TL;DR at the bottom

This is a bit of a sore spot for me. When I was 18, I went to a residential. I think within a week I had a meeting where I got a list of what I was diagnosed with, and BPD wasn’t on that list. 

However, during me stay, my therapist at the residential would say things like “that’s very common for people with BPD” during therapy, and she’s just generally frame things as though I had BPD. The staff in general would respond or treat me in a particular way (sometimes not very nice ways) and I didn’t know why or where exactly they were coming from. 

I began to feel quite paranoid about it (shocker), and bought a book during an outing on BPD. It was a book that made those with BPD out to be quite terrible people, so I was freaking out. But I was also freaking out because as far as I knew, I hasn’t been diagnosed with BPD. I began to wonder if I was just so defective that there wasn’t even a name for what I had. 

I ended up going to a step down program right after that, and then another residential a year later. Of course, my notes from the original residential were shared with both places, and the same thing happened—where staff was acting like I had BPD without saying I have it. They would show me my lair of diagnoses every two weeks and it was never on it. 

My anxiety about it continued even when I was at home, and it did so for years. I would suddenly feel very paranoid after something happened (an argument with a family member, etc.) and then go on these binges where I read all about BPD. I desperately wanted an explanation for what was going on with me, so that I had hope and didn’t feel like I was just terrible. But I also was getting stigmatized information because I was using Google or looking at the wrong resources. 

I’m 24 now, and I recently got my medical notes from the first residential I went to, and I saw that within a few days of me being there, they diagnosed me with BPD. I was relieved, but also very upset because I felt deceived and like so much pain and confusion could have been avoided. 

Worse is that, when I was in therapy at home/not in an facility setting, BPD was never suspected, since it was such a confined and controlled setting that I was able to act very “non-BPD” during the sessions. I’ve been in and out of therapy for years and never saw progress despite me and my theorists efforts. 

If I had known I was diagnosed with BPD at that residential, when I was 18, I would have told the therapist I was seeing about that and got proper treatment, or I would have seen a specialist. Instead I ended up spending years with a big paranoid question mark in my mind. Now that I know, I’ve been able to realize so much about my struggles and am starting to see so much progress in myself. 

TL;DR - I was diagnosed with BPD at a residential when I was 18 but wasn’t told about it. All the staff began to act like they knew something I didn’t. Ended up spending years confused and unsure, and at times paranoid. Wish someone had just told me I had been diagnosed with it.