What Is The Most Disturbing Aspect Of Borderline Personality Disorder?
I’m going to go one step further by not only telling you the most-disturbing aspect about living with Borderline Personality Disorder, but I’ll also tell you a couple of related facts that are even more disturbing still.
But first, my credentials, so nobody gets the idea that I’m simply guessing about these things.
I had Borderline Personality Disorder, unaware, for the first thirty-five years of my life, as powerfully as anybody has ever had it. After a major crisis, which resulted in me discovering that I had lived with the disorder for my entire life, I spent the next seven years becoming an authority on Borderline Personality Disorder in the interest of eliminating it from my life once and for all - something I achieved. My full-time job now is using the experience to help others escape Borderline Personality Disorder authentically for themselves.
For anybody who has trouble understanding what I just said in practical terms, thirty-five years of direct experience, plus seven years of intense analysis, followed by the real, measurable results of being authentically cured, outweighs any doctorate degree on the planet.
In this article, I will address the primary question: What is most disturbing about having Borderline Personality Disorder. But I’ll also tell you related facts that are even more disturbing, by far.
This article is going to be controversial, not because it’s inaccurate, but because it contradicts a lot of what the professional community as a group tells you. Therefore, this article will be rejected or embraced depending upon which group of thinker you fall into:
If you are somebody who is approaching this subject from a place of genuine necessity, and who has first-hand experience with these book-ordained experts, you will probably recognize pretty quickly the accurateness and value in what I say.
The most disturbing part of living with Borderline Personality Disorder is that our own parents - the very people who are solely responsible for ensuring our physical, mental, and emotional well-being, when we are innocent, helpless children - are also the very people who have damned us to lifetimes of immeasurable frustration, pain, and disorder.
No matter how much they might have paid for our college educations, no matter how well they teach us to manage money, no matter how much they instill in us a love for God, no matter how much they might support our artistic endeavors, no matter how many luxurious vacations they take us on, no matter how often they got us out of tight jams, no matter how often they gave us money, no matter how far they went out of their way to help us in any situation, they failed at their most fundamentally-important responsibility of all: To ensure our emotional well-being.
When a little girl shows up to school with a black eye, and she tells her teacher that her daddy did this to her, the blowback is swift and justified.
When a little girl shows up to school and doubts her inherent worth as a human-being, nothing at all happens.
No alarm bells are raised. Nobody is held accountable. To be perfectly honest, the teacher probably does not even notice, or question, a little girl doubting her inherent worth as a human being.
A black eye fades and disappears in a few days. A child who lives with the belief that her feelings are inherently irrelevant and shameful, devoid of worth - and that this describes her inherent nature, too - this never goes away. Ever.
…Unless future events conspire against her to make her question and re-evaluate some of the conclusions she formed long ago about the nature of fundamental aspects of life, as happened in my case.
We receive our emotional education directly from our emotional teachers. The cause of Borderline Personality Disorder is not ‘trauma’, as you have been told. Nor is it ‘genetics’, that lazy, favorite lie of the professional community. Rather, it is the unhealthy attitudes of our emotional teachers - our parents.
Whatever unhealthy attitudes they harbor about the nature of fundamental things in life that human-beings must understand accurately in order to be able to enjoy genuine inner contentment, this is what they pass on to us.
The most common misperception they pass on to us as children regarding the nature of feelings is that they are a bother. Feelings are irrelevant. They don’t matter. When you express your genuine feelings, they scoff. They laugh. They get angry. They dismiss them. Your feelings do not in any way positively affect their manner of dealing with you, therefore your feelings do not contain any inherent worth. If your feelings do not make sense to them, then the feelings are irrelevant. In order for your feelings to matter, something external has to provide that worth.
If your feelings are inherently irrelevant and shameful, devoid of worth, it isn’t long before you conclude that you yourself are also inherently irrelevant and shameful, devoid of worth. After all, your feelings are you. They are what make you, you.
Now think for a second of the bigger picture that I am trying to paint for you here. The true horror is not in what is happening with the child, even though this is horrific enough. The true horror is in what this will translate to in the coming years.
Here are just a few of the things that the child’s own parents have subjected their child to:
* An inability to experience genuine intimacy, the very foundation of healthy relationships. (Intimacy involves the revealing of one’s authentic inner self to another person, and those who are intensely ashamed of who they are cannot bring themselves to do this.)
