Hey All! This is going to be kind of long, so if you don’t have the patience to help me out, no need to waste your valuable time.

I’m a 30M who’s had a lot of stormy relationships and just got sober after being addicted to heroin for four years. I need advice about whether I may/may not have BPD, and if so, what I should do to work toward being a better man, and eventually (I hope) a wonderful husband and father.

When I was in my early teens, it was almost like someone flipped a switch in my brain. I went from being the most cheerful kid alive to the most terrible teen.

For starters, I felt emotions far more intensely, and for far longer, than anyone my age who I knew at the time. I would remember the insulting/hurtful things people said to me for weeks, turning them over and over in my mind until I felt like I was going insane. These emotional ups and downs often felt so intense that I would cut myself to relieve the pain.

Eventually, I discovered marijuana, which helped tremendously at realizing my outbursts of anxiety and anger. I smoked every day throughout HS and college, and strongly doubt I’d have survived either had it not been for marijuana. 

After graduating college, I began running and training for triathlons regularly, which also helped tremendously. My symptoms of physical self-harming and the super-intensity of my mood swings and inability to take a joke or roll with the punches almost disappeared. 

However, after I began illegally consuming prescription opioids to treat a triathlon injury and allow me to run through the pain, I discovered that opioids made me feel like the man I always wanted to be. I no longer felt out of place in the world, and I was able to sustain a relationship with a wonderful woman without cheating or otherwise blowing everything up as soon as things got boring. We lived together for three years.

However, during this time, my prescription addiction became a heroin addiction, I got popped for possession, and I spent five months in jail/rehab. I’ve been clean since, and have stabilized myself on a very low dose of prescription Suboxone.

However, since my girlfriend and I broke up about seven months ago, I’ve done a lot of soul-searching and realized I might have BPD.

Though a lot of my worst symptoms disappeared in my early 20s, I first realized I might have BPD when I was texting a beautiful young woman on a dating app a couple of months ago.

The conversation was going really well, much better than usual, and I realized quite suddenly that I felt high and euphoric, almost as if on drugs. However, when she failed to respond after about four hours, I unconsciously started snapping and yelling at my parents, picking fights over totally unrelated topics, and generally just feeling pretty miserable.

After I’d stopped myself and thought about why I was acting that way for a few minutes, I abruptly realized that it was solely due to the woman’s failure to respond to me on the app. And the scariest part is, the way I projected that frustration on to my parents was totally unconscious.

After taking an emotional trip down memory lane, I started to realize that all of my relationships with women, and the fallout from what had occurred to cause their often-abrupt endings, had entirely stemmed from me. I gaslit people. I cheated. I yelled and was verbally abusive. And it always happened just as things were getting good. Comfortable. Boring.

My parents had suggested on several prior occasions that I might suffer from BPD. But after this trip down memory lane, it finally started to occur to me that they were probably right all along.

I don’t want to keep hurting women. I don’t want to sabotage my relationships just as they start getting good and stable. I need to change.

I’ve started reading a workbook on DBT to get started, but I also wanted to reach out to all of you to ask what else I should do.

I’ve also scheduled my first therapy session with a woman near my hometown who specializes in treating the disorder. 

My question to all of you is, what else can I do to figure out how to change? I can’t keep living like this. I’m too old to keep hurting people and destroying every decent relationship I have with women.

I’ve actually been thinking about reaching out to my ex. She was the one who got away, and she has periodically checked in with me over the years to let me know she still loves me. My love for her has never gone away either. I’ve compared almost every relationship I’ve ever had to the one I had with her.

That said, I already know it can never work if nothing is done to address my chronic feelings of emptiness and my tendency to lash out and cause chaos to distract myself from those feelings. I don’t want to hurt her or anyone else again.

Do you think I have BPD? If so, what can I do aside from therapy and internal reflection/mindfulness? I don’t want to be this way anymore.