Inhabited by a Cry Living with ...

Inhabited by a Cry Living with Borderline Personality Disorder, Psychologia, Borderline (osobowość z ...

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Inhabited by a Cry:
Living with Borderline Personality Disorder
Kiera Van Gelder
INHABITED BY
A
CRY
Shortly after I received the diagnosis of borderline personality disor-
der at age 31,1 came across a poem by Sylvia Path (1965), a poet fa-
mous for her sensitivity, her intensity and her self-destruction-a poet
many people with BPD consider to be one of their own. The poem is
called "Eltn" and in it, Plath writes:
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
There are many ways to describe the experience of living with BPD,
but no other words have captured my condition so precisely. "Inhabited
by a cry" is not simply sadness^ where the cry comes and goes. It is not
depression, where heaviness sets in and the life force ebbs out. "Inhab-
ited by a cry" means living with something inside tnyself that is so
bloated with grief and longing and rage and fear that it can't find words
or solutions. It is being possessed by a type of pain that is so desperate
for comfort and relief that "nightly it flaps out looking, with its hooks,
for something to love."
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: "tnhabited by a Cry: Living with Borderline Personality Disorder."
Van Gelder, Kiera. Co-published simultaneously in
Social Work in Meiitai Health
(The Haworth Press) Vol.
6, No. 1/2, 2008, pp. 243-253; and:
Borderline Personatity Disorder: Meeting the Challenges to Successful
Treatinent
(ed: Peny D. Hoffman, and Penny Steiner-Grossman) The Haworth Press, 2008, pp. 243-253. Sin-
gle or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service
[1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@hawoithpress.com].
© 2008 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.
.cloi:10.1300/J200v06n01_19
243
244
BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER
In this chapter, I want to give you a sense of what it's like to live with
borderline personality disorder, but I have to admit that I'm nervous. By
identifying myself as a person with BPD, I run the risk of losing my
credibility. Who, I have to wonder, would hire a person admitting to be-
ing a borderline? And more importantly, who would willingly enter into
a relationship with hitn or her? Like many people with BPD, I arn excru-
ciatingly sensitive to other people's perceptions of me. At times, a nega-
tive word or look can drastically redefine how I feel about myself. It
even has a physical effect, like being hit with a soccer ball in the solar
plexus. With this kind of vulnerability, it seems almost masochistic to
publicly identify oneself with a disorder that has such negative associa-
tions. But here's the catch: enduring human connection and tnastery
comes only after facing oneself and sharing that self with others.
It has taken a long time arrive at an understanding and acceptance of
this disorder, to be properly diagnosed, to receive the treatment and sup-
port that directly addresses my suffering. I began seeing professionals
when I was 12 years old, when the cry was already so loud that I'd tried
silencing it with a bottle of pills, and then, when that didn't work, with a
steady supply of alcohol and drugs. By age 151 was cutting and burning
myself every day, fantasizing about suicide, writing letters in blood and
sending thetn to schooltnates who, understandably, had withdrawn their
friendships in the face of my neediness and self-destruction.
My family, baffled and fearful, sent me to a psychiatrist and what be-
gan with a doctor suggesting I had adolescent depression grew, over the
years, into a hydra of diagnoses, each one seeming to have a life of its
own: PTSD, drug and alcohol addiction, panic and generalized anxiety
disorder, social anxiety disorder and bi-polar disorder of an unspecified
numeral. All told, I wandered the tnaze of psychiatric diagnosis, medi-
cations and treatments for almost two decades. Twice I went on disabil-
ity. 1 had numerous hospitalizations. I went to 12-step meetings and got
sober. I took medication and worked on my issues. 1 tried to build my-
self up after every breakdown, but a horrific truth was revealing itself
the older I got. No matter what 1 did, I always ended up back where I'd
started: suicidal, self-hating, unable to keep a job or a relationship, a
failure at everything, an exposed nerve.
SNAPSHOTS OF YOUTH
I duck into the baihrootn in between classes. In the stall, I pull a
thumbtack frotn tny pocket and drag the rough point across my forearm.
Kiera Van Gelder
245
over and over. I watch with a detached fascination as the skin reddens
and tears. Then, as the blood appears, it happetis: a wave of cahn ritises
my chest; the intense pressure in my head temporarily diffuses. Re-
lieved, I go back into the hallway, into the churn of eyes and feet and
slippery facts. I atn 14 years old and I don't know it yet, but I already
have all the sytnptotns of borderlitie personality disorder.
My head is shaved. I wear all black. The people around me seetn
wooden. Sometitnes I can 'tfeel myself. Sotnetimes, I feel so much pain
atid self-loathitig I sit on tny bed atid bang my head agaitist the wall.
Bad girl. Ugly, evil girl. I carve patterns itito my arm with razor blades.
One night I down a bottle of aspirin with orange juice atid wake up in
the tnorning with my ears ritiging. I throw up seven times, the taste of
the aspirin making me gag atid shudder. I am 15 and I atn diagtiosed
with depression.
