Some days just suck

Today was not a good day. The prelude to today really started on Friday when I went to pick up my 10 year old (G) from afterschool care. G is prone to accidents as she is hyper-mobile, has low tone and has a problem with proprioception. She had apparently fallen from a tree on to her outstretched wrist, and there was some debate as to whether it was broken. I was supposed to be taking her to her swimming lesson, and after a long week seconded in a different office, I couldn’t handle the change in plans so decided to just take her to swimming and deal with the problem there.

Driving to swimming, about 5 minutes down the road, there was a bang. The lights all flashed up on the dashboard and the power steering went out. I thought I must have run over a piece of plastic or something but checked the rear vision mirror and there was nothing. I managed to steer the car to the side of the road and called the AA roadside service, who ordered a tow truck for me.

Meanwhile G’s wrist looks to be just sprained (again), so that’s something I guess.

Fast forward to this morning, and I wake up with period pain and a sore back and jaw. I’m already not feeling great, then I get a call from my mechanic at 7.30am. He had looked at the car over the weekend for me and it wasn’t great news. Whoever did the cam belt last put a washer back in the wrong place, it had stripped the belt and the belt had snapped, causing massive engine damage. He said the car would need a new motor, water pump, valves, cam belt etc. He said he’d see if he could find a second hand engine and give me a quote.

This put me in a tail spin as I knew it was going to be expensive and I don’t have anything in reserve. Last year was one of those years I’m still recovering from. My other car had needed expensive repairs, then I set up my business and there were quite a few bills for that. Then I had a disaster with one of my contracts and ended up doing about 60 hours of work I didn’t get paid for. I took a massive pay cut when I took the job I started in October – long story, but basically there is potential for growth in the role so I took the cut in the hopes increased role & responsibility would gradually lead to increased salary. Then I had an accident and the costs associated with that, and have been on ACC at 80% of my massively reduced wages. Oh and I spent what savings I had left in topping up the trade in when I brought this current vehicle. So I have no capacity to pay for repairs or buy a new vehicle. And I currently have a leaking caravan as well, which is a whole other story.

I spent the day feeling teary and trying not to cry. My back is still sore and I’m still seconded to another office so I was feeling out of sorts. Then my mechanic rang and said he’d managed to source a second hand engine, though there was only one in the country (mine is a V6 and my car is 16 years old so not as many of them around). However the bad news was that the car was going to cost approximately $4,600 to fix. I had to take lots of deep breaths when he said that. I can’t find that kind of money and my financial situation is such that I already have 2 credit cards (1 is maxed out) and a small personal loan. And nothing to secure any loan against anyway. And I’m still on ACC so have limited earning capacity.

I then spent quite a bit more time at the office trying not to howl with what seems like the unfairness of it all. My brain automatically goes straight for “the universe is against me” and I feel that urge to self harm. When that comes up I try not to push it away. I try to tell myself its understandable I’d feel like hurting myself to get some relief, that the situation looks bad and of course my brain is going to offer it’s old habit to create some solace from that pain. So I can feel the endorphins and not the pain, so I can distract myself from the terrible thoughts going around in my head. Thoughts like “I never make good decisions” and “I deserve this” and “what’s the point, everything turns out shit”.

I am noticing my feelings and how they are effecting me physically, and trying to surf the wave of pain. While simultaneously trying not to cry in an open plan office full of about 20 other people. This is not easy. I felt very alone.

So later I pick G up from afterschool care, and she tells me she has found a bug in her hair. This is not good as she has been complaining of having an itchy head and I have been checking her every second day for nits (head lice). Sure enough, I look and she is crawling with lice. So then I have to come home and strip both beds (she’d been in mine over the weekend), wash all the towels and sheets etc, and then treat us both for head lice. Turns out she’d shared the love with me so I had them too, though mine were only tiny. 3 hours later I’d done 3 loads of washing, two lots of treatment shampoo (me and her), nit combing, blow dried and straightened both our hair. Not a great end to a shit day.

I still want to hurt myself, but tonight reflecting I can recognise the improvement in my self harming urges. Some of them are not as strong, and some are not as ceaseless or long as they once were. I am able to use other things to keep myself from fulfilling the urge. I wouldn’t trust myself to pick up a craft knife tonight (I have them around for sharpening pastel pencils) but I won’t seek one out, and although I am thinking about razor blades I have no motivation to go and find some pliers to pull apart my razor. I am trying to chose to focus on the progress I’ve made, and the difference between where I would be if this happened 2 years ago vs it happening now. It’s not easy and it feels tenuous and fragile in the face of so much turmoil, but it’s so much better than it once was.

When I feel like the urge to self harm is starting to over power me I try to think of my daughter and use the love I feel for her as my anchor. I don’t want to self harm partly because I don’t want my daughter to see that I have cut myself. She is so much more aware now, and she knows that’s where my scars have come from. I want her to feel secure and teach her to deal with her emotions in a much healthier way than I do. Part of teaching her that is to model the behavior for her. I may not be able to muster desire to improve for myself, but I want to try to for her. She is my reason.

Here’s hoping tomorrow is a better day.

Ka Kite

Searching for Meaning

I have been off work for 3 months following an accident in early December where I fractured my spine, sprained my ankle and knee, and ended up with a severe hematoma from my lower back to my upper thigh. While I’ve been off work I’ve listened to a lot of pod casts on all sorts of topics, as especially initially it was one of the only things I could do while lying down that didn’t cause me discomfort. This has led to a lot of thinking and reflecting on my life and who I am, and what I want from being here. I feel like I am searching for something but I don’t know what it is which makes it very hard to find! It’s like there’s something floating around in the ether, just out of my view but every time I try to focus on it, it slips away.

