[Butterfly Crisis]

"What seems to be of central importance in the symptoms and difficulties mentioned above is that the hallmark of the "borderline" personality is great difficulty in holding on to a stable, consistent sense of one's self: "What am I?" these people ask. "My life is in chaos; sometimes I feel like I can do anything—other times I want to die because I feel so incompetent, helpless and loathsome. I'm a lot of different people instead of being just one person."

I got that from the sticky "Borderline PD symptoms description"

I've been diagnosed twice with BPD, once when I was 12 (which seems impossible to me from my research), and again when I was 21. I've doubted it my whole life, but as my insight has improved, I see that I've been in denial. There's no doubt I suffer from BPD. There's two things I have issue with, though.

One is dealing with my therapist. I've only been seeing him since January and he doesn't know a LOT about me and my inner world, hell, I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be talking about in therapy. But I did mention my BPD diagnosis to him and he simply shrugged it off and basically said that personality disorders are messy and often mis-diagnosed. I don't know how to approach this subject with him because lately it's been getting so much worse. I had it under control for a few years, but now.. Things are just BAD.

Specifically, dissociation.

My second issue is discerning the difference between Dissociative Identity Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. I'm really lost when it comes to myself and I often switch from one type of me to the next. I never sync up with what others view, I often ask questions about myself in order to gain some form of clarity. I daydream constantly, I can't get out of my head.. And when I do start thinking about the possibility of alters, while excited to explore myself, I panic at the thought, though I don't know why.

What is going on? What should I do?

[CopperStar]

DID will almost always include periods of amnesia. Try making a timeline for yourself, and for each year, list out as many general memories as you can. If you notice some huge gaps, it might be a major sign.

BPD is a very reactive disorder, and will mostly affect your personal relationships - usually the more emotionally intimate the relationship, the more severe symptoms can become. But it won't make you have periods of amnesia or blacking out.

People with BPD have a weak and confused sense of self, because they are groomed and conditioned from very early childhood and onward to 'be' whatever their caregivers want them to be, typically in a futile attempt to get their emotional needs met from very abusive and unpredictable parents. Their sense of self 'doesn't matter' and is so aggressively invalidated that it never gets the chance to actually develop all that much. Combine that with splitting issues when it comes to perceptions of other people and one's self, and identity issues are pretty significant.

But this is not the same thing as the brain creating amnesiac barriers which wind up manifesting as a fractured mind, in which different emotions, memories, etc are completely cut off from each other, creating the subjective experience of having multiple personalities inside the same mind. This is why amnesia periods can be a dead giveaway of DID.

Also your therapist sounds like an idiot and a coward. BPD is heavily misunderstood and stigmatized even with the professional psychology field, and some therapists are so unwilling to work with people with BPD due to the stigma that they will sometimes just flat out go into denial about a client having a personality disorder. If he was worth his salt, he would have asked you how you felt about the diagnosis, what symptoms you experience, what makes you think you have BPD is you do believe it - you know, actually do his job as a therapist. He doesn't have to believe you have BPD, but he does need to know what you think/feel about it and why in order to do his job.

I don't want to tell you what to do, but those are my honest thoughts.