•
My hair is long. I wear Indian print skirts. I have run away from
home to follow a band called the Grateful Dead. I take LSD and prac-
tice ttiy particular version of free love. When I return hotne, my family
brings me to a psychiatric hospital. I atn otie month shy of my 18th birth-
day and atn diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, but no otie
tells me this. I am discharged to tny owti care.
* *
I often wonder what my life would be like if someone had intervened
sooner. What if a knowledgeable teacher or counselor had noticed my
symptoms and brought my fatnily together, describing to us the nature
of my disorder, the importance of our working together, the necessity of
treatment and support and patience. What if we'd gotten a good refer-
ral? I want to turn the years back and reel in my family, dysfunctional
and fragmented and each person caught in a private web of confusion
and ask each of them to look at me, to pause, to be present, to observe
me without judgment, and let my pain exist as it was: raw, overwhelm-
ing, something beyond my control at times. I want to say to my younger
self "You are not a bad person, you are in constant pain. You are not ir-
246
BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER
responsible, you just don't have the skills to handle life as other people
do. You are not alone. This all makes sense, and you will get better."
But I slipped away at age 18, unmoored, my hooks catching whatever
would hold me for the moment. I had sex with men simply to be touched
and to imagine what love must feel like. I put any chemical in my body
that protnised a tetnporary respite. Even in recovery and on medication
throughout my 20s, I lived as a hostage to my inner turmoil. The world
was unsafe; I was contaminated and unlovable. People couldn't be re-
lied on; I was unable to take care of myself.
* * *
Twenty years after my first suicide attempt, I formally received the
borderline diagnosis. At that point, I was living on social security and
disability insurance. My previous three teaching jobs had resulted in
breakdowns, and I had just ended another tumultuous relationship. Ten
years sober, I found nothing in the 12 steps to soothe the cry inside of
me. Bile rose in my throat every time I was advised in meetings to
"work the steps" harder, or to have more faith in God. If anything, my
years of sobriety had given rise to more etnotional turmoil. I didn't un-
derstand how I could be doing everything "right" and still not function
and live the way other people did. At the advice of my frightened
ex-boyfriend, I made an appointment with a clinician randomly as-
signed by an outpatient receptionist at the local psychiatric hospital.
And, like every other intake, I sobbed my way through the laundry list
of difftculties, abuses, hospitalizations and diagnoses. Dr. P. nodded
and scratched notes onto the clipboard. Symptoms of emotional dis-
tress, flights of escape, medication, more medication. At the end of my
story, the doctor put his clipboard aside, spread his fingers over the
pressed blue fabric of his knees and said, "I know your problem."
I strained in my chair, ready to catch his words. He was like a palm
reader, eyes interpreting my hands. He only had to skim over the life-
line, no need to trace the smaller creases of my hand. "Borderline per-
sonality disorder," he declared, then waited a beat. "It's a condition of
extretne tnood instability, a fear of abandonment, an uncertain sense of
self." He leaned forward in his chair. "Does that make any sense to
you?" 1 nodded. "A pervading sense of etnptiness," he continued, now
ticking off his fingers. "Recurrent suicidal behavior, self-mutilation."
He listed the nine criteria, and when he had finished, I'd mentally
checked off all nine. "Of course, saying you have BPD is just a conve-
nient way of explaining your behavior. A personality disorder," he con-
Kiera Van Gelder
247
tinued, "can't simply be cured with a pill." He took a white business
card from the pile stacked at his elbow and wrote down the contact num-
ber for the local Dialectical Behavior Therapy program, explaining that
it was a therapy designed particularly for my kind of problems. Our 20
minutes, I realized, were up.
"You will learn equanimity," Dr. P promised, tamping his hands
down in a gesture of settledness. Then he extended his hand in farewell.
"You are a woman of great passion. What you'll learn to do is channel
that energy, to control it, rather than the other way around. And when
you do," he smiled, "there will be no need for a diagnosis."
Relief flooded tny body as I left the doctor's office. Until then, noth-
ing had been able to describe the pain I'd experienced since I was a
young girl. Things I'd never been able to manage-the impulsive and
self-destructive behaviots, the desperate clinging to relationships, the
over-sensitivity to rejection and judgment, the obsession with suicide,
my shifting identities and di^astic changes in perception-suddenly made
sense. A voracious need for more information followed quickly. I have
heard other people with BPD describe a similar experience: when the
diagnosis is revealed, there is an "ah-hah" moment, and for the first
time, a sense of control enters the picture. It's not so much that one sud-
denly gains control of the symptoms, but that the awareness, itself, be-
comes empowering. I remembered from 12-step meetings, people would
say, "You can't rearrange furniture in a dark room. First you have to
turn on the light." Those nine criteria were a spotlight into a warehouse
full of rampaging armoires.
SCORCHED TO THE ROOT
In 2001, when the country grieved the tragedy of 9/11,1 sat in a hos-
pital day room with three over-medicated women and felt oddly com-
i'orted by the fact that the rest of the country was also in a state of
distress. The orderlies, the nurses, the news anchorman on television, all
seemed to finally share what I'd been feeling all along, as though the en-
tire nation and my interior world had something to finally agree on.
Plath writes about this state of mind:
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
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