One of the topics I have approached from many directions is the idea of meaning, and that if you focus on the meaning in life you are more likely to be happy. Happiness is a seductive concept for someone who spends a lot of time depressed so of course the idea that finding meaning can help you feel happier holds a lot of hope for me.

So what is meaning? To me, finding meaning is about finding purpose. Why am I here? What should I do with my life? Is there a point to anything I do? My brain, especially in depressed/low mood state often answers this question with ‘no’. That there is no point as my life is fleeting in the grand sweep of humanity, and within 4 generations (if I’m lucky, 2 or 3 if I’m not!) I will be all but forgotten. Mexican people believe that there are “three deaths” – the first when you physically die, the second when you are laid to rest, and the third when you are forgotten. If all of life is a march toward certain death, then what should that journey be filled with?

I have always been fascinated with the various religions and cultural beliefs surrounding death, and with death itself. I know I am not alone in this, my quick google search on just the word death brought up more than 3.3 billion results! There is much written on the fear of death, and the glory of death, but I am more interested in how to be comfortable with the knowledge life is fleeting and that this doesn’t mean there is no point to being happy.

When I write this it seems obvious that we should live to be happy if life is fleeting. Which is what I understand the central tenant of hedonism to be – that if life is a flash in the pan of humanity then it should be lived to maximise pleasure and minimise pain. That self gratification is the only sensible purpose of a life that may be cut short at any minute. A ‘you only live once’ philosophy. So I explored the concept that I could live focusing on what would give me the most pleasure, only to ‘run in to’ my ethics and values, which were dictating to me that I could only be happy if I was not hurting anyone else (or at least minimising that pain) while pursuing my own ends.

So then I explored what it might look like to live your life devoted to a cause you believed passionately in. There are many examples of people like this, from ancient times forward. These people fascinate me and I admire a great many of them. What I found though is that you can be passionate about a cause and dedicate your life to it, and cause other people great pain at the same time. Some times people are so focused on achieving whatever it is they believe to be the greatest good that they are prepared to sacrifice a great deal to achieve their goal/s. Great dictators spring to mind here.

I read, listened and explored all sorts of events and ideologies from here. From the Crusades, to struggles for independence in various countries, socialism and communism, facism, the French and Russian revolutions, terrorism, the stolen generation, various wars, Vikings, the Underground Railroad, NZ history, Chinese dynasties, stories of shipwreck and tragedy and exploration….you get the idea. Anything I could get my hands on about the history of the world and it’s people I read and listened to.

And I learned that life is a paradox. There is not one truth. All sorts of contradictory and utterly illogical points of view can exist at the same time, and be at least partly right from various perspectives. People view the same event from different angles, using their unique perspective to decide what is acceptable and not, to them. An individual’s perspective is influenced by biology and genetics and life experiences, but also culture, world events, religion, the pervading ideas and government of the time. Their genetics may cause them to be more or less interested, or more or less involved in events of their time, but sometimes there is just accident or coincidence, or being in the right (or wrong) place at the time when something impactful is happening.

So all this brings me back to me. What is my purpose? What do I believe in? For, as many revolutionaries as there are out there, there are just as many people like me struggling to make sense of it all.

I remembered listening to the hedonism podcast and the research I had done, months ago, on that ideology. For some reason it had stuck in my mind and of all the concepts and things I have learnt, that one continues to fascinate me. I’d also heard about a short, non controlled, study done where researchers gave participants a camera to record 10-12 photos over the space of a week of the things that gave their life meaning. And from that they discovered that where people were physically involved in the things that gave their life meaning (by taking pictures, as opposed to talking about them), there was a discernible increase in happiness levels. The reason this study interests me, and why I have related it to the theory of hedonism, is that when I think about the things that give my life meaning, these are also the things that bring me pleasure.

At this stage I need to do more research on the items that bring my life meaning, as I’ve only been able to come up with a couple. I feel stuck on this issue, so I’m going to go back and do some more research all the different types of Hedonism (and surprisingly there are at least 7 types), and the related philosophies, to see if I can figure out meaning and it’s relation to me.

And I wonder – this is a passing thought at this stage – whether my attraction to the concept of Hedonism is due to my tendency to think in dichotomy, and push away any pain I feel as ‘bad’ using self harming behaviors……

Life admin, abandonment and loneliness

I’ve had some really up and down days recently. When you live with Borderline Personality Disorder life is very much like a rollercoaster at the best of times, but recently those lows have been very low. I’ve had days where the blackness has rolled in and I feel severely depressed and suicidal.

I have been pondering on my triggers and there’s been a number of things going on for me. One is that I feel overwhelmed by life and all the admin and appointments that never seem to end. The weekly grind of washing and cooking, dishes and supermarket shopping, housework and garden maintenance. I very quickly get overloaded. I lack the executive function to keep my house tidy or remember where I’ve put anything as I get distracted very easily, but a messy house also really stresses me out. Losing and forgetting stuff constantly is also really stressful. There are days when I don’t want to come home because the house is messy and I can’t seem to tidy it up. I can spend several hours “tidying” but still not have a clean and tidy house at the end as I tend to deviate off task and get really distracted. And the more I have going on in my head the less likely I am to be able to cope with the basic day-to-day and week-to-week tasks. This end of the year also seems to fill up quickly with my daughter’s school stuff, end of year events and birthdays so remembering our schedules and fitting everything in adds more pressure. And yes, I have a calendar with colour coded schedule, plus a note book of reminders, I make lists, I set alarms and reminders on my phone etc. Even with all this ‘help’ to remember things I still feel overwhelmed and anxious about having too much stuff on my plate.

