Posted by Annabelle Smith on September 24, 2010, at 21:40:49
Does anyone on here know about borderline personality disorder? Has it been your experience that many therapists do not readily diagnose BPD?
There is a strange feeling that is always there, haunting, like an emptiness in the core of my being. It is especially bad at night. Sometimes I don't even know what to do-- I can't stand to sit with myself. I have frantically tried over and over again, and cannot define what "it" is. I have filled notebooks and many pieces of paper, just trying to capture what is missing and awry. But it eludes me. Sometimes I feel stuck in a spiral, drowning in words and thoughts that can't be expressed. Sometimes I feel so bored with life-- I am attending a good university, am well into my field of study-- religion/philosophy-- with what might be a promising future-- but I feel so empty and directionless.
I started going to therapy last spring but my therapist left the university in September, and I am now seeing someone new. The thing is, upon entering therapy, I got worse in some ways. I became very dependent, clingy and obsessive about my therapist. My old therapist is gone and it hurts so badly. Sometimes I have had to play saved voicemail messages that he sent me over and over again just to feel a little relief. I am aware that when I enter into the therapy session now with my new therapist (and the same happened with my old therapist), a change comes over me. I become very, very anxious and can't have coherent thoughts or speech. I end up feeling like I wasted the entire session, despite the fact that all week, it is all that I think about and all that makes me feel like I can make it through. I am consciously aware that I often make my therapist (as well as other authority figures in my life) out to be the god who can care for me and save me while I simultaneously take on a helpless position. It happens automatically. I feel like I am lying and faking it, but I am not doing so on purpose. When a session goes what I feel is poorly-- meaning that I leave feeling like I said absolutely nothing because of panicking-- I feel utterly depressed, sometimes wanting to die. Sometimes I scratch my wrists. I have an intense desire then to call my therapist, but usually resist because I know I am obsessive and am afraid for him to know. He says that I must be open in sessions and that he won't leave or reject, but I am afraid. If I tell him how obsessed I really am he will think poorly of me. But if I don't I don't know that I can ever get better.
I feel so fake, like I live two lives. One in my head and when I'm alone; one with everyone else in my life. My mind is chaos, and it feels like hell. No one has ever told me that I have BPD, even when I bring it up-- they deny it or brush it away. But I have researched extensively and actually have incorporated parts of psychoanalytic theory with my religion academic work and am nearly convinced that I fit the label. I feel like something is being denied to me. I feel alone and scared and each day is like a new hell that I can't tell anyone about, even my therapist.
Is this a common feeling? Can anybody else relate?
poster:Annabelle Smith
thread:963658
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20100831/msgs/963658.html