Just because you feel rejection doesn't make you a Borderline

Hey guys,

2nd post in 3 days whoop! Getting good at this blogging malarkey!

Today blog is about rejection as the title suggests...god that sounds like a teacher talking sorry. The reason for this particular post is that it was my brother's 30th Yesterday and this has brought up a lot of feelings of rejection and abandonment for me. (thank you Sharnie for putting up with the test and Charley for talking to me for hours on Skype and keeping me busy, I am truly grateful for all the support that I get! And YOU for reading this blog!)

I want to suggest and show you that it is possible to feel these things and not necessarily have a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder!

Many of you know that I am currently fighting my BPD/EUPD (Emotionally unstable personality disorder, the term used across the UK) as I feel that I have grown out of this diagnosis. I am glad that I have won a small battle and my primary diagnosis is now PTSD!

Anyway for some background....

Once my parents had become very much involved in my life again (Not a good thing in hindsight as this will show you) my BPD became very apparent as a lot of it was to do with the controlling nature of my mother (and later my father as well), and Rachel being extremely present (she's the very impulsive one, plus the Prozac when I was in hospital) I came very very impulsive and chaotic and displayed almost all the characteristics and diagnostic criteria, the only one not was anger. 

At this time I was overdosing a lot, and texting my brother as he was a doctor to ask what would happen to me. I was very unwell at the time and this is why I ended up being sectioned.

Then Lavender came, and I was able to feel safe enough to actually open up about the biggest trigger to my illness the abuse that my father inflicted on Lucy. This was the beginning of my healing process, and Lucy has made a lot of progress since then, with me now disputing that I even have the diagnosis as a whole (rather than the different parts of Lucy).

Sorry if I bored you with that, and sorry for the switchness, I will try and control this this post!

Anyway...

In the DSM V The first criteria for BPD is

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behaviour covered in Criterion 5. 

On the website Borderline world they interpret it as this, I think this is aimed at carers and other people that are involved with people with BPD

These traits can sometimes make it very difficult for a person to maintain a relationship with someone with BPD, as their behaviour and actions can be difficult to tolerate and hard to understand. It is important for those close to a BPD sufferer to educate themselves on the condition so that they can empathise with what the sufferer is going through and how they are feeling. 

Having had friends that have had BPD I can guess what they mean in terms of abandonment and rejection is that things like the fear of abandonment and rejection when they know that they are going nowhere is really difficult to understand unless you have been there!

(trying to be objective about this!!!)

Well now that I am fighting this diagnosis, it is possible that I will still feel these things, I might have borderline traits or maybe in this situation anyone would feel this way. I personally think that many people show the traits to borderline, as many react in a similar way.

Now via that detour back to my brother's 30th birthday. I felt sad that I couldn’t be a part of his celebrations (although he's in Spain according to facebook!) or be able to even send a card, as I don’t know where he lives, I am not friends with him on facebook, I don’t have his mobile number etc. etc. But also the feelings of abandonment and rejection by him came rearing its ugly head! 

I know that I had my part to play in the reasons that he has decided not to have me in his life, I was very unwell at the time and I wish I had the opportunity to show him how much I have changed. But I also know that my mother will have got to him after I came clean about the abuse that I suffered and the subsequent police investigation (and then the cutting of all ties to my parents), and that will have played a part in his decision too. Or at least this is what I can surmise from what I knew of him then. Or maybe he decided to take my lead in cutting from my family but I am pretty sure they are in some sort of contact. I cant read his mind and so I will never know why he has cut me from his life.

But the abandonment is real, the rejection is real, and I think a lot of people would feel the same if they were in my situation. 

I feel abandoned by him because he is the only real person (apart from my parents who I am sure are in complete denial about their role within our family) I feel that he is the only person who could not only verify my family situation as a kid, even if he had no idea of the abuse, we were a very dysfunctional family as a whole. And this of cause has had its part to play in my illness over the years. But mostly because I love him unconditionally and I thought he did to.

