A Muggle's Guide To BPD
Some days you just wake up and you know the brain and body is neither willing or able to carry out the relatively simple plans made for that day. If we are human we all feel that to a degree on some level the odd mornings but with BPD you can take that emotion and multiply it by 10 as conservative rule of thumb.
Heightened extreme emotions are one of the main malign life crushing tell tale symptoms of BPD. On a register of say 1-10 most fortunate people, or muggles as I like to call you, operate in a reasonably comfortable zone in and around 3 and 7. With 3 being as low as you ever really genuinely feel even on a bad day and 7 being when you are as happy as a Fox News presenter when they heard about the latest FBI investigation.
For someone with BPD we will go up to 9 or drop to 1 and remain there for longer than you would be prepared to believe. DBT Counselling describes being above or below that 3-7 comfort range as entering "hell" for someone with BPD. Now we are not talking about overly dramatic patients with BPD..the hell description was coined by psychological and psychiatric specialists who have spent a career studying the symptoms of BPD.
The other major difference between you muggles and those with BPD is how long it can take for that extreme motion to come back up or down to anywhere near that emotional comfort zone. You will hear someone criticise you. If you are a muggle yes it might annoy you for an hour but you will get on with the day ahead telling yourself the person who did the criticising is a prize tosspot of the highest order with an intelligence lower than a worm's tit or somewhere below an average Jeremy Kyle guest and hasn't the first clue about what they are talking about.
From personal experience of BPD I can think of many times when one marginally bruising encounter has pushed me practically off that emotional scale for days on end. Think of an emotional version of a thermostatic regulator. The simplest way to put it is most of you muggles have one which operates reasonably well the majority of the time while most of us with have an emotional thermostatic regulator which is so unreliable it might well have been bought second hand on ebay and installed by some bloke called Davey who says he can turn his hand to anything.
The theory behind this inability to cope emotionally in people with BPD is fairly detailed but more or less runs something like this....at what ever age the BPD patient suffered the major trauma in their life governs their ability to cope with extreme emotions. So if you take myself having brush shafts broken over my back at the age of ten by a drunk that equates to my ability to cope with emotions being by and large those of a ten year-old boy.
I can only hope one or two people read this and gain at least a little understanding to the world of myself and anyone else with full blown BPD.
#bloggingformentalhealth2016