My life and how i got here

Most borderline personality people have the following symptoms or ideas Paranoid ideas Relationship instabilities Angry outburts, affective instability and extreme abandonment fears Impulsive behavior and identity disturbances Suicidal behavior Constant feeling of emptiness A deeply rooted belief that one is a bad person Most of us are extremely sensitive to other people's feelings Their are many personality disorders, from what i have read and learned, bpd is kind of a combination of all of them which makes it very very hard to treat. Patients usually need from 2 to 10 years of therapy to overcome this. I have been in different types of therapy in the last 2 years, and 6 months ago i started a 2 year therapy program at the Allan Memorial institute in Montreal. I can say it is the absolute most difficult thing or road I have ever been on and i still have a long way to go, but it is already starting to change my life in good ways and i find myself very fortunate to have this opportunity but it is a road full of up's and down's. There is however for the first time in my life a light at the end of this dark tunnel. And i do appologize for any grammar errors. This can be very hard for others to understand...i will share a bit of my life and story to hopefully shed some light about this. Before i tell my story, i want to make it clear i am not mad at my family or friends or anyone that is in my story, i will not name anyone but if you recognize yourself in this story i mean no offense at all. I am sharing myself to help others and myself. I have memories as far back as when i was one year old. I remember my babysitter one day brought me to buy me new pants which i did not like but was too shy to tell her. On our way back home from the store, we stopped at friends of hers, once in the house their were about 7 or 8 woman there, i remember sitting on a chair and thinking i don't like these pants, surely someone will notice they are not nice on me. I remember feeling very uncomfortable, wondering how to sit, should i talk or not, will they find me boring if i don't talk. I was about one year old and already i felt i was not good enough and someone already wanted to please people so they would like me. Around the age of three and a half or four, my parents seperated. My dad moved about 40 minutes away. I remember missing him so much one night, i called him and was crying on the phone asking him to come over. Being the loving dad he is he came to visit me. He brought me for a drive, and he told me that i had to be strong going through things like this and to not cry and be "tuff". That somhow stuck in my head, and from then on i became "tuff" and no matter what happened to me in life after that day, i pushed it deep down and always smiled and told everyone i was fine and have been like that ever since, never showing pain, sadness or anger. Around the age of 6 my mom went through a depression and asked me if i would go live with my dad but i wanted to stay with her. She was not well enough to really take care of me. We have talked about this. I felt unwanted and asked her a couple of years if this was in my imagination, she told me that at that time in her life she loved me very much but did not want me around and wished i would have gone to my dad's. She loved me very much but just did not want me there...from then on i have had a feeling of being unwanted in life. This caused me to become a troublesome child always seeking for attention. By the age of twelve i started drinking since i could not face the world sober i had zero self-esteeem, by the age of 16 i was into drugs, hard drugs and was always drunk....no one knew something was wrong with me as i was always the life of the party. I had already learned how to be the fun one, the one people wanted to be around since i knew how to be a cameleon and adapt my behavior to what people wanted, and i was always smiling and fun. I had bulimia. I started smoking cigarettes as well. At around 16, i started going out with a guy. At the begining i was on a pedestal to him....that quickly changed and i found myself into an abusive relationship. It became worse and worse. It started with me not being allowed to see my friends, my whereabouts had to be known at all times, then the insults and verbal abuse began soon to be followed by physical abuse. He would slap me in the face, pull my hair...then it became worse, lifting me up with one hand by the neck and almost choking me to death...peeing on me in the shower. Hitting me with full force. Following me around when i was not with him. Constantly telling me i was ugly and fat, no good and would never amount to anything. One day he hit me so hard while i was driving, he pulled my hair and slammed my face on the driving wheel and i went blind for one minute. That day i left him...the following month was one of the scariest months of my life. He was stalking me. I remember crouching in my bathroom while he was circling the house throwing rocks at the windows and yelling ,trying to get in the house. One day i was driving my car with a very good friend and he started following us with his car and almost made us have an accident. Then one day after my mom had left for work, he walked into the house and locked all the doors, he proceeded to beg me to take him back, he would have done anything, offering to buy me clothes, give me money and saying i could now talk to my friends and do what i want, he was crying but i kept saying no. Then he switch to anger and started saying i had promised him we would make love one last time which was not true, he forced me upstairs and rapped me. He then left before my mom came home for lunch. I never said a word. About a week later he called to tell me he had bought a gun and was going to either kill himself or kill me...i then had to tell my mom he was threatenning me. She immediatly went to talk with him for about 4 hours, to this day i have no clue what she told him but he never bothered me ever again after that. I of course was smiling and saying i was fine, cause i had to be "tuff", so i did not tell anyone what had happenned. After that i started drinking alot more and doing more drugs and had absolutly no self esteem or self worth. All i wanted to do was party away, and of course i always seemed happy and was the life of the party. By this time i had become a pro at hiding my feelings and a pro at acting in whatever way needed to please people, a real cameleon. I knew with this person, that makes them happy so i will act this way and they will like me...i had a ton of friends. I did all of this unconsciously, I only see this now. At 