* An inability to love oneself. Instead, the only possibility these children have is to live with self-loathing - or self hate. (A person who believes they are devoid of worth does not love himself or herself. Quite the opposite.)
* Lifetimes of believing they have no inherent worth. Any sense of worth they get to enjoy will be superficial and fleeting, dependent on external factors: The job they have, the boyfriend or girlfriend they have, the house they live in, the car they drive.
* They will be angry and frustrated all of the time and not understand why.
In short, the parents - the very people with the sole responsibility of caring for their children’s physical, mental, and emotional needs - have damned their own children to not only a black eye - but to an entire life of angst, frustration, failed relationships, and misery.
Do these parents hate their children? Is this why they have brought this great curse upon them? Well, in some cases, yes. In some cases, parents are evil. But overwhelmingly, in the greatest number of these situations, the parents genuinely care for their children. They simply lack the qualifications to teach others about life based on the incredibly-unhealthy educations they themselves received. They can’t teach accurately what they themselves understand inaccurately.
Is this an excuse? No, it’s not.
Matters of ‘responsibility’ are not subject to what one knows or doesn’t know. Because when we are responsible for something, what this means is that we could have known, if only we had tried.
The failure of a parent to meet a child’s emotional needs is no different than if they had failed to meet a child’s physical needs. If a child shows up to school with his ribs showing because he obviously has not eaten in three weeks, that child would justifiably be removed from his parents’ care. This is an example of physical abuse.
Likewise, all parents who have children, either living at home or not, with Borderline Personality Disorder, are guilty of emotional abuse.
Emotional neglect is abuse.
Ignorance on the part of the responsible party does not excuse the abuse. Because again, responsibility is based on what the responsible party is capable of, not on what they are able to do.
For an in-depth conversation about the differences between capacity and ability, please see my article titled How Your Inability To Play The Fiddle Can Teach You What You’re Capable Of.
So by far, the most horrific aspect of Borderline Personalty Disorder is the breadth of abuse brought on innocent children by the very people who are responsible for caring for their physical, mental, and emotional needs. These are not unfeeling strangers. No, these are their very parents. The people who are supposed to be their unwavering, primary defenders against all forms of harm.
What is more horrific is that most of these children will grow to old age, and even death, never having experienced authentic, inner contentment.
More horrific still is that these children will grow up and have their own children, and what sorts of emotional educations will they pass on? The same emotional educations.
I myself believe that I broke a cycle that had probably been going on in both sides of my family for many, many generations. My family arrived in the United States in the early 1600s, and I imagine the subtle distortions in perspective toward these fundamental aspects of life were already cemented then.
When I went to search for answers about what it was exactly that I was dealing with, I encountered only half-interested ‘professionals’ who did not seem to possess any true, intuitive insight about what it is they were supposed to understand so well. Their ‘expertise’ had been superficially memorized from books, or directly from their professors’ mouths.
I paid them ungodly amounts of money, and in return I got nothing of value. For over two years, and while interacting with a dozen different ‘experts’, they superficially dealt only with my symptoms, while never accurately diagnosing me with Borderline Personality Disorder. Their entire focus was on superficial tricks and approaches, because these things require infinitely-less effort and still ensure signed checks.
Finally, in the early spring of 2011, I encountered several exceptional psychologists in Scottsdale, Arizona who provided me with practical answers and genuine insights.
I took what I learned from them in the course of only a handful of days and then built upon these insights for myself for the next seven years. Finally, I managed to rid myself of Borderline Personality Disorder once and for all.
The single most horrific aspect of Borderline Personality Disorder is that authentic recovery by people who are truly suffering, but who do not need to continue suffering, is blocked by the endless sources of misinformation on the subject out there, written by celebrated people who are trusted by society to provide practical, real help, but who do not genuinely know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, these individuals have illusory, hollow credentials to misdirect you and make you waste years of your life to the point of disillusionment - that is to say, the point of no return; the point where you throw your hands in the air and give up.
There is absolutely no need for this. Borderline Personality Disorder is not unfixable. It is not difficult to escape, relatively speaking. It took me seven years, unnecessarily. It does not have to take you seven years. The number one factor complicating authentic recovery is misdirection by means of misinformation.
I encourage you to take the time to research my work and to take advantage of the many free resources that I provide. The information you find here is meant to be your escape from conflicting, erroneous misdirection.