Thinking About Your Illness Can Drive You Crazy

My therapist told me that BPD, like alcoholism, is something I'll probably have to live with for the rest of my life. Not too long ago, he asked me whether or not I had "embraced" my diagnosis.

"Of course," I told him. "And I hate this illness. I hate the things I have done to my loved ones. I hate having had to live with it for 42 years, not knowing what it was. I am determined to fight this monster tooth and nail. I'll kill it, even if it kills me."

My therapist is a tall middle aged man. He has a habit of wearing his reading glasses tilted up, on his forehead, like the visor on a medieval helmet.

He gave me a long, piercing look, then said, "That's not embracing your diagnosis. You can't fight your illness. You have to learn to live with it, or it will always control you."

Just three days ago, I'd spent a few days on the psych ward. An argument over a very trivial matter had sent me into a BP flare that drove me to the brink of suicide. It wasn't even what the argument had been about that had triggered the flare. Truth to tell, I had been nursing the borderline flare for a good week.

Learning that there was a medical term to what I had believed to be a character flaw was an important revelation. So I was determined to catch up on 42 years of misspent living as quickly as possible. I read Robert O Freidel's book on BPD, Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified, in a matter of days. I joined four or five online support groups, scoured the
web for every credible source on my illness, developed my own theories.

And I resolved to heal as quickly as possible. I made a list of people whom I hurt in the past. I wrote interferences, statements that explained how my behaviors interfered with the lives of others. I began sharing them with these people. Eventually I hit that proverbial brick wall.

People who live with borderline personality disorder have a very weak sense of self. That means we define ourselves by what we see in our environment: people we admire, books or movies we enjoy, and so forth. And focusing on fighting my illness only made me more ill.

Mental illness is not like a tumor that can be cut out, or a broken bone that can be set. It is not all of who we are, but it is part of it, more like a misshapen foot or an arthritic hand. Cutting it out only cripples us all the worse. We have to learn to live with it, utilize the treatments that are available. We have to learn from what works and what doesn't work.

Most importantly, we need to learn to treat ourselves with honesty and with kindness.

We also need to learn to give ourselves a break when we need it.