TLDR: I’ve officially been diagnosed as BPD, sharing my story and looking for suggestions on coping (what has worked for you). Is there anything that you avoid in particular such as food items or alcohol that you find is helpful as well?

TW: eating disorders, suicide mention

Hello world,

I’m new here. My name is Jessica. I am 28 and have lived in Denver, Colorado for a year now. I moved here from Northern Lower Michigan. I have been wanting to write this for a long time now, so this may turn out to be a novel. After many, many years of suspecting that I had BPD, I was officially diagnosed yesterday. I want to share my story in hopes that I am not alone and I am also seeking peer support.

I share my story knowing that other people have had worse lives, but this is “my worst”. I am seeking feedback if you have had similar experiences or can relate. My earliest memories include me telling my mom that she was fat (I didn’t know what it meant at the time) and her hysterically crying and remembering the day that my dad decided to file for divorce and she was packing her things and crying while he held my sister and I in his lap in the living room.

My parents divorced when I was 4 years old. My mom had been cheating on my dad and blames him for being emotionally unavailable. My dad had primary physical custody, we lived with him full-time and visited my mom every other weekend. I remember waking up one day and my dog was gone; my dad had taken her to the humane society because of the divorce I later found out. That was really hard for me.
I struggled until 4th grade with separation anxiety from my dad. He would drop me off every day for before school care and it would take a long time for me to stop crying and calm down. This happened at daycare and during the summers as well.

My mom had a girlfriend following the divorce. I shared this with friends at school innocently but didn’t know at the time that this was unusual or frowned upon and I was picked on a lot for this. I went to a Roman Catholic school in the Detroit area. Anyway, my mom has always had tumultuous relationships and I have come to realize as an adult that she 1,000% also suffers from borderline personality disorder but has never sought help. 

When I would spend weekends with my mom she would always be preoccupied talking to people online. This was something that was a prevalent issue growing up…she always only had online friends…which is not to say that is a bad thing these days. I knew that she went by a different name online and lied a lot. She would speak to other people romantically when she was in a relationship and my sister and I were always privy to the details. 

My mom has a huge heart and is very loving, but I think that she has always been caught up in her own unresolved emotional issues and therefore was never really present for me. Eventually we moved 4 hours north and we had to commute every other weekend to see her. We would meet at a halfway point. I remember that sometimes she would have her boyfriend come to meet us and she would stay behind. This hurt me a lot and I think this is when I began to feel the most abandoned. Considering the fact that we only saw her every other weekend it hurt that she couldn’t be bothered to spend every second she possibly could with us and I felt that I was not a priority to her.
Around the age of 11 I started to restrict my eating. I think that this was an attempt at getting attention to begin with but I found control in it as well. At 13 I starting binging and purging. It was a way to seek the comfort of food without gaining the weight. It was also this year that I got into a fight and was charged with assault. I was put on probation and this was when I started seeing a therapist. I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder. 

Between 13 and 18 I engaged in self-harm, using drugs and alcohol, and engaged in risky behaviors. Mostly normal teenager stuff, but I was an especially angry teenager and also starting to deal with suicidal ideation frequently. I felt that no one understood what I was going through and I felt so incredibly alone. Basically, I never felt that I received any emotional validation growing up. Either my parents were unavailable or they dismissed and minimized my feelings which led to me just bottling everything up. Music saved me in a lot of way…lyrics showed me that I wasn’t the only person who felt the way that I did.

Eventually my mom was able to move to the same city as us with her boyfriend. My mom would frequently make promises that she never followed up on and continued to speak to strangers online even going as far as to have one of them stay in the house she owned with her boyfriend while she pretended to be the sister of the person that he was talking to (this is a much longer story, just trust me that it’s weird). 

At 19, I moved out of the house for the first time with a boyfriend. A week before I moved we had to put my childhood dog to sleep, this was super traumatizing. We had moved about 4 hours away and I began to drink quite a bit and was cheating on my boyfriend, engaging in unsafe sex and all that. I was very manipulative and mean to him. The next year was pretty my worst period of being self-destructive. Eventually I moved home to live with my dad again but continued to drink too much and be volatile at times. By January 2011 I made a plan to kill myself and wrote letters and started to prepare. This was when, at my therapist’s suggestion, I went to a partial hospitalization program for a week and half. This was somewhat helpful and I learned some coping skills.

