Wendy,
I totally get the identifying with the DX and the SI. That is part of why I had to leave here for the short period. It was part of the shift. My new T had me read a book called Stormy Search for Self. It was extremely difficult for me to read because it gave an alternate explanation for what I was going through. I won't go into what it was about but in order to read it I had to loosen my hold on my Belief of who I was. I had to re-evaluate just how much I had invested in my being diagnosed with BPD and my being a self-injurer. It also had me look at the possibility that my belief could possibly be wrong even though being diagnosed was the first time in my life that anything made any sense. It is hard to give it up. On the other hand I think that even though it has served a valuable purpose and made it possible to change my life, my identification with my dx has run it course and now actually hinders my progress. Same with SI. Though it kept me alive for years and made it possible for me to exist, it too has become a hinderance to my moving forward and growing as a human. It was so strange. As I thought about these things I could actually feel a kind of shift inside. It was like that empty feeling that always sent me into a closet to eradicate with some form of SI but at the same time it was totally different. In the end I decided that I want to identify myself as someone who is essentially well who just is in the process of finding out what being well is.
Anyway, sorry I got off on a tangent there.
Carrie

<font color=green>But the implicit and usually unconscious bargain we make with ourselves is that, yes, we want to be healed, we want to be made whole, we're willing to go some distance, but we're not willing to question the fundamental assumptions upon which our way of life has been built, both personally and societally.--Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft