Borderline Personality Disorder – From the inside, out. Articles on BPD written in 2000 by A.J. Mahari
The linked article resonates, some of it matches what she appeared to be going through from outside, but some of it I would have been unaware of, only she could have known. She was obviously living behind a facade, she alluded to it by saying “I’m tired of hiding.”. I can’t imagine what it is like for her to live always pretending to be something she isn’t so that nobody may learn who she is. How this hiding interrupts her life, the things she can’t freely experience because of the facade. It’s truly a tragedy. The one thing in this article which really became visible to me because I was able to get to know her very well, is the difference between her identity and her disorder. She is unable to know the difference and believes deeply that her disorder is who she is, and she fights a constant battle between hating that person, punishing that person and seemingly doing whatever was necessary to not hate that person as an act of self preservation. To me she seems to live in a bubble, a fantasy world, a dissociative dramatic Mal-adaptive coping mechanism. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that BPD is treatable and manageable, at least to some degree, and her family, possibly because of their own dysfunction, live in denial and simply enable her more. What Ms Mahari has written gives me more insight into what this young woman might have been experiencing. If you care for somebody who suffers from BPD, this article is well worth reading.