19 I left for Calgary with a one way ticket and 200$ to go live with my now ex husband. I was married 13 years. Many many beautiful years, but we were very disfunctional for each other, even though this person is amazing. The last 2 years of my marriage were very very unhealthy, he was by then a coke addict and i was co-dependant and put all of my happiness on his shoulders. He finally had the sense to leave me. I wanted to leave but did not have the guts. This was my worse fear, abandonment. After my divorce things started going downhill. I jumped to many bpd compulsions, excessive shopping (had to do bankruptcy), drinking, drugs, sleeping around...ANYTHING to take the pain away and to fill that sense of emptiness and loneliness that has followed me my whole life. About 2 years ago, i could not function at work anymore and had to go on a sick leave. I became pregnant after a drunken night of sex. I had to get an abortion, one of the worse and most painful experience of my life. I ended up a month in the hospital since they did not do the procedure correctly. This happenned in the month of august. I went into a severe depression. I pushed away my best friend, the one who understood me the most. That was just as hard as losing my husband. Other friends and some family members slowly went away. I pushed them all away with my scary overwhelming behavior. I was too much for anyone to handle. The few friends that stayed were angels for being for me. But i was soon pretty much alone. I could not get out of bed, had no desire to eat, clean, see anyone, some days i would not even want to shower and had to be forced. When december came around, i hung out with a girl who was a cutter and she made it sound so releiving....one night i was drinking alone and all of my emotions came out so i took a bread nice and cut my arms from wrists to elbows all the way around my arms, about 25 cuts on each arms going all around the arms...and that was MY hitting rock bottom of my life. These are some of the big things that happened to me in my life. There are many other things but these were the big ones....this is where my life took a turn and where i finally got the help i needed. My whole life i thought i was alone with this sometimes crazy mind of mind, i thought no one else on the planet thought like me and that i must be crazy. The only person that kind of understood me the most was my best friend which i had also pushed away as i mentionned earlier. There are many people in my family with severe bi-polar, my grandmother shot herself in front of my aunt a month before i was born. That aunt has severe bi-polar as well, and my family but mostly my mom has had to take care of her her whole life. By that time, i thought perhaps that was what i had, but something was different and i was then diagnosed with BPD which i had never heard of. When i went to my first therapy group session and others started talking, i was SHOCKED, i was thinking there are others like me out there, they speak my language, they get it they understand. I AM NOT ALONE....i cried for about 2 days when i got home after that. Tears of relief. Which brings me to today. Alot of the experiences i just wrote affected me quite a bit....perhaps a friend or family member that is close to a bpd person might understand by reading this that we, from a very young age for various reasons feel unloved, unwanted, unworthy and believe we are bad people....which explains our compulsions to either drink, do drugs, cut, have sex with strangers, go on shopping sprees, binge eat, stop eating, help others to the point of forgetting about ourselves, we are sensitive to other people's feelings....the list goes on. I can be in a room with 10 people and if one person is not feeling well, i can feel it very strongly, and it gives me so much pain to think someone is not ok or hurting, i want to do anything to make them feel better, it is stronger then me. And when those feelings of emptiness, sadness or rage, which we have no clue how to express, we will do ANYTHING to numb them by jumping to one of those compulsions. We also have no sense of self identity, when one has spent a lifetime of being what we think others want us to be in order to feel loved or wanted, when we stop that, then we are left with "who am i", who am i when i am not trying to be what others want me to be...we dont know ourselves at all. Most of us suffer from panick attacks, severe anxiety, bouts of depressions, bouts of highs, some days the world makes no sense to us at all, we feel unreal, or as if things aren't real, alone, suicidal thoughts, not being able to trust our own feelings or knowing what is real and what is imagined, we have bouts of paranoia and imagine no one likes us, how could they, we believe we are horrible people, the feeling of emptiness and loneliness are so strong some days it feels unbearable. Everything is black and white, no grey. On bad days even during all this therapy, i can say personally, i need extra love and attention. I have once spent 2 weeks locked in my room hiding from the world. I was once convinced for a week that i was so horrible that i was a sociopath. This is very hard on people around us and very very hard to understand and a lot of friends or family members do not understand at all and do not know how to deal with us and just leave. It can be very lonely at times. I cant imagine those of you who live with this without help. The help i am getting is saving me and my life. As therapy moves along i am starting to understand and know myself a lot better. I am learning how to express my anger and sadness in a healthy way, how to be vulnerable, how to trust my feelings. It gets better and better but there are still many days where you are right back to where you were and those days are very hard and lonely and it is extremely hard to not jump into my compulsions, sometimes i fuck up and run to one of my compulsions but slowly I am starting to learn how to prevent ahead from running to my compulsions or how to stop it by myself, and other times i just cant yet. I am learning tools to deal with these compulsions, to deal with anxiety or panic attacks, suicidal thoughts or urges to cut or any of the above compulstions. It is a long road to beomcing ME. In future posts i will be sharing some of the tools i am learning and exercises and so forth. This was very very hard for me to write, it is not easy to put yourself out there and to show your faults to the world but this is very very important to me as i want to make a difference and help others, that is why i chose to share these very private experiences and thoughts of mine. Thank you for reading