My rejection is also very very real. He one minute was talking to me, and coming to see me while he was at Brighton Pride (and this was after it all kicked off with my parents) the next a text saying he was only down for the day and couldn't meet up. And then nothing, not a thing, and nothing ever since. I wanted him for a short while to be my next of kin while I sorted it out, but no contact with either me or Lavender (Sharon, one of the nurses, bless her tried her hardest). Its such a big rejection when you are going through the hardest time of your life (a police investigation against your dad) to suddenly and a few weeks later be completely rejected by your brother hurts. It hurts big time. 

BUT you could say that these two thought patterns of mine are part and parcel of a BPD diagnosis but who wouldn’t feel like this when this has happened, who wouldn't feel hurt?

My example is a very current one as I explained, but smaller ones could be used. I do constantly check with my friends that I haven’t upset them (sorry guys) but that is actually against me having a BPD diagnosis as they just run with the idea that rejection and abandonment has taken place and either seek revenge or internalise it (I do realise that I am seriously generalising here) but they don't check it out! Also although I am very insecure about wondering if I upset people I don’t think for a minute they are going to run away as I don’t give them the reason to (or at least I hope that I don't) any more.

I have changed, and it is possible, BPD is not a life sentence!!!

Luce xxx

image sorced online and not my own

Fathers day

hi guys,

Well it's fathers' day in the UK, and I am desperately trying to keep busy as I find it incredibly difficult especially as its my brothers birthday tomorrow, a day of rejection but that’s for another post!

I'll start with what I wrote in my journal for my CPN, it kinda encapsulates how I am right now....

Well its fathers' day and I am struggling. Wanna cry but can't. I am so confused by everything. My dad did what he did to me and I completely and utterly hate him for that – sorry trying to keep control. But, it wasn’t all bad, like when he used to read to us until lights out, or more likely we were asleep first. But that memory is tinted with what happened after – there were others (good memories that is) I just cant remember any of them. Why can't I remember them? I just remember the bad stuff, all the hurt and pain, all the lies and manipulation and it still goes on, inside my head.

I'll stop there as Rachel takes over and that not a good thing!

I think for many whose abuser is a family member they might be able to relate to that, how there are good bits, good memories but they are taken over by the completely catastrophic bad stuff, whether the abuse physical, sexual or emotional. Or at least in my experience that’s what happens. 

However in some way this would make things easy, as you can just hate the abuser and not have to get confused by it all, but nothing is ever all bad or all good. Sometimes a good memory comes in, not when you want it though,  but for me it always seems tinged by everything else that has gone on. Like when my dad was so excited that I was home for my first Christmas after I started uni, he gave me a huge hug, but of cause he had more than one reason to be happy that I was home.

While I have been trying to write this – its been a lot harder than I thought it would be – I have been trying to think of good memories, birthdays or something, but nothing really forms...am I the only one? And the bits that do form always are tinged with his stuff (sorry just can't write that word right now, its far too close to home), plus with my mother being so emotionally abusive as well, good memories were always few and far between

Maybe if I could understand why, just why, then maybe I could deal with all the crap of my life and heal...but that is far too simple even I know that. I do know some of his history, 

For all of us fathers' day isn’t a good day, we are a whole in some ways, and our dislike of today is one of those, whoever I am, whatever age that they are there is always something that means that today isn’t a great one, its just full of how father's should be, and how far from that reality mine is. 

I mean who takes a 5 year old to a group of the occult? And explains it as getting the evil out of them? A FIVE year old? They are full of innocence and playfulness, why inflict that on LuLu? 

OMG I hate that name, that's what HE calls me.

See I keep flittering between people (another reason that this is hard) but one of (I don't think you have met char) sees everything in the 3rd person and so can see the real horror of it, but when we are any of the others it hurts like hell, and I, Lou, still believe that I am evil, and that he was only trying to make best out of a bad situation, I mean what other parent wouldn't want to fix a child? But for Rosie, she just is hurt, physically, emotionally and mentally by the whole situation, but it is her that it happened to.

