BPDRecovery.com: Forums

A year ago my best friend decided to join the Catholic Church. I asked her if I could go with her. She said "no." I felt rejected and left her house. We did not speak for a year. Then we reconciled. Last night she said the night I walked out I yelled at her about being selfish. I do not remember this. I must have split or just find the memory too painful. But I can imagine myself doing that. When I feel rejected my BPD really comes out. Not only is rejection painful for me because of a difficult childhood, my mother was permissive and never taught me how to accept the words "no." Sometimes I think recovery for BPD is just a matter of growing up and accepting boundaries like other adults. But for me it is progress not perfection. When things go wrong I can't see it until its all over. It is like I go into a trance. I hate having BPD.

I have big trouble too when I feel rejected. It's always been a major problem for me.

All I can suggest to you is to keep reading and working with our "Tools," over there on the left of the page. If you're just starting out with them, you'll probably have to do a lot of it in retrospect, after an incident has occurred, but if you practice enough, you'll get to a point where you can actually assess your thinking and modify your behavior as you go.

So examine what was going on in your mind for "twisted thinking." Look for ways in which you might have been making assumptions, or taking things personally. And then the "steps": imagine a scenario just like the one with your friend, go through the process, and come up with three possible courses of action. Then pick the best one. When we first start out with this and look at situations after the fact, we usually find that what we actually did was not the action we would have picked as best when we looked at it later. But in time, with practice, it's possible to kind of think things through quickly in your head and make good, thoughtful decisions in real time.

Don't just settle for "it sucks to have BPD." Yes it does, but you can get better, and one day you might even be able to say "I used to have BPD."

I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you for putting it into such clear words. Recovery really is a process of growing up and accepting boundaries like other adults.

At another board I used to go to - designed for those people involved in relationships with someone who has BPD rather than the person themself who has BPD - there was a common thread amongst the group ... that people with BPD were stunted and would act out as if __ years old. The age ranged from 2-10 but it was always somewhere well below adulthood.

Granted, this wasn't any reflection of the intelligence or intellect or earning capacity or functionality of the person with BPD. It was merely an observation that there were times when the BPD would come out in full force at the spectacle would be very similar to that of a child of __ years who hadn't yet learned some of life's basic 'rules.'

Do you find any comfort in this relization? If it's just a matter of growing up and learning to accept boundaries like other adults, it's obviously not rocket surgery. It's something millions if not billions of people have already figured out. There's not really a mystery to it. It's not something that costs a small fortune to obtain. It's not a secret society with a special handshake to achieve healthy, happy living. It's just moving into adulthood in that one last area of life.

Yeah, it's a pain in the tushy sometimes and it stinks that we're adults in age but not in all areas yet; that we're a little behind the curve in this one aspect and catching up sucks, no two ways about it.

But when you think about it, it took these other adults 20 years to get there and we're looking at recovery / getting there as well in 2 years or less. It's possible, trust me. It's hard work and takes a LOT of practice (cramming!) but it can be done.

This is how bf has described it to me. My dad was not around to teach me certain basic things that children learn from their fathers, therefore, I am trying to live life without knowing these basic concepts, and it makes everything difficult. Others assume we have them, but we don't, and it becomes evident at some point this is so.