One of the other things bothering me at the moment is that my nurse case manager left. I tend to get very attached to people and I have a really hard time letting go. This one hurts a bit as I thought she understood that so might have given me an opportunity for a bit more closure. She’s been my case manager for about 3 years and we’d had a really good appointment last time I saw her in September. She said she’d ring me in about a week or so as she was going to be away for a few days. And I didn’t hear from her and I kept thinking I’d ring but then thinking she might be busy and she said she’d ring so surely she was going to… At the beginning of November I rang her because I was having a really bad couple of days and wanted to arrange an appointment and she told me she’d resigned. I mentioned it to my psychologist and apparently he’d asked her to tell me but she’d forgotten and that was her last day so she’s gone. And I feel disappointed and upset. My head knows I was just another case to her and she told me herself straight up when I first met her that it was not her job to be my friend. I had just thought she might say goodbye in person and I feel abandoned. Not great for a person with BPD who struggles with feelings of abandonment most of the time anyway.

My psychologist and I were talking a bit about what I expected from a case manager and discussing options going forward. I mentioned that when I ring them I expect empathy and validation, not necessarily a solution to my problems. Having been through a modified version of DBT I have strategies in place which mean I get through most days mostly ok by myself. But every so often (once a month or so) I have a really really dark time and I need some extra help and that’s when I call. Often I get suggestions aimed more at what I’d imagine would help a depressed person, but not necessarily helpful in my situation. My psychologist asked me if I would ring more often if I did get the empathy and validation that I want. I told him that I wouldn’t for several reasons, one being that I absolutely hate asking for help, and another being that I hate using the phone lol. But also that I tend not to ask people for help (not just the services but friends and family as well) as I am conscious of not putting too much burden on any one person.

I have been thinking about that question this week and whether he is right, would I reach out for help more often if that help was more likely to meet my expectations in that moment? Then I came across this post on The Mighty today and this bit sums up what I said to my psychologist last week

“but I also know loving someone with borderline personality disorder can be overwhelming – to say the least. It’s one thing to have a meltdown every couple of months, but it’s entirely different to live with a disorder as unpredictable and intense as BPD. To avoid “burdening” those around me, I tend to bottle these feelings, fearful of “overreacting” or pushing people away. I know most people won’t really understand, and I don’t want to bother my friends with my third crying spell this week.”

The Loneliness of Living with Borderline Personality Disorder

To me, that perfectly sums up why I try and keep my issues to myself on all but my very worst days. Because no matter how empathetic and understanding someone is, supporting a person with BPD is no picnic and I don’t want to wear people down or make them resent me. My psychologist is the “last man standing” so to speak of my team of professionals – my case manager having left and my psychiatrist resigned earlier this year (I’ve had locums the last two times) and I am conscious of not making myself too dependent on his help. I worry that he’ll leave like they did, or that he’ll get sick of me.

Constantly having to decide how much of yourself to reveal to others is very tiring. During every interaction with other people I filter what I say, and I try and make sure I don’t come across as needy or dramatic or pessimistic or “spiky”/angry/difficult – all of which I have been told I am by others before. Then there is conversations where I could contribute something but it might reveal more about my mental state and how will that come across and will it make the other person uncomfortable. And then there is trying to sort out whether am I talking too much or being too opinionated? And understanding what other people are saying, in words and body language, which is sometimes just as difficult. Not to mention actually hearing people as filtering out background noise is hard for me and sometimes the I don’t hear all the words or my brain doesn’t get the message fast enough.

I isolate myself, especially when I am depressed, which is not something I do on purpose. I enjoy being on my own, but its also a relief not to have to constantly monitor myself. Communication is such a bit part of life as a human but also a massive source of stress for me as well. Sometimes it is easier to be alone, even if I am lonely.

Waving in the dark

Kia Kaha

Family and BPD

My Mum, Dad and sister are doing a course at the moment called Family Connections which is for family of people with BPD. They learn about BPD and they get skills training and support. Dealing with someone like me who has a mental illness is tough and I admire them for being there for me, providing me with support and going along to get further educated, and get some support for themselves.

My family have seen me at my worst. They’ve had to scrape me up off the floor when I am drunk and covered in blood. They have been called the the ER after I’ve self harmed, tried to commit suicide, and taken an overdose. They have visited me when I’ve been in the psych unit. I have called them in tears telling them I am about to harm myself. I’ve turned up on the doorstep so emotional I can’t speak except to cry. They’ve held me as I’ve rocked, and sometimes been beside me as I’ve attempted to communicate with psychiatrists, nurses and the crisis team. They’ve looked after my daughter when I’ve needed help, cleaned my house, done my lawns and helped me get things back on track when I’ve fallen apart. They come over with dinner every Monday night to help me out.

Families get a raw deal. Mental health professionals often put the burden of care back on to families, without giving them any support or explaining the system to them. Families are sometimes limited in the amount of knowledge they are given due to privacy reasons, and they are expected to care for very unwell and sometimes suicidal people. Some of the things they have seen would probably cause PTSD in healthy people. They often exist under chronic levels of stress when the person they love has a mental illness, and I imagine often feel very helpless as well.

