Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

[Jimbo]

Hi,

I thought I'd start a thread on this as it's something that has come up recently for me, that I might be suffering from and there's very little about it on the forum elsewhere. Apparantly Anxiety/Panic Disorders, Depression, etc go hand in hand with this, so I guess there must be some others out there that have this too?

I had a PM from another person regarding my thread about the therapy I'm starting soon DBT (Dialectic Behavioral Therapy) which is used primarily to treat this. Not many people seem to know much about it, so I've been Googling... always a bad idea . It's quite a stigmatised, misunderstood and complicated condition so a bit scary.

I'm finding it a bit hard to accept that I might have this, but some of the symptoms I've read about seem to match up with me. At first my thoughts were "Nah, that can't be right" but the more I read about it, the more I think I could be. This is the MIND leaflet on it:
Understanding borderline personality disorder

I wonder if there are any other people that suffer from this that can shed any light on this condition?

Jim

[Under~The~Stars]

Hi Jim,

Well done for starting this thread

As you know I've already spoken to you about this. I too may have BPD, and it is really scary. I will be seeing my therapist again in under 2 weeks so am going to ask more about it then. I think if you do have it, and find out more about it - it may make you feel a bit better about it as information can help.

I totally agree that there is loads of stigma attached to this condition, which isn't fair.

Just hang in there, and well done for making positive steps. Let us know how you get on with the DBT.

Take care and speak soon

[Jimbo]

Looks like it's just you and me Louise

Ahh well, at least we are not totaly alone.

[Under~The~Stars]

Yeah Jim it looks like it

Oh well you're right - at least we're not totally alone

You hang in there - pm me anytime.

Take care

[xBettyBoopx]

Hi Jimbo and Louise

I haven't been diagnosed with BPD, but I have looked at the symptoms in the past and I think I have it too. I did an online test and it came out that I had it. I am agoraphobic and cannot get to my doctor but I will try and speak to her over the telephone (we have phone consults here), I only live about 500 yards from the drs but I can't get there.
Anywhoooooo....................hope you're both ok
Take care
Elspeth

[QueenVictoria]

i've thought that i have it, it's really weird.. lol

[Under~The~Stars]

Hey Elspeth, Vic, and Jim,

Elspeth - I'm sorry to hear that you can't get to the doctors because of your agoraphobia. You should phone them, I think that's a good idea - even if it's just for a chat about how you are feeling. They may even be able to do a home visit. If you do phone let us know how you get on! Feel free to pm me anytime too.

Vic - If you think you might have it hun, then go see the doc. Can't remember if you told me if you were getting counselling? Pm me if you want to chat hun.

Jim how are doing today?

[Jimbo]

I'm ok-ish today, had my GP apt earlier which went ok. No major panics or anything so far today. My meds are slowly being increased and played around with atm, so I have to start taking yet another tablet in the evenings now.

My DBT starts tomorrow and I'm very very anxious about it. So I'm just chilling out and listening to some relaxing music. (wanted to use that smiley for ages!)

I've kinda been preparing myself for tomorrow by writing down my whole life story on Word so I have it clear in my head lol. So when we go through that whole initial part of therapy where the "so tell me about your life" question comes, I can be ready. A lot of bad stuff happened to me and I want to be prepared for talking about that without cracking up.

I think I'm gonna post it all here if I'm feeling brave enough. It's gonna be an epic post tho, lol!

Stay cool
Jim

[Under~The~Stars]

Hi Jim,

Glad your GP appointment went ok.

I knew you were starting your DBT tomorrow - was going to post just one specific post saying good luck etc, but suppose I will just write it now lol.

Good Luck for tomorrow, and you will be fine. I know you will be nervous about it, but just keep telling yourself - it's yet another step forward, and they will probably just be explaining stuff to you, and asking you questions like you said. I think thats really good that you have written everything down about your life, as at least then you have it written down, and if it's too hard to say you can just show them the paper - thats what I always do lol It's better than missing things out, that you feel you can't talk about. But I'm sure once you get to know the therapist you will be able to talk about more. Just take it one step at a time.

It would be really brave of you to post it all here Jim, that is entirely up to you. I already have loads of respect for you, for mentioning BPD in the first place.

Onwards and upwards pal Starting the DBT is a step closer to where you want to be.

Take care - let us know how it goes!!

[Jimbo]

This is a mammoth post... my entire life story... but here goes.


Some of this stuff I've only talked about with my counsellors and psych's, so I can't believe I'm posting it on a public forum! I find it highly embarrassing for me to tell people, but maybe it will help some other people understand a bit.

I guess first you have to know a bit about my life and how I grew up to understand why I might have this condition.

