New to reddit here so I already posted this on r/Borderline but found this more populated group lol so keen to hear more thoughts!!:

Hi all, this is my first time posting on reddit but in this fucking wild time of isolation from covid19 and the fallout of being alone with my thoughts all day every day I just want to hear some other people’s thoughts on the bpd trait that I feel like nobody (including professional resources online) talks about: depersonalisation and stress induce paranoia or ‘micro psychotic’ episodes. 

This might be a long one sorry but I’d love to hear anyone’s experiences/thoughts/what therapists have said about it etc. 

About a year and a half ago some friends took me to an emergency room and I eventually spent some time in a respite centre (in nz our mental health services are super overstretched so there are some charitable trusts that have facilities to house people for a short time. It’s like for if you’re not imminently suicidal or completely psychotic so they won’t admit you to the psych hospital but you’re not safe enough to go home). Anyway.. through that I saw a psychiatrist who said I had traits of bpd. She couldn’t make a conclusive diagnosis because I hadn’t seen her long enough and because I came in through an emergency channel I couldn’t keep seeing her but she described what had happened as basically being an episode of severe dissociation because of extreme stress. Ive never really felt satisfied that that summary actually helped me understand what I was experiencing and even though I’ve scoured the internet for info on it and watched practically every YouTube vid on bpd, the mentions of this kind of extreme dissociation or paranoia that seems like psychosis, are few and far between. 

So what happened for me: my best friend and I were apparently ‘emotionally enmeshed’. I was really stressed at the time with university and I had a couple of dreams in which my best friend had killed herself and somehow people saw me as responsible for it because she blamed me in her suicide note or something. (Can’t fully remember now) but after that dream we took a short trip together and during that time I was super dissociative and I remember feeling like she didn’t exist even though she was with me. I was seeing a psychotherapist at the time who didn’t really take it seriously and chalked it up to some escapist idea because maybe it was ‘easier for me to pretend my best friend didn’t exist for a little bit’. Anyway a couple months passed and then I had that dream again. I’d been super out of it at that time and drinking heavily for a couple days and when in a fight I asked my best friend to leave me alone she said ‘maybe I will’ and I think that triggered me into this kind of psychosis again where I thought I had killed her or that she killed her self but it was my fault and somehow she didn’t exist but was following me to make sure I knew I killed her and hold me accountable for it. I ended up jumping out a window (ground floor) at my university one night and climbing on the roof because I thought people were trying to find me make me pay for what I’d done. That was the night my best friend and some others took me to the ER. For about a week after that I would fade in and out of reality: between thinking she was dead and knowing she wasn’t. I remember thinking people were talking about me and saying repeatedly ‘they know’. After all that I returned to university a few weeks later. 

I still don’t feel I understand what happened but it still feels really important to me to be able to call it something. For a while I just decided to tell people I had a short psychotic episode but now years on that still doesn’t feel like the right definition because I can remember a lot of what happened and usually people who are psychotic don’t remember much of their episodes. I think it makes sense that when you have an unstable sense of self and are already dissociating a lot, that if something strikes a really deep nerve (like my best friend hinting that maybe she really would leave me alone and kill herself) that the mind might just dissociate to a point where nothing is really based in reality for a while. I guess what confuses me about this is that I wish like in schizophrenia or bipolar or something I could put it down to uncontrollable chemical changes in the mind but I feel like with bpd, the question always remains with me of whether I just decided to let my mind unravel like my therapist once said. And so I guess if I had allowed myself to fall apart like that then I can’t really feel sympathy or compassion toward myself in that time because it was my own fault. Whereas I feel like if I knew it was out of my control, I could move on and stop blaming myself. 

Hope this resonates with someone and maybe you can share your experience and thoughts? 

Hope you are all hanging in there in this crazy time.