Life in a Bind – BPD and me

My therapy journey, recovering from Borderline Personality Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I write for welldoing.org , for Planet Mindful magazine, and for Muse Magazine Australia, under the name Clara Bridges. Listed in Top Ten Resources for BPD in 2016 by goodtherapy.org.

Monthly Archives: January 2015


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Memory Monday – “PayBACS – a tale of BPD splitting”

This is a very early post, and the only one I’ve written specifically about ‘splitting’ (or ‘black and white thinking’). This is despite the fact that it permeates so much of my thinking and appears regularly as an aspect of other posts as well. Although it describes a specific incident that happened after one of my therapy sessions, for me at least, the reactions and feelings involved are typical of my ‘splitting’, irrespective of the context in which it happens. This is the link to the post:

https://lifeinabind.com/2014/04/11/paybacs-a-tale-of-bpd-splitting/

It feels particularly pertinent for me at the moment, as for the first time in many months (probably since September and the end of the long August ‘therapy break’), I am finding my perceptions of, and feelings about my therapist, changing on an almost daily basis, and alternating from idealization to devaluation and back. The cycle is broken only by days when my feelings are of apathy and lack of feeling.  I remember how I used to hate never knowing how I was going to feel about her from one day to the next – and how I thought that that ‘phase’ was behind me, during those months of almost undisturbed ‘adoration’ between September and December. I need to remember that therapy is not a straight road but a winding path, which often doubles back upon itself so that it appears that we are going over the same ground, and through the same terrain, again. ‘This too shall pass’, I can hear a friend of mine saying  – I’m sure that’s right, but I’m still no clearer about the eventual destination….


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An open letter to my therapist

It’s been a long time since you’ve felt so much like the enemy. Since I’ve wanted to keep you at arms’ length and push you away. When I asked you a question at the start of our last session and felt brushed off by your reply, I was surprised at how much it hurt. Surprised because I’d been feeling so cut-off I wasn’t sure if you still had the power to wound me like that.  Before the Christmas break I would have just let go and cried, but instead I tried to contain it and keep it inside. I was guarded and I was holding back.

I’ve been turning away from you in session, I know I have, but I don’t know if you’ve noticed. It’s very subtle – just shifting in my chair so that I can turn a little to the side. It’s not deliberate, but I’m aware of it happening. Before the Christmas break I was pulling my chair closer because it felt as though the distance between us was too great; but recently I’ve been pushing myself back into my chair in an attempt to get further away. Sometimes I want to leave mid-session – it feels pointless to keep talking when I’m not connecting emotionally with anything I’m saying. It feels too difficult to carry on when you feel like an outsider and I feel so alone.

I feel disconnected – from you, and from my own feelings about you. I can’t reach you – you feel completely inaccessible. I feel as though I’m relating to you from behind a glass wall and I have no idea how to break through. What are you thinking and feeling? Are you feeling anything at all? Does anything I say have an emotional impact on you? And what do I have to do to get some sort of reaction from you that makes you seem real, human and invested in me, and not just like a well-meaning bystander?

When there’s a chink in the armour of my disconnection, I bounce between longing –  and anger and resentment. When I opened up to you about the more troubling aspects of my feelings for you, on some level I felt as though I was trying to forge a connection by bringing something to the table that you would find psychotherapeutically interesting – something to analyse and theorise over. It was almost as if I was giving you a special gift, not just of my trust, but one that represented professional excitement for you, and emotional intensity for me. But the reality was very different – it seemed to be just an ‘ordinary’ gift to you, and I felt little apart from confusion. As for you – I had no idea how you felt.

It was afterwards that the anger and resentment kicked in. You’re so keen to try and show me other viewpoints, other ways of seeing things. So keen to open me up to the possibility that there are explanations for things that don’t involve me blaming myself all the time. So maybe it’s you who cannot reach me; you who’s not trying hard enough and who’s failing to tune into me, and not the other way around. Do I really believe that? I don’t know. I want to hurt you and to protect you from hurt, all at the same time.

I feel so terribly unfair. You don’t deserve these words and on some level I know that they’re not true. But I’m so desperate and frustrated. Where is the person that I love? Where is that love, and why can’t I feel it as immediately as I did? Why do I hesitate to trust you?

I spend so much time not looking at you in session. And when I do look, I try and remind myself that what I’m seeing is thoughtfulness, rather than judgement; seriousness rather than dislike; amusement rather than dismissiveness. Sometimes I’m too afraid to look, in case it hurts. But sometimes I want to look and look at your face just to try and find something that I recognize. Maybe I want to see the smile that I love, and feel that it’s for me. Maybe I want to see empathy, understanding, or compassion. Maybe I want to see something of what I’m feeling, mirrored in you. Or maybe I just think that looking hard enough will be sufficient to build a connection again. But I could never keep your gaze for very long; and in any case I’m too worried that I could never keep your attention.

Therapy has such a limited repertoire of senses – and when I cannot look at you in session, the only thing that I have left is sound. Sometimes your voice changes – it’s one of the reasons that I’m here. I don’t know why, or what it means, but it’s beautiful and it makes me feel held and cared for. You used that voice in our very first session when I was drowning and in floods of tears, grieving over the imminent loss of Jane. You used it a few months ago when I was distraught because I thought that I was a ‘bad patient’ and was ‘failing at therapy’. It’s a warmer, softer, gentler voice, and I wish that I could remember it clearly, or bottle it and let it out when I need it most.