My childhood was very traumatic and in hindsight I think this is what has caused my problems now. One of the main influences in my early life was my father. My dad had a severe mental illness with psychopathic tendencies :S (Classed then as a major personality disorder) This resulted in some very traumatising and horrid experiences in my early life. Physical and mental abuse, threats of me being killed and threats of my family being killed, all as forms of manipulation to satisfy himself. I witnessed a lot of physical violence towards my mum and she probably physically had a worse time than me. I have two younger sisters who although they didn't get any physical violence from him they had a lot of mental torture. He often used threats of killing us as ways of manipulating mum. He always used to say my middle sister (J) was his favourite and he didn't love the rest of us. He used to do some very crazy things like he'd often pretend that he didn't know who any of us were and would lock us out of the house. The list of crazy things that happened is enormous, I could probably go on for pages! I guess the main feature was that, I was a fairly naughty kid, nothing abnormal or different from any normal kid of my age I think. But whenever I did anything wrong, I would get a serious beating and a lot of real bad stuff happened to me, way out of proportion and totally wrong. At the time, I didn’t know any different so I thought this was normal. I was totally scared by my dad and used to stay out of his way as much as possible.

My mum obviously wanted to get away from him but was terrified of what he might do if she left. He had gone through years of seeing psychiatrists while all this went on, but never believed there was anything wrong with him. He apparently used to wind up the psychiatrists and most of them gave up on him. As an example of some of the stuff he did, one particular psych he hated the most, he actually found out where he lived and left the carcass of a dead pig on his doorstep! Some utterly crazy stuff went on. Eventually he ended up sectioned after an incident at work, he was a dentist and became convinced he had killed one of his patients while under anaesthetic (he hadn't) which sent him into a complete breakdown. While he was hospitalised, the psych's advised my mum that this was the best time for her to try to get away from him and she should issue divorce papers and they would try to help him deal with it.

The divorce case went on for 3 years and various crazy stuff went on like restraining orders after assaults on my mum, break ins to the house and various stuff to freak the hell out of us. He actually changed his name to something crazy like ‘Irey Hedoscova’ saying he was the reincarnation of a dead russian KGB agent or something, and the courts had to address him as that throughout the case. Crazy legal system we have eh! The police were virtually no help and there was nothing they could do in terms of him being declared mentally dangerous as his condition at the time was described as a Personality Disorder and that meant he was in control of his actions. They did nothing about the physical stuff as that was just seen as domestic violence which the police do nothing about virtually.

This all went on till about the age of 16 for me, until he eventually left us alone. I guess you could say my childhood was a very bad time in my life. We still occasionally get the odd crazy stuff happen like my sister receiving a 'with sympathy' card for her 18th birthday and a xmas card last year addressed to my 2 sisters but not to me. It affected us all pretty badly, my youngest sister was luckily too young to realise what was going on and has turned out pretty much ok. J has ended up with fairly serious OCD but pretty much has it under control now.

I kinda went off the rails a bit while the divorce went on, started getting into drugs and doing everything under the sun and more. I was a fairly intelligent guy and did well in my GCSE's but college went totally wrong and ended up coming out with awful grades cause I never went to any lectures. I didn't go to uni, which I probably should have. Ended up unemployed for ages, smoking an unbelievable amount of pot over the years, doing acid, pills, speed, basically anything I could throw down my throat.

Eventually friends moved away and my life moved on, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life (still don't) I ended up moving to Southampton and getting a job in the financial world. I hated it and never enjoyed my work life, eventually stopped all the drugs except for the occasional joint. Left one job because I found it too stressful but ended up in yet another job in finance that was probably worse.

All the time, I knew I wasn't right, I always felt like I was different from everyone else and that the person people saw on the outside was totally different to the me on the inside. People always say I come across as a very confident and self assured person, but inside I'm the total opposite. Very shy, withdrawn and always feel like if I allow people to get to know the real me inside and all the crazy stuff that happened to me, they would run a mile. I guess I have learned to ‘put on a brave face’ despite how I was felling inside. This has resulted in me never really being in any proper relationships, except for a few drunken one-night stands that I've totally regretted afterwards, I've never been in a proper relationship with someone who really understands me and I trust or love.

Things got worse over the years and I knew I was probably depressed and started to get scary thoughts of seriously hurting myself and ending it all. I kinda see my whole life as a complete disaster and that I've never achieved anything important, as though I took the wrong path and wasted it all away and the world wouldn’t miss me if I was gone. I was scared to tell anyone about this and rarely saw any doctors but certainly didn't talk to anyone about it. I just struggled on and just about coped with it. The occasional outlet of serious drinking binges and the occasional self harm, but nothing that caused any lasting scars or anything.