Right I am going to go, as this isn’t working out as I’d hoped and is getting very confusing in my head as everyone wants to talk :(

Luce xxxx

Food, Control and me

TRIGGER – Quite Explicit with EATING DISORDERS, SELF-HARM, and ABUSE

Hey guys,

Well I'm out of hospital completely 2 weeks tomorrow :) it feels good to be free, but the fight doesn’t stop there it carries on...well that sounds so positive, not quite how I feel right now, I am struggling the last few days, but on the whole I am a million times better than I was before I went into hospital.

This post came about after a discussion at a survivors group I go to, around the need for control...so this is my take on it. I know that this is something that I have talked about on here, but things change, new ideas come about etc., and this is something that I will always have close to my heart (after all my undergraduate dissertation was around Anorexia!)

Food has been my control for a very long time, my body isn’t mine, so why should I care what I do to it? It belongs, as I have said before, to the people who took it from me time after time after time.

I feel completely out of control, because of the dissociation (that is still happening regularly), because of the flashbacks, because life is not something that you can really, honestly, control, they took that away from me. But I cant cope with being out of control so have to do something to stay in control in comes the eating disorder. This has more than one use, but for the moment I will keep on the control. Food, at least in the First World, is something people can control, whether it is controlling intake to the point of Anorexia, binging and purging, or comfort eating. I go from not eating very much to the binging and purging, and I honestly cannot remember a time that I did not do this. Unlike my self-harm this is a lot more hidden, there are no (at least external) scars that anyone can see.

When I am restricting I feel so much in control, seeing the numbers go down on the scale just reinforces that control for me. But I cant keep this up for ever, I can go weeks, even months doing the restricting, and then something happens and I have to start eating at least vaguely normally and this freaks me out so I purge, and this little cycle continues.  I am in control of my food intake, or at least I like to think that I am. I feel so much better knowing that there is something in this world that I can control.

I haven’t regularly partaker in taking laxatives for a few years, but every so often it rears its ugly head and that come part of the control. What I cant get out from making myself sick I get out the other way. But for many laxatives are a regular intake and I completely get it, it got to the point in Bangor where no place would sell them to me, even though I was “rotating” where I got them from, and I did begin to steal them...you think this would shock me into stopping -  tablets are the only thing I have ever stolen from a shop – but no, the only reason I stopped is I ended up in ITU after a fire and so stopped for 4 weeks and then lived at home for 6 months which made it difficult and so the regular daily diet of laxatives stopped. For me the number of laxatives I took was control too, I took the exact number I needed to for the result I wanted. It did involve increasing the number as you get used to senekot very quickly!

Men, if you can call them that, the paedophiles and rapists that took my control away did it systematically, whether it be over a few minutes (as in one rape) or over several years. They have the control in my head, telling me that I am Evil, that I am worthless, that I am there's even now, now that I have no contact with no single one of them. Every single minute in my head they are telling me this. And I still completely believe them. I think everyone gets frustrated with me because it must seem like I am getting nowhere with it, but as someone once told me I had 27 years of the 32 years of my life of this, a few years of people telling me that I am not, isn’t going to even dent the trauma from that. See they still have control over me. And that what they want, they want that every single second there control is over me. And I am so so scared it will never go away that I will never get “real” control back...whatever that is!

As I said eating disorders, such as my own, have another use, and so does my self harm. For each person it is different for me it is about getting the evil out of me. Black Magic when I was little didn’t help, so every time I purge, have diarrhoea because of laxative abuse, cut, I am ridding myself of that evil. But not just the evil that I was born with, the evil that they have put in me. As I do with my eating this is often (not always) a cycle for me, going from the eating to the self-harm and so forth.  I need to rid myself of my body. Its not that I want to die, cause its not my head that what I want to rid myself of, but of them.

I am sorry that this has been so blunt, and hope that the trigger warning at the beginning means that people are not too much affected (but going to do here is a link to b-eat the eating disorders charity in the UK, and National Self Harm Network as well as a link to Eastbourne Survivors Resources page). Looking back I sound angry, that is not what I meant to come across, I am just a scared little girl, namely Tracheal, who has no other way to cope. This leads me onto the last thing that I want to say, whatever maladaptive coping strategies that you use, whether like me its food and self-harm, or whether its drugs, alcohol or sex its what’s keeping you ALIVE! Don't beat yourself up about it :)


Luce xxx