What it’s like to live with Borderline Personality Disorder

These external acts are based in self-loathing or self-hatred and feelings that you are not good enough. You feel this so deeply that you can’t control your actions.

What it’s like to live with Borderline Personality Disorder

Meet Sonia Neale. She’s 45. The recipient of SANE Australia’s inaugural 2014 Barbara Hocking Fellowship. And a sufferer of Borderline Personality Disorder.

by Michael Sheather
Aug 27, 2015

BPD is a personality disorder of extreme emotions. When you have somebody criticize you or judge you or say something about you, it triggers a response that is simple horrendous and over the top.

It might be shouting or anger and resentment in terms of reaction on the outside but the truly horrendous part is what happens inside you.

Innocent remarks are construed as damaging to you. So the people around you tend to walk on eggshells.

When you have this emotional dysregulation, for want of a better description, you tend to overreact. However, it is a catastrophic overreaction.

You see everything as a variation of happy or angry but not the thousands of emotional degrees that exist in between those two points. It is black or white or nothing.

In addition, when something upsets you, no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot let go of that comment and it escalates to the point where you can feel all these toxic neurotoxins percolating through your brain and your body. It is literally like acid coursing through your veins.

If you can remember Brittany Spears when she shaved her head and everyone was wondering what on earth was going on.

Your hair is an incredibly intimate and important part of who you are as a woman, so to shave it off is an expression of self-loathing.

These external acts are based in self-loathing or self-hatred and feelings that you are not good enough. You feel this so deeply that you can’t control your actions.

Your behaviour becomes impulsive in the extreme. You might shop lift compulsively or begin cutting yourself, drug abuse, burning yourself and various eating disorders.

These are ways to relieve the pressure from these intense emotions.

You can feel physical pain from your emotional dysregulation in this state.

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