Then about 2 years ago or more, I think, the anxiety started, I've always been a very shy person and not been very outgoing, I have a few very good friends that know some of the stuff that went on in my life and I could semi-trust. But I'm not one of those people that has hundreds of friends that everyone is desperate to see. I started avoiding going out in social situations as I just felt out of place and uncomfortable the whole time, a bit like an outsider.

I started getting migraines, and when I had the first full on classic migraine, I went totally blind and that was the first full on panic attack I had. I thought I was having a stroke or brain tumour or something. I did go see a doc who just said yeah it's a migraine, nothing to worry about, just take paracetamol. But I didn't see the link between the headaches and panic, stress or depression in my life at the time.

In my most recent job, it's very stressful, I worked with millions of pounds of client's money and had a very high responsibility. I'm a total perfectionist and if I made a mistake no matter how small I would punish myself for months after and I just couldn't ever switch off from work. I would go home and spend the whole night not sleeping and worrying about what would happen the next day. This resulted in more migraines and panic attacks, but at the time I didn't realise that it was panic, I began to think I was going crazy. The pressure at work increased and I made more mistakes, which in turn made me worse. I got into some big arguments and kicked up massive stinks about stupid things and the way the company was run. This just added to my stress and depression. I began to have terrible sleeping problems, not sleeping for days at a time, which obviously caused my mental state to deteriorate. I started getting panicked about even going into work and had a lot of time off where I just made up excuses like I had a cold or was feeling sick and didn't go in.

All that kept building up and in hindsight I should have realised something would snap. Basically I had a week off cause of constant migraines and work forced me to go see my doc to get a sick note. He questioned about some of the reasons that I might be getting them and came across the stress thing, but I still didn’t talk about my depressive thoughts. He signed me off work for a week and asked me to come back again to have a better chat with him. I knew that all my work would be piling up waiting for me when I got back and It was then that everything came crashing down around me, I started to feel utterly suicidal, that I just couldn't cope with it any more and that I really would rather be dead than carry on living this terrible life I had created for myself. When I went back a week later I finally bit the bullet and confessed about how I was feeling and he asked a load of the typical depression questions which I answered yes to all of, and he said I was definitely depressed. I went away with a prescription for prozac…

That was when everything went totally haywire, I started on the prozac and ended up having a bad reaction to it. Rashes, sweating and in a state of constant panic 24/7. I didn't sleep in about 5 days, the whole time I was forcing myself to go to work. It was my birthday on the 11th July which was the full on worst birthday ever! The next day I was in work and just couldn't do anything, I had no concentration and I was in a total panic, I just sat at my desk staring at my screen all morning completely freaking out. I eventually, e-mailed my boss that I was having a panic attack and went home. Went back and saw another GP that afternoon who kinda said, yikes, the rashes and stuff probably mean you are allergic or having a bad reaction and stopped it straight away. It took about another week before the effects of it wore off.

I started trying to go back into work but I would either get on the bus and start freaking out and feeling paranoid that everyone knew or I wouldn't even get as far as the bus stop and turn back for home where I felt safe. Around then I started self harming more seriously, cutting a lot deeper and more regularly.

I haven't been back to work since and have been signed off since then. I started seeing a normal counsellor cause I didn’t have any clue what the heck was going on and why I was feeling like this. We went through all the stuff above about my childhood and I started to kinda see the link between what was happening now and all the stuff that happened then. I now sort of understand how all this had led up to what happened. A lot of the emotions I get now are similar to how I felt when I was a kid and I think the way I have learned to cope with stress in my life is not normal. But the whole counselling thing just made me worse. I spent the days constantly thinking about my past and feeling worse and worse. Eventually on an alcohol fuelled binge I took a load of sleeping tablets to just get away from it all. Nothing too bad happened, I didn’t go to hospital or anything, just ended up sleeping for about 24 hours and feeling like c**p for a few days afterwards but it scared the heck out of me and I told my GP, who I was seeing fairly regularly by that time. She at that point referred me to a psychiatrist and I started on Citalopram. He confirmed my GP’s diagnosis of Depression and also Panic Disorder, I got put on the waiting list for therapy, but it was long and would probably take months to get an apt.

My anxiety and panic just seemed to keep getting worse and worse and I’m a total agoraphobic now and panic whenever I am out of my house. Nothing much happened with the citalopram, just made my sleeping worse and my panic and anxiety slightly worse for a couple of weeks. They kept on increasing the dose up to 40mg but it just wasn’t doing anything in my opinion. So I switched to paroxetine, very similar happened with that, I worked up through the doses but it didn’t really help. So my psych decided I should switch to Venlafaxine recently. I thought I could just come off the paroxetine and would be fine the same as I did with the citalopram, but made a big mistake in reducing too quickly. I don’t think I’d realised that it was actually helping me with my depressive thinking and suicidal thoughts and it all returned big time within a week. I ended up taking a big overdose of sleeping tablets and ended up in hospital this time.

