Not only do symptoms change over time, but for me the past has become more & more clear as the years have gone by & I have been able to read more & that triggers memories that I have finally been able to recall though they were there all the time, the actual memories & putting them together with experience & feelings have really enlightened ME which has given me the chance to enlighten my psychologist.

Little bits & pieces of what other psychologists in the past have given me the pieces to research & to finally pull the picture together MYSELF. I know personally that DBT has been a great help in opening up my understanding & giving me words to put to what I had experienced. Not labels, but the words to describe it.

When I first lost my career & started attempting suicide, they seriously thought BPD so they (my insurance) sent me to UCLA's psych hospital for a Dx. They had no idea what in the world was going on with me because honestly I didn't fall into any REAL category. Finally I ended up with Major Depression recurrent & major anxiety. It probably fit the best in reality......but they had no idea the cause & always thought that JUST loosing my career, I was overreacting.

This in reality WAS TRUE....but at the time, I knew I was in a bad marriage, but the H was always there & seemed supportive. What they missed was the lack of emotional connection....all thought it was ME that was the problem. Turned out with research, I found out what was really going on with my H & why he wasn't capable of emotionally connecting....that research came 6 years after I finally left him & my life started coming back together & the depression started to leave & I found out that I could very easily emotionally connect with the people around me. That caused me to look back at my childhood & realized that all through my life, there was emotional neglect because my parents along with my H were all totally dysfunctional & I learned my own dysfunctional ways of dealing with it......no one caught that I was trapped in the marriage & couldn't get out. It was like a battle I was silently fighting & no one knew us other than my subconscious self which was where the suicide attempts were coming from.

Wow, what an eye opener the future has for us as we learn so much more about ourselves.

Given that, I don't hold much value at all to many of the more subtle Dx's because there can be so many causes that make things look different than they REALLY are.

One T actually suggested that I went through a series of trauma's that I didn't even recognize as trauma's because they just seemed a NORMAL part of my life & normal things to deal with. You will find that as you learn more about yourself & your own life that it will shed a very different light on it than possibly any of the psychologists or pdocs are able to see.

I surely understand your frustrations though.....but there is hope in the future.....that I can attest to.