Hello my friends. Today I listened to a podcast by psychologist Dr. Ramani describing borderline personality disorder. And I saw that BPD along with CPTSD characterize me. And I also realized that my BPD is environmental being a direct result of narcissist parent abuse from the four people who called themselves my parents. Dad, mom, his new wife and her boyfriend cum husband: all of them exhibited extremely narcissistic behaviors in various stripes of covert, vulnerable, malignant and grandiose.
If I'm understanding borderline personality correctly, or should I say this is how I manifest, it's intense self-hatred, dangerously low self-esteem, fear (particularly of abandonment, threat and angering someone) and suicidal tendencies. I've acted out with self-harm since I was about 6. I've experienced and put loved ones through panic meltdowns with some outward violence but mostly self-harm.
What it looks like is irrational fear. Or what I believe it must look like. I've been so gaslit, invalidated, shamed and shunned by family of origin that I have come to think I'm as bat shit crazy as they've painted me. What they saw was me falling apart. What they didn't see was me holding it together for a scary long time, having a sadly too high pain and cruelty tolerance. Nor did they see my supposed caregivers exploiting, manipulating, coercing, raging at, violently punishing, abandoning, double standard, parentifying, endangering, neglecting and abusing me at every turn. And allowing each other to do so as well. What normal parents would protect their children from, my parents and their partners engaged in.
Or maybe outsiders didn't see me as the mess. Maybe that's the version I was told. As I look back, I can't remember ever daring to show anything but hoop-hopping groveling servitude. And I do remember a LOT of times my parents acting out. They were violently rageful, passive-aggressively cruel and blatantly abusive. They did outrageously immoral, risky, impulsive, thrill-seeking, selfish, unethical and illegal things. They lied, deceived, scammed and cheated a lot. And left the job of making it all look like normal family to me who had to cover for their entitled, arrogant, spoiled, immature, irresponsible and frankly creepy behavior. And I did as best I could.
I got used to being afraid a lot. Afraid of rages, being left behind, letting people down, the police being called, dangerous creeps molesting me, the list goes on. And I held it together until I couldn't. When the seams split and the weight broke me, I fell apart. But not as often as I should have given my circumstances. Sadly it was never with the people who caused it and deserved it. It was always with my innocent new family. Because of course they were safe and my family of origin wasn't. And every time I did, I felt unbearable guilt.
There was this sense of complete bewilderment every time. I could barely remember what happened. And I always believed the worst of myself. And my dreams bear me out. I endlessly trauma nightmare about my terrible, unspeakable failings. I have somehow let everyone down and they have formed a sort of tribunal of humiliation but will not tell me what I've done. Interestingly, what I didn't see in the dreams but was always there, was that my "failing" was in being unable to complete their ridiculously impossible, uncommunicated, nonsense demands. And me losing my shit is caused by confusion, guilt, shame and self-loathing for failing. It's never directed where and to whom it should be to the folks who caused the shitshow in the first place.
Perhaps this was the narcissists' gaslighting grand design, to con me into believing I was the problem. That I was responsible to and for them not the other way around. This was to distract from their own problematic behavior. If they could keep me dancing, maybe no one would catch on. And they could carry on with their awful actions, unchecked. That's the scapegoating. A poor little puppet doll.
And the little doll didn't get any of this. She just kept smiling her sewn on smile, through unspeakable terror. They had so damaged her that emotional leprosy made her unable to feel anything but fear. Everything triggered and made her trauma respond. And the poor thing had no clue that that none of this was her. It's was the fucking puppet masters pulling her strings and laughing as she danced. They said jump and little doll put on her brave face and jumped as high as she could and it was never enough and she always fell on her poor painted-on face.
And when you take this level of buried trauma with you into what passes for adulthood, it is not a healthy outcome. I see now too that it isn't just weird things that trigger me. Actually, it's pretty common sense. Another's anger, being shamed or blamed, someone else's dysregulation. The children's tears would physically tear me apart. Did I mention trauma survivors are often danger level empaths?
I wish I could go back to when my children were young and comfort my younger self. I wish I could help her see that she was never the problem. She was caught in their crosshairs. I wish I could help her see thing clearly, to trust her instincts. I would have been a better mom and wife and happier person. But there are no do-overs. And for that I will never forgive my parents. For my trauma that they inflicted on me, that I without understanding how or why inflicted on my children. I want those years back clean.
So the BPD: The constant fear of abandonment, anger, failure, driving, car washes, my own shadow. You name it I fear it. And that fear impels me, without my knowing it, to do what looks like strange things. Some of it hurts others. Some is just odd. It all hurts me.
It hasn't been helped over the years by a lot of toxic-Christianity and pseudo- religious bullshit from the many churches whose pews I filled. God gets traumatized, gaslit, abused kids. Christians, by and large, do not. They make the pain soooo much worse with their smarmy victim-shame-blaming. I could have shaved decades off my recovery if I'd just not heard it. Better no church than bad church. And the same with counseling. I've experienced a lot of setbacks there too.
Because the problem is not that most people don't get us. It's that they WON'T GET US. They want to fit our story to their agenda, preconceived notions, pet theories, worldview, mantra, etc. THEY DON'T LISTEN to us. They don't hold space. They hear what they want to hear and if it doesn't fit, they configure it. I don't want to be translated, talked down, talked over. I don't want to be pathologized, psychologized.
It makes me furious to think how many times I've let myself be minimized and invalidated. People who say stupid crap like "oh it wasn't that bad was it? Surely you had SOME good times? Aren't you exaggerating just a bit? You're over-sensitive, need thicker skin, personalizing, on and on. Now, you tell me, how in the blue blazes would they know how bad it was or wasn't?? They weren't there!!!!! No one was.
How dare anyone scoff or pooh-pooh another's story? Keep your arrogant long nose to home if you can't say anything helpful. No, they do not mean well. They, for whatever reason, get a kick out of kicking someone who is down. And lest you think that I've dumped on these people, I haven't. At most I've made a comment or two and they just swoop in with their judgmental yammering. Actually, if you've experienced folks like this, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
And worst of all is the way that an already vulnerable person hears their shamey-shamey scolding. They take it personally, duh! It shocks me to realize how often I've taken their invalidation to heart and then participated in my own auto-invalidation. That's why I've got such piss poor self-esteem and sub zero self-care skills in the first place. I've listened to the wrong people saying unhelpful hurtful things that undid any forward traction in healing.
Never again, will I allow myself to be second-guessed, reinterpreted or explained. My words are gonna start standing on their own two feet. And if someone doesn't want to hear them, there's the door. Don't let it hit you in the butt on the way out.
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