I've been under psychiatric care for what must be most of a decade and that's always been a situation where we're just juggling meds to see what helps. Last year my psychiatrist recommended group therapy and while it helped a lot the horror stories from the other members just overwhelmed me. My life has always been sort of "if you're hurting, so am I". I hate to see people in pain, I "feel" obligated to "fix it".

Anyhow, after I got out of group I was connected with a brilliant therapist. The amount of testing he put me through was staggering. I know I've had major depression, social anxiety disorder, various OCD issues, agoraphobia and that sort of stuff but after the tests were analyzed my therapist told me I had PTSD... and borderline personality disorder. Well I knew what PTSD was and we've been working on that for some months. I'd suppressed some rather unpleasant events including being molested in 7th grade by a female classmate EVERY DAY, then in my early 20s I was raped over a period of six months to a year (I really can't remember) by a woman I thought was a friend, it was NOT consensual in any realistic meaning of the word. Other women had made the attempt before and after that but I'd always managed to "escape". It's not that I'm James Dean reborn, I am however incredibly naive and trusting and totally clueless about the intentions of other people. I've always been that way. Oh yeah... I'm a man, so that's stigma number one.

I had no idea what BPD was, I'd never even heard of it and assumed it was some sort of "it could go either way" minor kind of thing. I offhandedly said "oh yeah, my therapist says I have bpd" to my psychiatrist last Friday and you'd have thought I'd admitted to being a serial squirrel rapist. Suddenly I was being told to seriously consider hospitalization and being evaluated for ECT and rTMS. I convinced him to delay anything rash because honestly, if I were separated from my wife and kids (who are the greatest people in the world) whatever was finally discharged from the hospital wouldn't be me, because I'd be dead.

I've never been violent, I've lived my entire life with the intended goal of being kind and helpful to everyone. And now it seems the townspeople are coming with pitchforks and torches.

WHY?!