Y'all want juicy drama? Stay tuned. So I work in the mental health field- somehow I made it so far. It's a field where you're totally naked and you've got coworkers with PhD's and vast experience dealing with PD's, who **love to psychoanalyze each other**. Add whatever clique dynamics that are prevalent in the workplace plus power dynamics and you have a very uncomfortable situation. I never got Sartre's idea of "the gaze" until I got into this field and was undressed by my own co-workers daily.

Having BPD is the holy grail of persona non-grata in our field. Clinicians often trash pwBPD (look at Susan Heitler's articles) due to their own unresolved issues, and BPD's with shame like AJ Mahari trash BPD to self-flagellate. It's very discouraging. There are clinicians who like to help, but the norm is clinical staff talking worse about pwBPD and having worse countertransference than people with qualitatively worse diagnoses like ASPD or NPD. It's the raw vulnerability of need that invokes this countertransference when with disorders like ASPD, what you see is what you get. I really had to think about this after dealing with BPD in the people I serve and observing my own reaction. It triggered me thinking about past work experiences where I almost quit or worse due to my dynamics.

I have a tendency of wanting close relationships with supervisors. As a result of this backfiring, I've become more rigid with boundaries. I noticed in my last job, a colleague with BPD traits unnaturally started spilling her woes to me in a barely veiled attempt to elicit sympathy, caring and validation, and after this my normally rigid walls came down and I formed a close relationship with another supervisor who saw me struggling due to relationship problems and wanted to help. After that I could see her slowly get annoyed with me over the course of the next year and trash talk me, and I felt betrayed, but what do you expect? Here I am, a functioning man in most respects, apparently an adult, asking for emotional babying from a mother figure. I hate inducing the scenario when I've burdened people with my need for closeness, they feel I'm getting attached, try to pry away, this makes me feel like they are treating me like a patient, I feel misunderstood, I try to make things right, only to get more blowback and Bam, the whole office knows that I'm borderline and there goes my fucking future at the agency. It's awful, the stigma, but I bring it upon myself with my disordered behavior.

I'm the oldest of two children to a very disturbed and slightly sociopathic mother, and a textbook borderline father. o learned most things on my own and am bummed that this part of my personality is attached to me like a barnacle and uses my body to get it's needs met- this infant like part of me. I almost got fired from an internship because I opened my mouth about a traumatic car accident to a task supervisor in the getting to know process, and from then on any attempt to get her to provide a more direct educational role for me was misconstrued by her as some borderline thing (to be fair, that clinic called any patient with significant trauma they couldn't handle a borderline and absolutely treated them differently) and she tried to get me fired. It ended with me documenting her being abusive to me in front of patients and trying to seek help with higher ups, who for office politics reasons didn't help, so I took it to the school internship office. It's a struggle standing up for yourself and almost daily in this field you're retraumatized by colleagues who see your flaws from a mile away and treat you like the monarch of ickiness. Over a decade hasn't helped this needy inner child finally fuck off and be satisfied so I can live normally and not alienate coworkers.

I have a fiance who is very supportive. Damaged herself, and I think that's the reason she puts up with me. I couldn't be more thankful, and I know that due to my disorder, I'll do worse in relationships than at work, so I likely will not get any better than what I have, so I make sure I treat her right, like a queen. We are like the emotionally homeless, looking for a home in people, and this freaks them out. I remember after my suicide attempt a decade ago where I had to be resuscitated and put on dialysis (just clarifying that no, it wasn't for attention, it was because I was deeply depressed for four years and finally fed up in an abusive relationship with my mother who used me as an emotional punching bag) the doctor took one look at me, told me I'm borderline, then when I asked him if he could stay a minute and explain to me what it means and whether I'll get better, he gave me that dreaded "ick you're creepy" look of disgust and walked off. That'll remain etched in my forever. It's lonely when the field that is supposed to help you hates your kind, but this is the countertransference we induce after all, right? I can't imagine it being any different than a constant train ride where ever stop is another person reminding you that you're half-human and they want to get away from you.

I currently avoid my father for this very reason. He's a black hole of need and on top of this, narcissistic and selfish. He can't be happy for me that I'm getting married, instead tries to induce guilt in me for not spending time with him, even feigning cancer to get my attention. It's like dude I work two jobs and live in another state, I literally can't. So I have him blocked. I finally get why people dislike me! Ugh, shoo inner child, go suck the blood out of someone else. Interestingly, a trauma counselor told me to imagine taking care of my five year old self, and I could only imagine disgust and an urge to tell him to man up and stop crying. That was my childhood. In between frequent physical and emotional abuse, I was seen as the problem, a complainer, needs discipline, etc. Another reason why I can't forgive my parents.

I want to eventually leave my field and go do private practice because most of my supervisors have told me I'm clinically excellent and diagnostically sharp. I'm always vigilant about not projecting my own shit onto clients. Then again, these compliments from bosses may just be them placating me because I'm so icky that they feel the need to protect from some imagined "borderline rage" they'll face for being honest with me. I don't fucking know. All I know is I'm triggered, I've started a new job and am scared shitless of my inner child putting me through the wringer again.

Thanks for listening, thanks ahead for responses.