So here I am up till today! I’ve started the venlafaxine now and some of the depression seems to be easing I think, but the panic and anxiety is still there. I’m on a very low dose cause they have to increase it slowly, but I already have my doubts whether that will work either.



…well that’s my life story, not a great one really. But an epic post!





As for BPD, as mentioned earlier in this thread, the therapy I was referred to was called DBT (Dialectic Behavioural Therapy), after finding out what it was I quickly discovered it’s primarily for BPD. I freaked out when I heard the words ‘personality disorder’ obviously after what I knew about my dad. Saw my psych who said he thought I was showing some of the symptoms of it, which is why he’d referred me.


I'll go through the common symptoms and how I think they fit me, perhaps how he made his diagnosis.

Self harm and repeated attempts of suicide;
A scary and difficult one for me to talk about, it's quite a private and embarrassing thing for me to share with other people. I have self harmed for a lot of my life, I can't really remember when it started but it's only recently that it became more severe, causing permanent scars from cutting. I guess I started it started as a kid as a form of attention seeking, I always had this wish to be injured and I longed to end up with a broken arm or leg or something so I would get some love and care from other people. This resulted in a lot of over exaggeration of small injuries and a lot of trips to A&E for bumps and bruises and lots of completely clear x-rays. But now, it’s definitely not for attention seeking in my eye’s, I constantly hide my cuts and don’t tell a lot of people about it. I still don’t know why I do it, I guess it’s the only way I know to deal with some of the terrible emotions I feel and is an outlet for them. It kinda somehow makes me feel better in the short term after I have done it.

Frantic efforts to avoid being alone, due to an intense fear of being abandoned;
This does sort of fit me, although I don’t have many people left who can abandon me. They say people with BPD will often get aggressive about being left alone. I’m definitely not like that, I’m a very placid and non aggressive person. I do like a lot of time on my own, but knowing there are other people in the house (my housemates) makes me feel a lot more comfortable for some reason.

Relationship problems where you may see the person you love as absolutely wonderful, able to do no wrong one moment, and then wholly bad the next;
This doesn’t really fit me, probably because I haven’t really been in any long term relationships. I guess I did kind of did go through this a lot with my mum and ended up in some horrible arguments with her for no reason, saying some awful hurtful things, but I do really love her and realised afterwards I never really meant any of them.

A very uncertain, shaky self-image or sense of self;
I do feel a bit like I’m different from everyone else and I don’t really know who I am sometimes. Hard to explain to someone, but I guess this does kinda describe me.

Two or more areas of your life where your behaviour could cause you harm and be seen as impulsive. Examples would be: spending money extravagantly and having huge debts, having unprotected sex, abusing drugs or alcohol, driving without due care, or binge-eating;
I don’t really fit this, except for the drug abuse earlier in my life and the self harm mentioned above.

You may have moods that are very difficult to come out of. For example, you may go through long periods (usually lasting a few hours) of extreme irritability, restlessness, unhappiness or anxiety;
This describes me perfectly, my mood swings around all the time. One minute I can be freaking out and panicking, the next I can be totally down and depressed, then extremely bored and empty, then the next life doesn’t seem so bad.

Terrible feelings of emptiness;
All my life I’ve felt like this. Never really knowing who I am and what I want to do with my life.

Anger that's inappropriate, intense or difficult to control. You may lose your temper a great deal, experience constant anger or be involved in physical fights. You may feel particularly angry when you think you're being criticised;
This is not really me. I did used to get very defensive about being criticised at work and it came up a few times in my reviews. I don’t think this is a major problem for me, anger is not something I have a problem with, I’m never lose my temper and am a very restrained and chilled out guy usually.

Periods of paranoia or feeling unreal when under stress. This might be accompanied by an almost complete lack of physical sensation. At difficult times, you may experience yourself as having more than one personality or feel you are in a trance-like state;
I do get very paranoid during panic attacks, especially that people know I’m panicking or anxious and feel that they are all looking at me. I do kind of feel numb a lot of the time and find myself going off into a trance where I just worry about everything and anything constantly. I do kinda feel like there is the me that I let people see on the outside and the scared and frightened me on the inside that people don't know about, not exactly two personalities tho.


Relationships come up a lot in the descriptions of BPD. The whole relationships side I don’t really have a lot of experience with as I’ve never really been in one, but I can see I could potentially end up in some sort of damaging relationship and be very upset and hurt if it ended. Probably why I'm not in one.

Well, that’s me… If you made it this far you deserve a gold star! Thanks for reading!!!

Jim