“Carrying a Stone”
People with BPD often feel as though they are carrying their pain like a heavy stone. No matter what they do, they cannot put down this huge, heavy stone of pain.
by Anonymous
Imagine waking up in the morning and having to push a huge, heavy stone out of your bed. You must pick this stone up and carry it around all day. The heavy stone is with you when you leave your house, when you walk down the street, when you encounter people along the way. You cannot put down the stone. When you get to where you 're going, you must keep on holding up this stone.
Imagine how it feels to hold up this heavy stone while you are drinking a cup of coffee? When you go to the grocery store? While you drive your car? If you want to rest, you are still holding up the stone. You fight as hard as you can not to be crushed or killed by this huge stone that you must carry. There's no escaping this stone, there is no respite. It is there to constantly overwhelm you in your daily struggle to live and survive.
You can put this stone down when you go home at the end of the day and are ready to go to sleep. However this heavy stone lies beside you in your bed, ready and waiting for you to pick it up and carry it, all over again, the very next day.
What makes the struggle even more poignant and painful for you
is that this huge, heavy stone is invisible to all the people in your life.
It is the stone of pain.
“The Self-Oiling Machine”
written by Edie, a man of 47 with BPD
The dilemma I am trying to understand is why we borderliner’s feel hurt and wounded all the time and always need "attending to." By this I mean we always need other people to be aware of us, to reinforce us, to pay attention to us, to understand us, all the time! Or is it that the normal person has the same need to be "attended to" but they seem to have a built in mechanism whereby they can attend to themselves, like a self-oiling machine that self-oils itself every ½ hour so that the machine will not overheat.
I think we can only do this by using the strong power of mindfulness. To prove to myself that this can be done, I am putting a beep into my palm pilot that will go off every ½ hour to remind me to validate myself. In other words, since our self-oiling machines are not working properly, we must learn to self-oil manually. It is important for us to remember that any work that is done by hand is always more valuable than work done by a machine.
Self-validation
I must remind myself every 1/2 hour to validate myself.
Normal people seem to have a built in "self-attender" while we borderliners somehow do not. It seems people with BPD continuously need "oiling" from others. When they don’t give it to us, we are really hurt. The oil we borderliners need is to be able think about ourselves and all the good things we really do embody without caring about what other people are thinking of us. Why do we constantly need to get this oil from elsewhere where it may or may not be given to us? Why can’t we just oil ourselves?
We borderliner’s may just be able to get to a higher plateau than other people if we can just learn to overcome this deficiency. At least we can start to slowly recognize and penetrate the deficiency and start the healing process. This will allow us to be able to manifest the benefits normal people get from their self-oiling machine. After a while, I will move up the self-oiling beep reminder to one-hour intervals.
It may be that since we have messed up for a while, that we have eroded the normal sense of "I". I feel sure that, by practicing this, it will surely repair.
I am happy to tell you that I tried this today and it felt great. I realized that I wasn’t looking around so much when I was in a public place with lots of people because I wasn’t looking for them to validate me. I was doing it myself!
“An Illness of Weakness” by Stephanie, a DBT Graduate
I feel like those people who have to exist in a completely sterile environment, free from germs- at least someone can look at them and understand the problem.
Unfortunately, my need for extra tender care is not so visible. As Marsha Linehan has so aptly described it, "…borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree burn patients. They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin. Even the slightest touch or movement can create immense suffering" (1993).
I liken this concept to an individual with a compromised immune system- someone who is extremely susceptible to "catching" germs that most people fight off quite easily. Borderlines are comparable to this in the psychological sense- their experience of self is easily compromised and the ability to fight off stress proves to be an often-formidable task.
So be that, as it may, I have decided to look at my illness from a different angle. I have decided that I will look at myself not as a weak person, but as a "person of strength, with an illness of weakness". After all, to survive and cope with this disorder on a daily basis takes a perseverance and strength that few could argue with, if only they could "walk a mile in my moccasins"!
I used to think of myself as a "weak" person, someone unable to deal with even the most minimal of stressors. I thought to be strong, I had to be like everyone else- able to "pull myself up by my bootstraps", so to speak. But then it dawned on me that the very nature of my illness was one of weakness, or vulnerability. Borderline Personality Disorder is essentially that- an illness of weakness and vulnerability. Sometimes I think of myself as having a "compromised psychological constitution". It's as if the smallest of "stress germs" can do one in! And what proves to be even more challenging, is communicating to others that, what to them may be nothing at all, to you, may be completely overwhelming.
People with BPD
feel isolated,
as if they are
trapped in a
bubble