I so wanted some of that gentleness when we were talking about how overwhelmed I was feeling at work. I knew I couldn’t be physically held, but I wanted to be held by that voice. I wanted to feel it wash over me; for it to be my comfort. I needed you to reach me with that gentleness and to connect us with that warmth. But we don’t feel bound together anymore. There is no ‘we’. There is me trying to steer a course in a stormy sea, and there’s you trying to give directions from the shore. But all I wanted was for you to speak the voice that stills the storm.

I want to fix this. I want to fix us, but I don’t know how. You said I was resourceful – because I had tried to connect us by talking about things that I thought you would find interesting; by asking you questions to try and find areas of similarity between us and to draw us closer together. But this is my last resource; I don’t know what else to do. I wrote a letter to Jane once, about half-way through our sessions together, and it was the key that unlocked the most intense aspects of my feelings for her. Perhaps I’m hoping that it will do the same for us; or at least, that it will break down the defences that I feel I have been putting up so that I can release what I’m thinking and feeling to you, instead of holding it back. But I’m not sure that my last resource will work. Words are powerful, but on this occasion it feels as though they are failing me. They haven’t unravelled the knots that are keeping me trapped within myself. I’m throwing them out as a lifeline, but they’re falling short. They haven’t anchored me to you – like my spoken words, they still leave me feeling floating and alone.

It’s been a long time since you’ve felt so much like the enemy, but maybe I just have to trust that that will change. Unless we sit in silence when we meet, I have no choice but to keep on talking. I can keep on focusing on the ‘less difficult’ areas; I can keep trying to talk about you, and not me. But eventually I’m going to have to take a risk and talk about something harder, even if it feels like nothing. Eventually, I hope the nothing will start to feel like something and you won’t feel so distant anymore. In the meantime, please don’t get frustrated with me, and please don’t close yourself off. I’m trying to feel comfortable enough to feel – but I need to see you being you, to sense you’re really here. To quote a favourite TV episode of mine: “People who are broken don’t want you to be professional, they want you to be real”….

 

 [* quote is from the last episode of Season 2 of ‘My Mad Fat Diary’]

 


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Memory Monday – “In my Dreams”

In common with a few other bloggers at this time of year, I have decided to delve into my archives (which are not that ancient, as I only started blogging in March 2014!) and to share links to a few older entries,  via a series of ‘Memory Monday’ posts. A number of followers have joined me over the last ten months or so (many many thanks to those who have!) and I hope that re-sharing some of this material will be helpful, particularly for those who have started reading more recently. I know that when I start to follow a blog, though I may read new entries as and when they come in, it’s often difficult to find the opportunity to delve back into the archives. The posts that I share will be an assortment of entries which may have been either early; or not as widely read so far; or the opposite and most widely read; or a non-contradictory combination of the above! As far as possible, I will share past posts according to what feels most relevant and appropriate for what I am going through at the time; past posts that speak in some way, into the present. Hopefully, they may then link more naturally into new posts at around the same time.

For the first ‘Memory Monday’, I wanted to share a link to a post from July 2014, called ‘In my Dreams’.

https://lifeinabind.com/2014/07/20/in-my-dreams/

I was reminded of it only a couple of days ago, when I was thinking about how disconnected I have been feeling from my therapist, since the Christmas break. The phrase that entered my mind was that “I feel as though I am relating to her from behind a wall of glass” – she feels emotionally inaccessible.

My very next thought was to recall a dream described in the above post, in which I escaped from a room where the walls were made of glass, only to find myself at the top of a tall building, with no obvious means of being rescued. At the time, I had wondered whether the dream was about therapy, or even about myself. A couple of days ago, I wondered not only whether the dream was in some way related to my current feeling of disconnection from my therapist; but also whether the way I am feeling about my therapist is a projection of how I am feeling inside. Disconnected from my own feelings. If that’s the case, perhaps that then feeds back into the interpretation of the original dream.

Although I have not been posting on my ‘usual’ weekly basis since the New Year – due to very low mood carried through from the Christmas break and an unfeasibly large amount of work – I have a long list of new posts I would love to start work on, once I am feeling a bit better and things are back on track. The link above feels relevant to some of that new material ‘waiting in the wings’, as I hope to write more about dreams in the context of therapy and in the context of feelings for one’s therapist. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the link above!

[I hope the format of including a link in the main body of the post works well, but please do give me your feedback via comments, if not. I spent an interesting time reading about all the various methods of re-posting one’s own archival material, and it was nowhere near as straightforward as I had thought! There is no re-blog function for one’s own posts (unless you follow your own blog and then try and find the ancient post in your Reader!); changing the date-stamp and republishing can cause ‘error’ messages for any earlier links to the original posts floating around the internet; ‘sticky’ posts don’t give the option to comment on the re-post; and posting the entire text of an earlier post again, can create problems with Google search and duplicate content. Sigh. Which is why I settled on a link, plain and simple. 🙂  ]