BPD itself is a disorder that causes chronic relationship problems. I can be extremely difficult, illogical, irrational, overly emotional and unstable at times. I know my disorder better than most people (I’ve done lots of research), and I still don’t know or understand where it stops and I begin. On top of that I have dysthymia (chronic depression) which means I am basically depressed to a greater or lesser degree all the time. Trying to communicate with me can be like walking on egg shells at the best of times, and I could explode with all of the best intentions from everyone.

This puts intense strain on the family dynamics. I am an adult, and I try so hard to be a complete and competent one. I am in my mid 30’s, I have a child, I have a professional job. But I also need a lot of help and support sometimes, due to my mental illnesses. I get mad about that. I hate asking for help. I try to be grateful that my family are there and that they are willing to help me and do things for me. But I wish that I didn’t have to put this burden on them.

I’m sure that on their side of things they probably feel equally conflicted. How to provide support when I am prickly and difficult, what they are supposed to do with me when I am very unwell and can be incredibly uncooperative, what level of support is appropriate – when to back off and when to help out. How they can have their own lives and be free of some of the stress.

So I admire them for all that they do for me, and especially for committing to 12 weeks of learning more and receiving some support through the Family Connections program.

A couple of helpful links:

Family Guidelines
Helping someone with BPD
For Loved Ones

The last few months part 4

Welcome to part 4…

Trigger warning……..there’s quite a bit of cutting at the end of this. Please be safe and don’t read if this could trigger you in any way.

So back to August. I’ve got all this turmoil going on in my life. I’ve had a complete meltdown, discovered I hate myself, am slowly decreasing my dosage of all my drugs, and I’m still pretty bloody miserable.

Work stuff happens. So much work stuff. Stressful things like clients getting mad at me for things that aren’t my fault. Work piles up and I can’t get through it and don’t know what to do about it. I can’t seem to get anything finished and every day someone emails or calls to ask where another piece of work is that I haven’t finished.

Meanwhile, my daughter is having some issues of her own. She’s often very sensitive to my moods and for whatever reason she’s having some emotional issues of her own at the same time. She’s crying a lot, very clingy, wetting the bed constantly (not wholly unusual – she’s not nighttime toilet trained even though she’s 8 but she’s wetting through her pull-up) which is causing me a lot of washing, and she’s basically refusing to do anything she’s told. I know it’s a relationship/connection problem – she’s reacting to my mental unwellness But I can’t seem to get back on track to do anything about it.

Self harm is still calling to me all the time. Suicidal thoughts are constantly with me. I get in the car and think about what it would be like to gas myself in the garage. I drive down the road and notice stuff I could run my car into. I drive by the sea (which is everywhere as my city is a series of peninsulas) and think about drowning. I’m constantly thinking about cutting, drugs, electrocuting myself. It’s tiring, all these thoughts of self harm and death.

Alcohol is my nemesis at this point. My body physically craves a drink, but having one lowers my defences and is a slippery slope to doing something I’m trying so hard not to do. But, after achieving something at work I feel like I could do with a drink to celebrate. I call in to the liquor store on the way home on a Friday night and buy some vodka and e-cigarettes.

I always try to take the appropriate positive actions. This time I read books, had a bath, got someone to take my daughter so I could have some alone time. I tried to go to bed early and get more sleep, and listened to music I enjoy.

On Sunday afternoon my thoughts were all over the place. I would feel momentarily calm and then get worked up and agitated about something. At the time I wrote “I don’t want to be me anymore. All the stress and the constant struggle. I’m trying to do the right thing but it feels like no matter how hard I try I always fall short”.

One beer turned into two. One temazepan became two. I did some cleaning. Didn’t feel tired in the slightest so smoked, drank some vodka and had another temazepan. I was getting manic, cleaning the house and dancing around. This was the opposite of the sleep I was craving, so I took more temazepan and drank more vodka.

That’s when the blades came out. Just so I could get some relief. A bit of cutting, some more vodka and another temazepan or two for the hell of it.

Things get a bit crazy. I dance in the kitchen and the blood running down my arms goes everywhere. I for some reason think this is funny. More cutting, dancing, drinking and taking of drugs ensues. I don’t care about anything anymore. I don’t care anymore. I feel like I can see me from the outside and the absurdity of what is happening but I’m powerless to stop and I don’t want to anyway.

I start drinking vodka straight from the bottle and slashing myself randomly with the blade. Arms, legs and stomach. Take handfuls of drugs with the vodka. I am still trying to clean up the blood but I keep falling and hitting my head on the cupboards. I suddenly realise I have probably taken too many tamazepan and have a bit of a panic. I won’t be able to wake up for work tomorrow. That’s how screwed my mind is. I don’t want to live, and in fact am deliberately harming myself because I can’t cope, and then the responsible part of my brain is worried I won’t wake up for work. Never mind that if I was dead I wouldn’t make it in…

I rang the crisis team. I didn’t want to but I am started to get weirded out. My thoughts and my body aren’t connected anymore. The ambulance come and take me to hospital. For a while I refuse to let them ring anyone but when I start vomiting I want my Mum. She comes and sits with me. A nurses glue up the worst of the cuts while we wait for the crisis team. About 3 hours later they finally arrive. “There’s no beds so you’ll have to go home”. I feel weird about this. I don’t want to leave the safety of the hospital. Home is where people are, and the means to hurt myself. Mum takes me back to their place, I have the day off work and then back to work on Tuesday. No one from the hospital or mental health calls to see if I’m ok. I don’t know what to do. I still want to die. I feel guilty about what I did but not enough to regret it. Life goes on. Nothing’s changed.

