I am very, very confused. I can't pin down how I feel, and I just wanted to post on PC in hope I might be able to join up fragmented thoughts/ feelings.

After feeling really bad for a number of weeks (including having quite aggressive suicidal thoughts) I now feel less...tortured. This is mainly because I had a couple of difficult conversations with a family member and made what feels like significant steps towards starting to heal our relationship. We have miles and miles to go, but I have finally told them how much hurt they caused me.

Saying this to them was really awful in a way, but after the most recent conversation - I just feel so much calmer deep inside myself. It's like for years some little animal inside me was always fidgeting constantly during every waking moment, and then escalating and going crazy thrashing around when things were bad. It was tiring. The calmness is great, like it's freeing up space in me, or something.

Now, though, I feel sort of philosophically hopeless about my capacity for relationships with other people. I love my therapist, and that's okay, I'm happy to simply let that be and appreciate how much help she gives me - but I just feel really hopeless because she knows enough of me now to see how unlikable and barely human I am She knows. Like everyone else who I deal with intimately knows. And she keeps telling me (and I believe her now) I don't have BPD or any other mental illness as such, my problems come from trauma. But if I'm not mentally ill, I guess I feel like I can't hope to ever "get well", and I'm just "naturally" (much as I hate that word) a pretty repulsive person. People are always drawn to me same as everyone else, really like me for a while and then back off at speed when they see who I really am. Therapy can't make me a different individual, a new proper human being, so I don't really know what to do