Over the years, I’ve been fired, resigned or walked out (before I was pushed) on more jobs than there are symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder.  I never understood why this was happening to me and I always thought it was the company’s fault, the other employees fault or that the Universe hated me.

There was always a honeymoon period where I fitted in for a couple of months, then came unstuck when the first small drama occurred.  This was always followed by a huge behavioural reaction from me.  I had not learned how to accept the vagaries of how companies operated, the diverse range of personalities concerned and my own borderline reaction to real or perceived workplace situations.  I reacted before I reasoned.

At what point in therapy should an experienced therapist tell a long-term client with a Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis, in an unsolicited manner, that they love them?

This is what my therapist said at the last session I had with her.  I do love you.

It was a major catalyst, amongst other things, for my decision to leave therapy back in April.  Our email relationship limped along for few months until I finally pulled the pin.  That occurred this morning.

The overwhelming sense of freedom, relief and empowerment is tinged with much sadness, grief, loss and longing.  I loved her dearly and she said she loved me, but only in the context of a therapy client within her four walls.  It was not a marriage proposal and we are not going to walk off into the sunset and live happily ever after in a house with a white picket fence.

I can live with that.  Finally.

It occurred to me the other day that I had not thought about myself in terms of excessive guilt, shame and disgust for many months.  This coincided around about the time I started my new job working with self-actualised people in the mental health field and making long overdue decisions about what sort of people I surrounded myself with in my private life.

I never seemed to have the discriminatory powers to know who was good for me, who was not good for me and who was perfectly evil in my life.  I also put strict boundaries around certain family members.  There are people in my life determined to make me feel shame and guilt because that is what they do best. 

Emailing and texting your therapist can be (for some) more addictive than cigarettes, alcohol and drugs.  The reward neurotransmitter dopamine floods your brain and motivates you to do more of the same. This is the same neurotransmitter secreted when you snort cocaine.  Even a simple email exchange can do this for some.  It’s not what drug you take, it’s the effect that drug has on your brain.

Until recently I had full email privileges with my therapist which led to gross feelings of narcissistic entitlement.  I haven’t seen her in therapy since April and I still expected her to be available electronically 24/7.  I would get upset when she didn’t reply within 12 hours.  If she did not reply immediately, I would get rude and hostile and she would apologize.

This relationship was not healthy for either of us.  We were merged and sometimes not in a healthy, nurturing, supportive, way.  Partly because of her availability, I would lurch from one crisis to another expecting her to resolve my life with a few words on an electronic form of communication.  Eventually she emailed that this had to stop and that I could email her, not every day, but every once in a while, and not to expect an immediate reply because quite frankly she was feeling overwhelmed.  She also said I was welcome to come back to therapy any time I wanted to.

I was recently at a social function and eagerly went up to this woman I work with, touched her shoulder and said, “Hi, how are you?”  She stared at me, looked very uncomfortable and frantically searched around for either someone more interesting to talk to or someone to rescue her from me.

This is a woman I have found curt, abrupt, dismissive, snappy and abrasive in the past.  I have never had an interaction with her where I have left feeling as though a warm breeze has blown through me, but rather a cold, icy wind that has left my whole being feeling fractured and discombobulated.

I knew this and yet I still went up to talk to her because, as a chronic masochistic people-pleaser, I unfailingly seek approval and acceptance from totally wrong and inappropriate graceless women.  I cannot bear the pain of rejection and abandonment from anyone even though I did not like her and essentially had split her into the “bad” part of the good and bad.  I always had an intense negative emotional reaction to her, felt deflated, empty and questioned who I thought was, and after an interaction with her I wanted to throw myself off a cliff. 

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.

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.

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.