The last few months part 2

I wasn’t going to post this but then thought this might give some perspective on how I was feeling back in August. Here goes:

I know I haven’t written much recently, but it’s not been because I haven’t wanted to. I am currently struggling with an episode and it’s hard to know what and how much to share. I started this blog to help people like me, to share my experiences in the hope that it might make at least one person feel less alone in what they are going through. And also to increase understanding and awareness of what it feels like to have a mental illness. Stigma is a very real problem and I hope that if more people have understanding and empathy then the shame around having a mental illness will decrease. But, I do have to be aware of the consequences of baring my soul to the world – on my job, my child, and my family. It is a scary thing to expose my innermost thoughts to scrutiny, and I have to hope that by doing so I don’t inadvertantly hurt anyone I love.

So, with that in mind, here goes…

I have been very unstable for about the last six weeks. I’m not sure why, sometimes these things happen, but I suspect in this case it was a build up of a whole bunch of stressors. I have job stuff, family stuff, financial pressure, health issues, my daughter’s challenges and some personal things going on, and my breaking point is a lot lower than other people’s.

In addition to all that, my latest psychiatrist decided a while back that I was over medicated, and I’ve been on a plan for the last 6 months to reduce my medications significantly. I’m down from 1400mg of Epilim to 600mg per day, and 375mg of Venlafaxine to just 150mg. I’m completely off Temazepan and Quetiapine now as well. Whether that makes a difference is hard to tell. My psychiatrist tells me drugs are ineffective for BPD, though I have chronic dysthymia which is why I’m still on an anti-depressant. I personally think the Epilim (a mood stabliser) was actually helping flatten out the ups and downs in my mood, but I am willing to try and decrease dosages and see what happens. One of the side-effects of being on so many drugs at such high doses was the massive weight gain I’ve experienced, at one point I put on 30kg from Lithium in just 4 months (I was on Lithium before Epilim). I’m hoping that with a decrease in dosage I’ll be able to drop some of the extra weight.

Whatever the cause, I’ve been very unbalanced in the last couple of months. I struggle to sleep at the best of times, and my sleep had got completely out of sync.

The last few months

And here I am again writing about how I’m back from my extended break…. I actually wrote a draft post about this about 2 months ago and then never posted it. Things have been….complicated.

It’s hard to write when you are in a down and don’t know how to turn things around. It’s also hard to write when there is a lot that you want to say and you can’t say it for fear of hurting someone’s feelings or making a situation worse. There had been several big things happen in my life that I couldn’t write about and that’s blocked all my other thoughts.

One of those things has been my relationship with my sister and her now husband. I won’t go in to details, but suffice to say there was a breakdown in communication, several arguments with him and things haven’t quite been the same since. I got un-bridesmaided and in-invited from the wedding in Rarotonga….unfortunately I’d already brought tickets at that point. It wasn’t just me, the rest of my family were also tarred with the same brush, and things have been very awkward ever since. We attended the wedding but the relationship between us and my sister/her husband is still very much tentative and none of the issues have actually been addressed. I’m finding that pretty hard as I am normally a ‘hash it out’ type of person, but my sister prefers to brush things under the carpet and pretend they haven’t happened and she’s the one calling the shots here.

One of the big reasons this has triggered me so much is my particular sensitivity to feelings of rejection. Throughout my life I have often done things to upset other people and they have cut me out of their lives, without an explanation as to what I have actually done. Due to my mix of Asperger’s and personality disorder, I genuinely don’t know or understand what has happened to cause this, but I end up terribly hurt and feeling completely rejected. This is a repeating pattern in my life, and the more it repeats the more I am inclined to withdraw from socialising and put up walls to protect myself.

In my family I am known as very independent, but one of the reasons I am so independent is because I feel accute pain if I open up and then am rejected in any way. I find it incredibly difficult to tell other people what is going on in my head or how I feel, and I never ever ask for help. Partly because someone might laugh at me and partly because I need to prove to myself that I don’t need anyone else. If people reject me then who needs them? I can do it myself.

One of the ways this pain manifests itself is obsession with what has happened to cause the rejection. My previous psychologist fired me as a patient more than 2 years ago and I still frequently think and wonder what caused that and what I could have done to prevent it, and what I would say to her if I saw her now. It’s hard to let go because I opened up and told this person my darkest, innermost thoughts and then (for me) out of the blue she said she couldn’t help me anymore and that was it. After over a year of therapy. I ponder over this often. I get out the memories of our last few sessions and see if I can try and make sense of what happened. And I still can’t after all this time. But that doesn’t stop my brain from turning this problem over and over to see what the answer is. Time has dulled the pain slightly, but it still hurts a lot. Every time I think about this I feel a portion of that rejection all over again.

So when my sister, one of the people who is supposed to be there for me, rejected me it hurt an incredible amount. But what hurt the most was my perception that they (mum, dad and my other sister) cared about her much more than me. I’ve been in this position before where I had an argument with both my sisters and they didn’t speak to me for months, one of them even moved to another city in that intervening time and didn’t say goodbye. And no one seemed to miss me or care that much. But all three of them were deeply upset by this situation and pursued resolution with my sister. I felt that this meant they cared for her more than me. Another rejection, by my own family.

