So I went to a new psychiatrist a few days ago, who whipped out her DSM and declared me to be borderline. I'm 22 and have been in ongoing treatment in one way or another since my mom found me cutting at age 12. It seems like I've had endless diagnoses - MDD, social anxiety, ADHD, Bipolar II...subsequently I've engaged in treatment really with the mentality of treating symptoms without necessarily identifying with any cohesive diagnoses. 

I'm having a really mixed reaction to this diagnosis. I suppose because maybe it resonates with me more than any before? But to be honest in many ways, not just psychiatric-ally speaking, I don't think it's reasonable to try to fit something so complex as a human psyche into some neat little box, or rather, a series of check boxes with this and that criteria to say, this is what you have, this is who you are. God, I just don't know.

But anyway, I do *strongly* identify with the mood aspect of BPD, to a lesser degree the identity, social idealization/devaluation, abandonment, I have had cutting/binging/substance abuse issues...it makes sense in a lot of ways. But the problem is, all that business about childhood abuse? Not even a little bit. No sexual abuse, no physical abuse, no neglect. Things did happen I suppose could be considered "traumatic" but I feel, I don't know, presumptuous/obnoxious putting it out there alongside something like childhood sexual abuse because it was not nearly as bad as all that:

 My father is bipolar/OCD and a drug addict but he was clean when I was a little kid and we were pretty close. He got suddenly mad pretty often but never at me, I never felt threatened personally I just knew it could happen at anytime and when it did I just remember wishing it would stop but he was never physical with my mom or anything either...I think he mostly turned it in on himself. But they got divorced and we lost the house when I was about 9/10, we moved 1,000 miles away and had a few years of really unstable living. You could say we were homeless but we never lived on the street, just with other (mostly mildly dysfunctional) people and for a while in a really crummy one room hotel with my mother, brother, and myself. Once that got settled I started cutting and it all rolled out from there...

I really just don't know about all this. I don't know if you could call that trauma...but that's when I started feeling the mood issues. Since then more classically traumatic things have happened...at 15 I was raped, it was my first sexual experience, there was social bullshit and I dropped out of HS, 19 my mother died with whom I was very very close and completely relied on...so IDK. I'm tired of thinking about it all but I do so obsessively especially since this diagnosis. I don't know what to do/think...