly, teach me a lesson; an experiential one and a message I am unlikely to forget.

I was in session last week with my emotionally and socially intelligent therapist learning important role-modelling and personal negotiation skills when my mobile phone started to ring.  I swore loudly, threw my arms in the air, jumped up, and raced out the door and into the courtyard.  I was expecting a phone call to tell me whether or not I had a much-wanted part-time job.

Only for me it wasn’t someone giving me potential employment – it was a life or death experience.  If I got the job I would be ecstatic and if I didn’t get the job I was going to throw myself under a train.  One would make me feel very important and the other would annihilate me.  If I didn’t get the job, I would just keep walking to my car, without explanation because the alternative was to tell my beloved therapist I had failed – yet again.   I just could not face that.  Ever.

Not that I overreact or anything.