This is a really interesting read....

Healing is not a process that has at its center just stopping the pain. Trying to just stop the pain will only increase the pain.

If you have Borderline Personality Disorder, (BPD) stop and ask yourself this question: Do I want to heal, really heal, or do I just want the pain to stop whether I can get well or not?

Why do I ask you to ask yourself this question, you might wonder? Because, as a person who has healed from Borderline Personality Disorder, I want to point out that there is a difference between healing and just stopping the pain.

Many aspects of the defense mechanisms and the maladaptive coping techniques used by borderlines attempting to just stop the pain actually, in fact, increase the pain. There is a central unspoken reality in the life of someone mired in the throes of BPD, which involves a very ironic truth. Borderlines spend so much time trying to keep pain at bay and to escape any further pain. It is the very actions taken to do this that end up causing more pain collectively than the original pain itself ever was.

In order to heal from BPD one must be prepared not only to feel his/her pain but to initially feel more pain in healing than they've been aware of otherwise. When you actively seek to heal, that is to say when you are not just trying to stop the pain but to find your way through and out of the pain and all of the accompanying behaviour the pain will increase. Why? It increases when you work to heal because there is so much to feel, to wrestle with and to change. There is the pain, the original pain of childhood, of abuse, neglect, and or any other trauma. Added on top of this there is the pain of where you are at when you seriously begin to peel away the layers of defensive and protective maladaptive-self-defeating behaviour and then there is the pain as you continue to heal of realizing all that you missed, didn't know or didn't learn and couldn't experience because Borderline Personality Disorder stood between you and your experience of the world.

So, in healing, it is necessary to face the pain of your past, the pain that you are currently in and the pain that you will come to know when you can see how the choices you've made to protect yourself have effected not only your life but the lives of those around you, especially the lives of those who tried to care, to love and to help you. There is a profound grief that must be waded through in the quest for one's authentic self.

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If you want to heal you must work at it and for it. If you just want to stop the pain then you are making a choice to continue to run from the proverbial steam-roller that's out of control and chasing you at 100 miles per hour. It gets harder and harder to run from who you are and why you hurt and the fact that you do, indeed, hurt. Stopping the pain is not really a realistic goal. Healing makes a very profound difference to the quality of one's life and relationships, but none of us gets to live without pain in our lives. What healing from BPD had taught me is that we are amazingly resilient creatures and that life in the "healthy world", or the "big picture" has its natural share of ups and downs. What makes all the difference in the world is knowing who I am, what I value, what my boundaries are and that I can be with myself, and take care of myself and maintain a responsible attitude to both self and others.

If you seek to just stop the pain you are going to keep increasing your pain. If you seek to just stop the pain you are also increasing the pain of those that love you.

If you seek to heal you will, for a time, increase your pain, and it can be very scary, at first to feel it and to deal with it but you can learn how and you can do it. Then over time, your pain will decrease.

In order to heal, you have to want to heal. You have to want to learn how to relate to yourself and to others. Just wanting the pain to stop is not going to initiate your healing. Just wanting the pain to stop is not what healing is about.

In life, it truly is not what cards you are dealt that matters. What does matter most is how you play the hand that you are dealt. So, if you are in pain, the way to effect change is not to do anything it takes to stop the pain but rather is to face the pain, feel it, learn to cope with it and to not continue to buy into the illusion that somehow you can be tougher than the pain or that you can control the pain. No, the pain will control you. Borderline pain controls the borderline and the life of anyone who stays involved with the borderline.

The way out of Borderline Personality Disorder, and the pain of BPD is through it. There is no other way. Healing is much more than just wanting the pain to stop. In fact, just wanting the pain to stop often precludes one's working to find long-lasting, new, ways of coping that are healthy and age-appropriate.

For those who seek just to stop the pain, "They see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave." (Plato)