This boiled over one night when the four of us were having some conversation about this all and something got said about my behaviour. I know I am often completely erratic, I’m difficult to be around and I fly off the handle a lot (working on that), I know that’s part of my illness but I also know it hurts people and destroys relationships. I completely over reacted, hit my sister several times, punched my Dad, bit him, stomped on his feet. He held me in a head lock and I screamed right in his face. I was screaming and screaming, feeling a complete lack of any control. I just wanted to hurt and be hurt.

Later, I walked off into the night and got in the sea fully clothed (I did take my shoes off). It was the middle of winter and I had jeans and a t-shirt on, no jersey, and I was standing in thigh deep water thinking about drowning myself. A very low point in my life.

This incident scared me. I was completely out of control. I could see the red behind my eyes and all I wanted was to feel physical pain to match the mental and emotional anguish. I’ll never forget the look of terror in my sister’s eyes though as she cowered in the corner after I punched her and pushed her over. And my father physically restraining me.

I’ll continue this in a follow up post shortly.

BPD and identity

I’ve always had a lot of trouble figuring out who I am and what I like. In my life I’ve tried a lot of things but very rarely settled to any one thing for longer than a year or so. I constantly seem to question who I am, what I like, what my values are and what I want out of life. I often feel hopeless and directionless because I can never quite seem to grasp what the purpose of my life is and what I should be doing with it. This is not just about career direction, but hobbies, friends, relationships, goals and values.

This is a fairly common problem for people with BPD. When you oscillate between liking yourself and feeling safe and secure, and hating yourself and shutting yourself off from people, you feel like you can’t get a grip on what your opinion of yourself is, never mind anything else.

I have a very short attention span and get bored incredibly quickly. I am lucky in some ways that I have been able to find a career that is mentally stimulating, and has just enough routine to make me feel secure and quell some of my anxiety while also offering enough variety that I don’t get too bored and switch off. I have been at my most depressed and mentally unwell when I have had to work at jobs which were not mentally challenging enough. Strangely though I had no problem being at home on maternity leave, although I’d say that was because my daughter did a very good job of providing variety and challenge for me!!

One of the things I have found very difficult to live with is my inability to figure out what my purpose is in life. I have spent numerous hours devoted to trying to understand why I was put here on this earth. As is my habit I have researched this question in the library, and also spent time trying to understand and define my values, read up on altruism and gratitude, attempted to meditate on it, investigated various religions, and questioned a number of people about what they think the meaning of life is. Logically I understand the answers and points of view presented to me, but none of them spoke to me or felt like they were ‘my reason’. This can be incredibly depressing, as my life is often a painful chaotic mess of emotions and their destructive impact on the people I care about. I need to feel like there is some reason for enduring it.

I see other people taking action for things they believe in, making a difference for others, practising their religious beliefs, following their dreams, or doing things they enjoy and I get jealous. I love that people I care about are doing these things. But I wish I had certainty about what I believe in or want, or enjoy. Sometimes I feel like I have a strong opinion, only to feel the opposite two hours later. I enjoy doing something but then never want to do it again. Or like the idea but feel no motivation to follow through. I’m capable of loving something one minute and then hating it an hour later. Or getting bored and abandoning in the process or project two steps in.

In the past I’ve often felt like I am acting a role, saying and doing what is expected of me. When I had my major depressive episode in 2013/14 I remember saying to my psychologist that I felt like a cardboard cut out. That I was presenting this face to the world but there was nothing behind it, no depth to it. I say things that are certainly true in that circumstance but not necessarily how I feel, because I don’t know how I feel. Or how I feel changes like the flick of a switch so I can say something to one person that is the truth but regret what I said or feel like I misrepresented myself later. This can feel to people who don’t have BPD that they are being lied to or manipulated. But for me, I certainly don’t intend to lie, and at the time I am telling the truth. It’s just that I’m erratic and very prone to changing my mind half a dozen times in the following few hours.

The stigma of BPD contributes to identity issues. There is the expectation that you just get on with life when you have a mental illness. You don’t own up to it and you certainly don’t make other people feel uncomfortable by explaining what is really going on or how you feel. You pretend that everything is fine and you suffer in private. This is seen as the acceptable way of coping with a mental illness. Then there’s the argument that you can ‘over identify’ with your illness. That instead of seeing it as something you have, like a heart condition or diabetes, you see it as who you are. People with BPD often call themselves borderlines, defining themselves by their illness. I know I’ve done this myself in the past, and I think in part it’s because having BPD is about identity, it is a personality disorder after all. Identity is all about who you are and what you believe in. But the danger is that in identifying with the illness that you negate the possibility of recovery. Recovery is possible for some people, and there is a percentage of people who do the therapy programs who will recover enough not to meet the diagnosis criteria anymore.

One of my goals is to not focus too much on who I am and what my purpose is. A little bit of self examination is a good thing, but too much navel-gazing makes me feel adrift in a vast sea of possibility and raises my anxiety level. Enjoyment of the journey is still a worthy accomplishment.

Ka Kite Ano

Progress is a series of tiny steps

It’s been a while. I was pretty unwell for a while there and really struggling. When I felt ready to write again I had accidentally logged myself out and couldn’t figure out my password, and Blogger couldn’t verify my identity so I was unable to change my password to get back in. Thankfully I eventually figured out I had been using the wrong email address to try and log in…..

