[Mouse_]

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)

[Perna]

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Mouse_ said:
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.

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[youOme]

Life is painful despite what you do and what you have to make it feel better for a short time. Making the best of suffering and learning from suffering is what makes life tolerable and accepted....imo

[Mouse_]

No I don't think life has to be as painful for me as it has always been. I believe that eventually once I work through my core issues, lifes normal up's and downs will be far less painful. For me the post I posted showed me that in the short term I have been doing things, going back to behaviours to stop the immediate pain, but if I allow myself to go through the barrier I will eventually see that what I thought was helping me was infact keeping me stuck. LIfe can be a joy, it doesn't have to be a chore.

[Mouse_]

Nobody actually owes me anything.

[youOme]

If a person expects life to become easy parcheesy after working their *** off to achieve this they will be sadly disappointed. Have you considered that maybe people get better, then fall back, better, then fall back again...because life is hard and is full of sucky hardships and sufferings. It's reality.

Life can be joyous..I agree with this. In order for a person to achieve real happiness in their lives I believe they have to fully accept their sufferings, their pain, and all the junk surrounding it. Accepting pain and taking it head on and making the best of it. There is no such thing as a painless life.

[pachyderm]

Here I would like to advocate a bit for those who have trouble dealing with the pain; so much trouble that they do not succeed very obviously or quickly in "facing" it. It is not that easy. Do not blame yourself too much for "weakness." There is something to be said for cowardice, too.

Now if I could take my own advice...

[AlteredState01]

Very poignant post, Mouse, and I wholeheatedly agree with what you are saying, but I just have one question:

How?

I know you answered this quesion indirectly, but answer it directly...because that is what I need to know.

I have done DBT. I have practiced it as much as I could (in spite of the fact that it is based on Bhuddist principles) without offending my own spiritual and religious beliefs.

Aside from all that, tell me HOW???

[Mouse_]

AS, for me its like this situation I have going on with a friend that showed me some kindness and that hooked me...all my pain and longing and yearning to be loved can be fixed by this person, well her and every drug drink and other obessive relationship I've had before her. This time I need to not keep contacting her or using a drug to escape that pain inside that feels like nothingness and feels like the worse lonliness one could ever experience without dying and to sit with it and to talk truthfully about the pain with my therapist and re-experience the feelings from the original hurts in the here and now and finally see that no I cannot get enveloped by another to experience myself as a seperate person and to experience my aloneness and to go through it. Each time I feel I'm going to do it this time, I run ffrom it, I numb myself out in so many ways just for that instant gratification but it still comes back because its got to be felt and then released, its like stored energy inside the body. While I hold onto that negative energy in my body it controls my life, it tells me to do this or to do that to stop it from being experienced, I've believed that theres a magic thing or person out there that will fix me, but they can't no one or nothing can only the allowing the pain to flood my consoiusness and then mourning it will it be cured..or at leasted become managable enought for me to deal with it whilst I get on with life instead of it being my life.

[Perna]

Don't lose sight of the idea that there are "middle" grounds, shades of gray, and throw the baby out with the bath water. The relationship might not be as sick as you feel it is at the moment? You have a lot of "numbing" and "running" and other extreme words but there is "aching" and "walking away" and "looking back" too. Whether we choose the "all" or the "nothing", neither one of those will fix things? We can stand with our pain, in the doorway :-) in case we feel like running, that's okay.

[pachyderm]

> shades of gray...

Why is gray good? Let's start a shades of blue fan club...