We are black and white....

I am writing this specific blog to try and explain to our non bpd friends what it means when they say Borderline personality people are all either black and white with their attitudes and moods and actions...everything to the extreme. No grey zone. I will also explain why we act in bad ways sometimes. So basically we are to the extreme. It's all or nothing. If i decide i am going on a health kick, example am starting to eat very healthy and exercising and going to the gym and doing my meditation etc etc..well it"s to the extreme, to the point of burning myself out. I will end up exercising hours a day, cleaning hours a day, eating super super healthy, quit smoking...i know these are all good things, but its not done in a correct way. And it has to be perfect, if not i feel like a failure. For example if i start going to the gym and do let's say 20 minutes on the stairmaster then 20 mintues running and then if i go the next day and only do 15 minutes on one of the machines its not good enough, its as if i never even went to the gym. So i keep adding and adding to the exercises til its become ridiculous and a chore i hate. Quitting smoking is already hard enough alone...then i eat super healthy and if god forbid i ate super healthy for a week then have a peice of chocolate, poof i am a failure. The week of eating well does not count. It's as if we set unreachable goals and set ourselves up for failure. Then the more to the extreme you go the harder the fall when you stop. Then once you fall from your let's say extreme health kick, you fall hard. Then its to the extreme in a bad way, everything becomes out of control, it's like fuck the health, fuck everything, i am no good at it, i am a failure. I cant do it and i dont deserve it. So then we jump into the compulsions as i call them..if you have been reading me you know them...shopping, overeating, not eating, alcohol, drugs, no exercising, cutting...the list is long. Depression and anxiety kick in with the shame and guilt of having failed one more time. It feels as if one has taken ten steps forward and then poof back to 15 steps back. Then you have to get up once again and try again, and the longer you do this in life, the harder it is to believe yourself or trust yourself, you just feel and know you will fail if you try again. It gets discouraging and hard quite a bit. Why we jump to bad behaviors was talked alot about in my life skills group too, and i found it very interesting. All of us from what i am seeing in therapy and from my own experience or from what i feel, we all have very low self esteem and feel we have never been validated or heard. We all have a longing to belong, to feel loved or validated..their is an emptiness that is always there, a hole as if something is always missing. We long for love and acceptance. I will start by an example they gave us. Let's say a 4 year old falls down and hurts her knee and cries. The best way a parent can handle it is by acknowlding the pain by saying something like "i am sorry you fell it know it must hurt" console them a little bit and then say something like "what can we do about it now" and then put a bandaid on the bruise. This way the child was validated that her feelings were ok and she was heard and felt loved and accepted. If a parent says something like "stop it you are being a baby"...the child feels unvalidated. So most of us in therapy, were never validated in life and we long and search for that. Most of us only got attention when acting out. When young, by either throwing tantrums, or fighting...etc. This varies of course from individual to individual, but for me i was like that. I was also always talking loudly and demanding attention at all times, there was always some sort of drama in my life, i have been called a drama queen quite often. Then at the age of 12 i started drinking and behaving badly as well...on to drugs after that, bulimia. etc.This was the way i would get attention, when i would act out. So this is brainwashed into our heads sometimes. If i am not well, if i am suicidal or cutting or you know the list...then i get some sort of love, attention or validation. Someone is hearing me say in my self destructive way, I AM HERE, I HURT, I WANT TO FEEL LOVED AND VALIDATED. It is very hard to stop this behavior since it's been a ways of living from a very young age. And when we do get validated in a positive way, we dont believe it anyway since we are absolutly convinced we are bad horrible selfish people who do not deserve anything. Now we are learning in therapy how to self sooth ourselves and provide ourselves the validation we need instead of trying to get it from either your parents, or friends of close ones...varies from person to person. Usually it is more specifically one person or two that we project onto other people as well. Now learing to soothe yourself, and feed yourself that love you need well let me tell you that is not easy. Your whole life you believe you are a bad person and you dont love yourself or belive anything good about yourself. It is a long and hard process...I will post soon some of the techniques and coping skills we are learning in my life skills course. Thank you for reading me and again i appologize for grammar mistakes and my computer still will not let me do paragraphs unfortunatly :o)