Anyway, that aside, it’s nice to be back writing here again. I have written some stuff while I’ve been off Blogger so it’s not like I haven’t been writing at all, it just hasn’t been quite the same.

The last month or so has been really hard. I’ve felt very down and things have been struggling along. I went through a period of not being able to get out of bed in the morning which is unusual for me. When I say not being able to get out of bed I mean consistantly running half an hour or more late for work. I set at least 3 alarms and I was turning off one or two of them in my sleep without even registering that they had gone off. Some mornings I’d only manage to wake up 20 minutes before I needed to be out of the house and I was not showering for several days in a row because I didn’t have time or the energy.

Little G was quite difficult to deal with towards the end of the school term. Her anxiety levels were high and I was having trouble responding to her from a calm, empathetic place. She can read me like a book and her anxiety often feeds off mine so that wasn’t helping, plus she also had some pretty big stuff she was dealing with emotionally. Her Dad was getting remarried and she was scared and unsure about what that was going to mean for her. When her anxiety levels run high she attempts to control all the other things in her life to make her feel safe and secure. I’ve been there, I get that, but as a parent it’s incredibly frustrating to have an 8 year old try to run your life and your household. This leads to a battle of wills over almost everything, including school refusal which she has a long history of doing.

When I’m unwell and I have this child refusing point blank to go to school or do anything she’s told, and throwing fits and stomping off every fifteen seconds, I struggle. My emotions are already hightened and so it doesn’t take much to throw my system into high alert and it takes a long time to calm down again. I have constant thoughts about how I have ruined her, how it’s my fault she struggles with anxiety in the first place, my fault she has the issues she does.I think I should be doing more for her. I worry that she’ll turn out like me and have to deal with mental illness throughout her life. My brain tells me I am a terrible parent and a pathetic person and that she would be better off without me.

With these emotions running around in my head constantly, they play havoc with the rest of my system too. My stomach oftent feels like it’s cramping or has butterflies, my heart palpitates, I get headaches and pain in my face from clenching my teeth and a stiff back and neck from hunching up, almost as if I am physically trying to protect myself. And let’s not even mention the effect of all this stress on my bowels!!

Through all of this, plus work stress (major deadlines to meet for various clients at this time of year) and extended family issues, I’ve had individual events that each have momentarily pushed me off balance. One of those was an appointment I had with my psychiatrist at the end of June. Historically I don’t have a good track record with psychiatrists. I’ve been under the care of Community Mental Health (CMH)/psychiatric outpatients for about 3.5 years and in that time I’ve seen something like 8 different psychiatrists. Unfortunately that’s the way the system works – you see a registrar and so every 6 months the registrar assigned to that consultant moves on and you get a new one. Sometimes you get that registrar back again after 18 months or so when they have had a number of rotations. I’ve been under the care of the consultant for ‘red zone’ the whole time, but I’ve only actually been seeing the consultant himself instead of the registrar for about a year. In that time there’s been two or three different ones because they change jobs or leave.

(*registrar = trainee psychiatrist with degree and 1-4 years experience, consultant = fully qualified and ‘boss’ in charge of registrars for a certain area. The region I live in is divided into zones by CMH and I live in red zone).

So the consultant I saw at the end of June I’ve seen twice before (roughly every 3 months), but neither time went particularly well. I tend to be difficult to deal with as I don’t understand what they are asking for or how to answer their questions, and I take offence to some of the things they have to say. For some reason the whole situation upsets me and the appointment often ends with me having said something I shouldn’t have or refusing to speak to them at all. When this happens I know I am not behaving well but once I have been triggered I find it incredibly difficult to act rationally as my emotions are fully in the driving seat.

In the middle of all this Little G has been sick, we’ve had school holidays, we are supposed to be following a plan from the continence nurse for her to try and sort out her bed wetting (not happening – she refuses to follow it), I’ve had family issues and financial pressure, Little G’s Dad got married, two of my colleague resigned – one I worked with particularly closely, and my back problem has flared up again. Not to mention that Little G was away in the school holidays so I was on my own for a week. And then the appointment with the communication and behaviour team that I’ve been waiting for since Little G was diagnosed with ASD two years ago finally happened, and it wasn’t quite what I’d pictured.

Suddenly I again felt all this guilt and doubt about my child and shame about my own mental health affecting her, and scared of what they might suggest. I’ve hung so many hopes on this appointment and to finally get it and find that I was going to be expected to carry out their plan to change Little G’s behaviour was very daunting. I don’t know what I thought they would do but I hadn’t imagined that I would be such a key part of it. For some reason I had thought it would be more about them working with her directly. And that really threw me. Because what if I wasn’t good enough? It would be my fault again if the plan didn’t work. I doubted my ability to carry anything out and suport her.

I freaked out. I think I subconsiously equated her communication and behaviour problems to my own as a child and I don’t want her to go through what I have. The pressure of having to be the person to help her when I am so fully aware of the possible consquences of getting it wrong tore me apart. Then I started blaming myself for my poor mental health and the damage I’d already done to her. I know attachment is really important and forming a secure bond with your child sets them up for the best possible outcomes in life. I also know that I have been inconsistent and at times very unwell and that Little G’s and my bond is not as secure as I’d like. I’m working on it but I’m always scared I’ll screw up.

