I am a 22 year old female who has always struggled with depression and anxiety. Two years ago my mom and brother told me about BPD. When they described it to me I knew that almost everything rang true to how I had been feeling for a long time, specifically quiet BPD. (I have not yet seen a doctor to be clinically diagnosed but I intend to.) My abandonment issues started as a child as both of my parents worked a lot and didn’t have a lot of time to spend with me. In middle school I started self-harming as a way to cope with the way I was feeling on the inside. I never showed my scars to anyone except some of my closest friends. I had become close to this group of girls in freshmen year of high school and that is when my depression started to really get bad. I had confided in them what I was going through, and some days I would not be able to hang out or do things because of my state of mind. That is when they told me that my depression was too much for them to handle and that they could no longer be friends with me. I think that is when my trust issues with people and friends started to really become apparent. The rest of high school was a struggle. I did my best to have friends and to seem “emotionally normal.” Sometimes I would wake up so full of anxiety that I would have panic attacks before school just thinking about the social interactions I would be having there that day. There would be days where I would get to school and something would set me off so badly, I would have to call my mom crying and begging her to take my out for the day. I basically bottled up my emotions and took everything out on myself. I started getting therapy soon after that. It definitely helped me learn to cope but I didn’t know yet what it was I was going through. I was getting treatment for depression but not BPD specifically. My therapist told my mom that she couldn’t bail me out of school anymore anytime something triggered me. That was a hard lesson to learn but it taught me that in certain life situations you have to push through the uncomfortable. I did group therapy and individual therapy and while in group it was very difficult for me not to compare my pain to other’s pain. I have always had a horrible habit of comparing my life to everyone around me and it has a way of making me feel never good or even bad enough. For example, in group there was a girl who had cut so bad that she needed stitches. I asked myself, you hate yourself, you’re sad too, why don’t you cut yourself that bad? So I started cutting worse. I was very good at presenting a false self that was happy and confident. I got a job when I was 16 and for the first two/three years of that I wore the same long sleeved shirt every day so that nobody would see my scars and think of me any differently. Everyone at work said I was the most upbeat person to be around and “how could I always be so happy?” Hearing them ask me that hurt because inside I knew how small and fragile I felt. After two years I let it go and started wearing short sleeves and I had someone ask me about my scars once, it was a bit awkward, but nice to know that he cared. I have also been in an on and off relationship with someone who suffers from self-destructive BPD for 5 years. In a way this helped us to understand each other and he was there for me even when I was having my worst mental break downs and vise versa. I truly believe that he could be my twin-flame (as crazy as that sounds). However, in our teenage years we did not treat each other well and we do have a past. While I tried to grow beyond it he held onto it and while I withdrew into myself as we would fight he would place all the blame on me reassuring me emotionally it was my fault we never worked. When we date I push the rest of the world out for some reason. I end up not talking to my friends and family as much because I think I don’t need them. I have my one person and that’s all I need. This creates self-isolation problems and I start to feel lonely and jealous over the fact that he still talks to his friends (even though it’s my fault I don’t put the effort in to keep mine). We broke up again recently because I have become to withdrawn to the world around me and he has turned bitter towards me thinking that I don’t care or love him anymore. He spits words like venom and after 5 years I have become mostly numb to it but he still says things that hurt and I ask myself if he truly loved me how can he say the things he says? Letting this relationship go is so hard for me. When someone has been your person for so long and you’ve been through so much with them how do you get over that... Then there’s coronavirus. As much as my job was not my favorite thing it was fulfilling in ways. I worked in a retail store so I was able to help people find what they are looking for and socially interact every day. Since I started working there at 16 when I graduated it provided that social interaction that I now feel I needed. Once coronavirus started I quit. I was happy that I had the chance to do it this way because I never wanted to put in my two weeks and have all my coworkers saying goodbye to me. For whatever reason,
I’m not good with goodbyes (probably abandonment related.) So I quit over the phone and my friends had no clue. I was very close with two
girls at work whom I called my “best friends” and once I quit there they made attempts to reach out and hang out and I never could get myself to go. It’s not because I don’t like them, in fact, I do still consider them my best friends. I just know that in any social situation there is a possibility of getting triggered and it holds me back from everything. When I get triggered I know exactly when it happens and how I’m going to respond to it. I start to disassociate and go into this almost blank stare where I feel like I don’t have to blink. I stop caring about whatever is happening in the present moment and I crawl inside my mind and it’s like there’s a hundred open boxes there. The thing that triggered you now is in the first box but now that that box has been unpacked the floodgates are open. All of my triggers come flying at me and things from years ago that I haven’t thought about resurface in my head. My immediate instinct is I have to get away. I have to be alone. I have to deal with this myself. When I get triggered around people I just shut down. It’s like flipping an on and off switch and once it’s off it’s stuck and you can’t turn it back on. Sometimes it takes hours or days for me to calm down from an episode. It can be a seemingly small trigger that I know in my head is not monumental but emotionally I can’t get past the fact that it IS monumental. When I was younger and more social my false self was so convincing sometimes I was think it was my real self. Now that I’ve been alone and seeing no one but my family for over a year my symptoms have gotten so much worse. I struggle with looking people in the eye, starting conversation, maintaining conversation, interpersonal communication as a whole. Some days I stay in my room all day just because I don’t even want to have interaction with my mom and dad. It makes me so sad to feel this way and know that one day I’m not going to have them here and even while I do I can’t always enjoy being around them. It’s so frustrating for me and for them. I idolize suicide more often than I would like and struggle to find an answer or a path for myself that is going to make me feel happy. I want to seek help. I want to have coping mechanisms to deal with my triggers and the outside world. I want to be close to people and I want people to be able to be close to me. I want to be able to maintain relationships with people long-term. Does anyone have any experience or advice relating to dealing with quiet BPD or BPD in general? Specifically DBT therapy? I would love to know what has worked for others in terms of coping skills, maintaining relationships, and just living a happy life. Thank you for reading my post and I appreciate your time.