"Make your life worth living", this seems to be the main motto of my DBT program. The doctors don't promise to make me happy forever or stop feeling pain; although it would be amazing, it is quite impossible. Currently I have finished my preparation phase, which consisted of understanding the causes of borderline personality disorder, but also of hinting towards the potential ways out.
At first, the doctors explained that people with borderline personality disorder were born slightly different. I did not get the proper medical condition but apparently our brains' center of emotions, the amygdala, does not work well, or perhaps it works far too well. Therefore, compared to healthy people, our emotions are much stronger and far more extreme, so that anything, even a seemingly insignificant subject, can upset us. And then we cry, burst with rage or tremble with fear far more frequently and far more intensely than the majority of humans. Inside our inner pot of emotions, everything is boiling and bubbling and there is not much we can do about it. And sometimes, when the mechanism overheats, we lose any control of our behavior, so we could do or say terrible things. Throughout my life, I lost so many friends due to these outbursts when I was not able to react any other way than going hysterical, screaming and swearing, and scaring everybody off.
The inability to control our emotions is often the result of being exposed to the so-called emotionally invalidating environment [1,2]. People around us (at home, at school or anywhere else) don't understand our strong feelings and emotions so they often invalidate them, causing us to feel bad about ourselves, triggering guilt, shame, anger and sadness. And the only outcome is that the negative emotions get even stronger and we know no means to control them. In extreme cases, this might end by self-mutilation or suicidal attempts because we see no other way out.
Here are several examples of emotional invalidation I experienced or witnessed:
"Big girls don't cry about something so silly!" When I was a child, I used to cry a lot, every little thing made me feel sad or guilty and then the tears started to flow. And when someone tried to calm me down this way, it all got even worse, because I started to feel ashamed that I was crying, I felt that I was a bad big girl.
"You have no reason to cry, nobody else is crying!" Well, I had a reason why I was crying, and invalidating it made me cry even more.
"It is nothing, you are just oversensitive." How many times have I heard that one. Yes, I might be more sensitive than most humans, but that does not make me wrong. Each of us has a different threshold of pain, similarly as some people in a certain room may feel warm and others cold. And none of them is mistaken.
"You shouldn't be sad about this." I shouldn't have been but I was. Again, this sentence made me feel guilty about my feelings and even more sad.
"Just get over it, there will be many other men in your life, he is not worth all those tears." That may be true but in that very moment I only saw the particular one. This actual attempt to cheer me up made me feel even smaller and ashamed for what I was feeling.
"Are you insane? Behave! You are terrible, you are acting like a lunatic, stop that madness! You are an idiot or what!" I witnessed this one on a bus, it was a mother shouting at her child. I thought this is exactly how personality disorders are being created.
"That again?" This particular one happened to me in relation to my suicidal thoughts, completely invalidating them. It made me feel absolutely terrible, even more suicidal, and totally worthless. It hurt even more because I heard it from my at-that-time partner whom I loved.
"I am not talking to you. There is something wrong with you. You are wrong." This is what a friend told me, one I believed would understand. After these words, I cut my veins open. Why would I live when my entire existence had been wrong?
As you can see, people born with strong emotions are extremely sensitive to any case of invalidation. Therefore, together with genetic predispositions, the invalidating environment made us who we are, the borderliners. We have never naturally learned to control our emotions because we have never understood them and we have never accepted them as they are. However, even when we have not always caused our problems, we are the ones who have to resolve them all by ourselves. And this is what DBT and other therapies are for.
At the end of the preparation phase of DBT, I had to create a list of my life goals. At first, they were very vague, such as that I wish to find the will to live or the meaning of my life. Later they became more specific, for example that I want to be financially independent or that I want to release an album with my band. Breaking all those goals to primary elements, we tried to find the thing preventing me from efficiently working on reaching them. Together with the DBT psychiatrists, we found the major issue is my terrible fatigue and demotivation. I'd rather sleep than work on finishing my University studies, and the same applies even to my art. Therefore, coping with this exhaustion is supposed to be one of the main targets I should focus on during DBT. It will be hard because right now I see no way out of the hell I am feeling within me. But maybe they will show me where the ladder is and how to climb it.
Here you can read more about what emotional invalidation is and what it can cause in other people:
[1] https://www.verywellmind.com/invalidating-environment-contributor-to-bpd-425186
Perhaps, just perhaps there is a way through all the fog.
Comments
Post a Comment