I recently discovered that, between the ages of 4 and 48, I met eight of the nine diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder. I still meet three or four, as evident from my history on ALL. There is a chance that I was diagnosed with it in 1977, at age 12. That diagnosis was almost never applied to children because it was considered a death sentence. BPD was long considered untreatable, and patients with BPD were considered a danger to the mental health of health care providers themselves. Diagnoses of BPD were almost never disclosed to the patient, the patient's parents and loved ones, or really anyone else except the few health care providers directly involved with the patient. Among them the diagnosis was never written down but whispered fearfully by unverifiable word-of-mouth with a focus on helping the health care provider protect herself from the patient. In the last seven years or so, however, an increasing amount of published research has shown that there are indeed effective treatments for BPD, and increasingly the focus is on diagnosing it as early as possible in a child's life so that treatment can be most effective and problems can be nipped in the bud before too much reinforcement occurs.
I finally understand many things--why I have for so long been so hard to get along with, have repeatedly alienated the very people whom I wanted to accept me, had stormy pesonal relationships, experienced dread of abandonment within minutes of having the security of my relationships confirmed, made snap decisions, abused cigarettes and the casino tables, alternatived between idealizing and demonizing the very same people within very short spans of time, experienced fits of rage and dissociation, sometimes felt numb and empty, etc etc etc. I also now understand why I always had this vague feeling that something very important was being hidden from me. It likely was. But now I have hope for the first time in many years. There is some chance I can self-administer the apropriate therapeutic techniques and make enough of a recovery to retrain and find a job again before reaching retirement age. Even though I know my possibilities are extremely limited, it _feels_ like they are limitless. And that's probably just the illness speaking. There's still a long way to go.
I finally understand many things--why I have for so long been so hard to get along with, have repeatedly alienated the very people whom I wanted to accept me, had stormy pesonal relationships, experienced dread of abandonment within minutes of having the security of my relationships confirmed, made snap decisions, abused cigarettes and the casino tables, alternatived between idealizing and demonizing the very same people within very short spans of time, experienced fits of rage and dissociation, sometimes felt numb and empty, etc etc etc. I also now understand why I always had this vague feeling that something very important was being hidden from me. It likely was. But now I have hope for the first time in many years. There is some chance I can self-administer the apropriate therapeutic techniques and make enough of a recovery to retrain and find a job again before reaching retirement age. Even though I know my possibilities are extremely limited, it _feels_ like they are limitless. And that's probably just the illness speaking. There's still a long way to go.