I began a new relationship in 2010 with a man who was 9 years older than me and was a recovering alcoholic. I felt that he was mature and has his life together unlike my past boyfriends. Everything was really good for a couple of years. He was essentially emotionally unavailable and was not helpful in dealing with my emotional problems, he was more hurtful than anything. If I was crying and he felt that it was “my fault” he would not console me at all, he would just ignore me. This gutted me, I felt abandoned and rejected over and over again. When I love someone, I love with all of my being and give every ounce of myself to them. I was with this person for 5 years before I broke up with him because I realized that he was not capable of loving me in the way that I needed to be loved and it was essentially re-traumatizing me. I was devastated to lose this relationship but I somehow found the strength to get through it.

A couple of months later I reconnected with a guy that I had known since high school. We were immediately infatuated with each other and began officially dating. His childhood was very different than mine and he is very well-adjusted. He gives me balance. He is an angel and has been my rock for 2.5 years now. We got engaged a little over a year ago. I feel so lucky to have him; he is soooooooooooooooo patient with me which is so important, although I do test the boundaries at times of course. He is always willing to learn about my disorders and do whatever he needs to do to help me to be successful. The one thing that he does that has been the most healing is validating my feelings no matter how irrational. No one has ever done that before.

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So that is my story in a nutshell, but I wanted to discuss my symptoms separately. I think that my biggest issues at this point in my life (age 28) are my mood swings, irritability, and rigid/black&amp;white thinking. The tiniest sliver of a hint of perceived abandonment or rejection sets me off. It feels like emotional whiplash. I threw a tantrum recently that was set off by a tiny problem, but was the culmination of stuffing my emotions down for a couple of months. This consisted of me slamming every door in the apartment, throwing a bag of groceries across the room and scratching myself. In hindsight, it feels mortifying but it feels so huge in the moment.  I so relate to Sylvia Plath’s description of feeling like living inside of a bell jar; feeling other than…separate from life. I am always ruminating, worrying, living everywhere but the present.  I am lucky that I do not have much instability in relationships, it is mostly in my relationship with myself that there is instability. My fiancé is the only one who really sees my symptoms first hand and is the only one who is ever the recipient of my misplaced anger. I have weekly existential crises and this is what leads to suicidal thoughts most of the time. I feel that it is a constant war inside of my head and sometimes it feels like it will never end and that I will suffer like this forever. It feels like a dark cloud follows me around everywhere. The moments that I feel happiness are so fleeting because it is foreign to me and I only know it won’t be long before it’s gone again. I honestly don’t remember what it feels like to live without the dark cloud.

I struggle A LOT with feeling guilty over everything. I feel guilty for feeling depressed because I have so many things to be thankful for that a lot of people aren’t as fortunate to have and yet I am still depressed. Guilt eats me up alive sometimes.
The professional who diagnosed me said that I am ‘high-functioning’. I have never had an issue holding down a job or attending college. I currently work full-time for the state and I attend graduate school…for clinical social work of all things…oh the irony. I am very well liked and I make friends very easily but I never let anyone get too close which keeps me from feeling vulnerable. I was speaking to my supervisor recently about my diagnosis and new medication and she couldn’t even believe that I had BPD…this felt quite invalidating actually…she made comments about “labels” and people with BPD are supposed to be this way or that way. I am so good at wearing a mask of optimism, happiness and humor…its entirely exhausting…I often have no energy left at the end of the day which sends me into my various forms of escapism (video games, streaming shows). The mask I wear is not insincere, it is a real display of my personality, it’s just that I suppose I amp it up a little. I live to make people happy and be friendly person…that is where I find some self-worth. 

I think that should be sufficient for now, hopefully this all made sense.  If you’ve read all of this…thank you! I’m looking for feedback on what has help you cope with your symptoms. Is there anything that you have found is helpful to avoid such as sugar or alcohol? 