I’d already been having suicidal thoughts for weeks. I live with them. Sometimes those thoughts are louder and sometimes quieter but they are almost always there. These are the ones that tell me I want to die, that no one would miss me, that there is no point to life, that people would be better off without me being a burden on them. When I really freak out I start also hallucinating suicide scenarios, which tend to scare me even further. I get in the car in my garage and I can see myself closing the doors, putting the windows down and killing myself with carbon monoxide from the exhaust fumes. I see myself in the bath with blood running down my arms, or head in a noose hanging from a tree. I frequently picture myself walking into the sea with all my clothes on and drowning. When I’m driving I can see myself plowing into power poles or into something solid.

Living with these thoughts and hallucinations is really scary sometimes, particularly when I tend to be impulsive and I’m aware I can’t always trust myself when I feel like this. Telling anyone you have this mess in your head is impossible. I still can’t quite believe I’ve written it down because it almost looks worse on the page than it did in my head. How do you tell someone who cares about you that you want to die so much that you vividly picture multiple suicide scenarios daily, sometimes hourly.

And yet, and yet…. if there is one tiny kernel of hope in all of this, it is that I am still here. I am still taking things moment by moment. I mostly remember and follow my crisis survival and distress tolerance strategies. I mostly take care of myself. Any one of these stressful situations would have triggered a full meltdown with alcohol and a lengthy cutting session only a few months ago. Not to say I haven’t cut because unfortunately I have. But just a bit and it was the first time in four months which is something I feel proud of. I am ashamed that I have self harmed again, but I do acknowledge the progress I am making. Small steps. Progress is a series of steps, and even if they are tiny I am making them.

One song I am listening to a lot is Let It Be (The Beatles). It fits nicely with the mindset I’m trying to cultivate.

Kia Kaha

Unconscious thought, Freud and me

I have been reading about unconscious bias recently, and the way it reinforces what we already believe in. Unconscious bias makes us tend to like people who think the same way we do, who have similar backgrounds and upbringings, and even look the way we do. This has a number of effects on how we view the world.

Bias shapes our world view because it provides a shortcut for our brains when receiving and reviewing new information. If we immediately disregard anything that doesn’t fit with what we already know or what feels familiar to us, then over time we develop a narrower world view. We will get less exposure to ideas, to different ways of life, to different situations. Our ability to have empathy for people diminishes if we can’t imagine ourselves in the situations they find themselves in.

I became interested in what my own unconscious biases were when I realised after reading information about the subject, that just declaring you were open and tolerant of others wasn’t enough to actually override the effect of bias on your thinking. I could tell myself all I liked that I didn’t discriminate against certain groups but that didn’t make it true. And in fact, all the reading I was doing was really reinforcing my unconscious bias as I was subconsciously filtering what I chose to read, and the information I was retaining.

Then I asked myself why I really cared about it at all. Why did I need to think about how I was thinking? I got stuck on this concept for a number of days, wondering why I cared about what my unconscious beliefs were. Sometimes when I have an idea that fascinates me I get obsessed with it, research it to death and read everything I can about it. But this one felt just out of my reach, like I couldn’t quite grasp something really important about it. I couldn’t even begin to narrow down a definition of what was in my head so I could type something in a search engine.

I put it down for a bit, got side tracked in other things as I tend to do. I happened across a blog post about transference which is where “we unconsciously transfer feelings and attitudes from a person of situation in the past on to a person or situation in the present”. Basically, when a person or situation reminds you of something else you transfer some of the feelings you have about the original person or situation on to the new one. I was fascinated by this, in part because of the link between these unconscious thoughts and the unconscious bias idea I had been trying to get my head around. In both of these phenomena the mind is taking what we have learnt in the past and applying it to the present, effectively creating a shortcut for thinking. This sets up a situation where we learn something and then potentially perpetually recreate and reinforce it.

I started to get really excited by the idea that all these things could be impacting on the way I see and react with the world and I am not even aware of any of it. I looked up Sigmund Freud who is the founding father of psychoanalysis – a type of therapy in which transference plays an important role in making the unconscious conscious.

One of the first things that came up a picture of Freud’s unconscious mind model, in which he used an iceberg to describe the three levels of mind. The tip of the iceberg is shown as the conscious mind, which is all the thoughts and mental processes we are aware of. The pre-conscious is the “working memory” type area of the brain, and then the unconscious mind, the bit of the ice berg well under water, is everything that we are not conscious of that influences thoughts, attitudes, processes, feelings and behaviour. Freud believed that our feelings, motives and decisions are influenced by past experiences and this is stored in the unconscious. While I don’t agree with all of Freud’s work, I do believe, as he did, that more of behaviour is governed by the unconscious mind that we realise.

And by putting all this together I had my answer. I cared about unconscious bias, and about situations of transference, and my core beliefs, because I am trying to change my pattern of behaviour. BPD is marked by (among other things) patterns of instability in mood, behaviour, self image and functioning. I need to be aware of the unconscious thoughts and beliefs my brain is holding in order to disrupt the pattern and then change it.

Therapy has allowed me to look at this by working backwards – from the action such as impulsive or suicidal behaviour, back to the thought patterns and then back further to the trigger for those thoughts. But by also trying to uncover the unconscious core thoughts and beliefs held by my brain I should be able to work on changing them before I am triggered.

So I have decided to see if I can discover what my unconscious thoughts and biases are. Hopefully this will help me discover more about my patterns and how I can change them to bring more stability to my life.

Ka Kite Ano