I Know The Pieces Fit, I Watched Them Fall Away
Having Borderline Personality Disorder, one inherits certain gifts from the universe. We are empathic people with highly developed skills of reading others. In fact, we do not just read others, we interpret their human expression through the core of our being. This is wonderful when you are with family and friends that love and nurture you in a happy fairy tale land of existence, but most people with Borderline don’t grow up that way.
Most people with Borderline grow up in a harsh environment that doesn’t allow for that individual’s soul to unfold in the proper way. This child is forced to live as the parents do, surviving in a soup of dysfunction and ego. There is no validation, no reinforcement, and absolutely no support. The child is not even allowed to express preferences, opinions, or any sort of individuality.
Without healthy borders and a solid image of self to protect the child, she is tossed in the wind with every gale force that comes along. There is no sense of security: that is banished in the real life Disney World of step-mothers and cruel villains. No one is there to listen, and no one is there to protect.
This child is told she is wrong over and over again; reinforced until this errant propaganda is stamped into her subconscious. It becomes the movie script that plays in the background. She is blindfolded and spun around and around; no longer able to see which way is up or down. One wrong move or verbalization and the child is punished severely, for whatever the caregiver deems as unacceptable in that split second of existence. This changes frequently, and there is no map or guiding light for the child to safely navigate the halls of this purgatory. She is dodging land mines and crawling for cover into the dug out trenches of the battlefield.
What differentiates the Borderline child from the neglected, abused, or misguided child without the shameful label? The Borderline child has empathetic abilities that allows them see into the soul of others. They feel every pinprick of insult, guilt, anger, jealousy, and rage that is hoisted onto the malleable child. They are aware of the oneness of the world, and how it should be, but instead they have incarnated into a battlefield of egoic proportions. They are sensitive creatures who feel the entire world of pain, in a single tear drop, which flows like a river from the eyes of the innocent. This child is traumatized to the point of having their fragile psyche splintered into unrecognizable pieces.
There is no one-size-fits-all treatment for the individual that is healing from Borderline Personality Disorder. This person has been stripped of every ounce of common sense, dignity, normalcy, and rational thought. She only knows pure raw emotion and this is the lens in which she interprets every experience and interaction; it becomes her currency in life. Therapy can help the person learn how to structure thoughts, conversations, and eventually, relationships. In truth, these are all geared to helping the person relate to and function in the outer world. There is no sense of self, and therapy may not fix the empty hollow shell that the grown child has become.
The real work begins when you start to heal your inner world. Put away the first aid kit, you are going to need the Fire Department. The whole building has been condemned and it’s time to bring it down. You will become your own rock solid foundation, and from there you will develop your sense of self. You will put the pieces back together in way that makes sense to you. You will become the magnificent being you were created to be, that is yet to be discovered.
