Extremely upset after receiving new diagnosis

Quitting therapy will not help you to get rid of your symptoms and traits. At the very least symptoms will stay there tormenting you further and the very worst they’ll get worse left untreated.

It’s the same as I’d go to GP and he said I have high blood pressure and I get mad at him for saying it and quit going to doctors all together. Well mental health isn’t the same but you get my point. Things won’t go away if you stop addressing them and blaming doctors for diagnosing illness or disorder etc will not help you heal.

You are asking for our help because you want to stop seeing your T. Do you see that this is a pattern of yours you stated that's your T a few years ago said you had bipolar what you got mad and you quit.

Regardless of your dx these are symptoms and traits that keep repeating themselves with you. Quitting therapy is not going to stop these repetitive actions or help you improve so that is the one reason why you don't want to quit.

Try hard to get past the dx and just start working on your symptoms. The quicker you stop fighting it and start working on making progress, the faster you'll start feeling better. I know it will be a long hard process believe me I know but every trip no matter how long, starts with a single step. Pease take that step Hope.

Hope, maybe one thing to ask yourself: what exactly do you get out of these almost polar cycles of admiring your T and getting intensely upset/running away? It it soothing for your psyche, something that eases your anxiety in some way, more than trying to endure and follow up with one decision and strategy? Or is it just reacting to your momentary feelings and their fluctuations? I guess if it is soothing and it only takes posts on this forum and telling your T, maybe it is not a bad thing, certainly better than messing with important things/relationships in your life. That would be a good use for this forum and therapy, at least when other forms of self-regulation don't work well. But if they are merely impulses and immediate reactions without even recalling very much the many previous cycles (denying the pattern), that is definitely a symptoms that could probably benefit from trying to endure more and change how you handle them.

While I’m talking to him about diagnoses, I need to discuss the Bipolar 2 with him.

I just don’t know how to open up.

I’ve been looking for journal type apps or maybe even starting a new blog to go into personal stuff and he is okay with that.

I just can’t find the best one.

He upset me when he disregarded the actual DSM criteria. Maybe he has a huge ego.

I don’t want to be upset with him but I can’t make those feelings stop.

I care about him and don’t want to lose him but I hate that he sees how messed up I am. And I haven’t even talked to him about trauma yet.

Remember that this IS his job. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor, and any medical doctor is hired with the purpose of figuring out whatever ails us and helping us come up with a plan to deal with those ails. Can you think of it that way?

For instance, if a person had really ugly rash in some private area of his or her body, that person might go to a doctor who would have to look at that in order to see what was going on, try to figure out what is going on, and hopefully come up with a way to help relieve that rash. Getting undressed and having another person, that doctor, look at that rash might be really uncomfortable, even perhaps feel embarrassing, but to the doctor, that is pretty normal, day-to-day business. That's his/her job.

Additionally, sometimes we go into a doctor certain we already know what's wrong with us (X), but once the doctor starts investigating, they use their knowledge and explain to us that, no, what's actually going on is Y. That's not ego; that's a more particular, more trained, set of eyes. A few years ago I woke up in horrible pain, and it was on my lower right side; I was pretty certain it was appendicitis. I went to the ER, and once the doctor did some investigating (ultrasound/x-rays/blood work), he diagnosed a kidney stone. He explained the symptoms such as mine were presenting were very similar to each other,but it was definitely not appendicitis.

I just encourage you to do what you and your doctor discussed: focus on the treatment of your symptoms rather than use your disagreement with the diagnosis (which probably won't make much difference in treatment in the long-run) and your discomfort with opening up to him (probably a common fear and discomfort for many people in this situation) as a reason to reject help by running away. Allow someone to actually try to help you. It doesn't all have to happen at once. That's okay.

As far as a blog goes, you don't need to find an app. Buy a notebook. Start writing. There is something to be said for the tactile action of writing by hand rather than punching keyboard keys. You can draw. You can doodle. You can't delete things permanently, losing them. You can paste pictures or articles into the journal, etc. My therapist always said the messier, the better, when it came to journalling. We tend to edit ourselves a great deal on a screen, and we tend to lean to our perfectionist tendencies rather than being spontaneous and authentic. Don't let not finding an app stop you from starting. Paper and pen is easily at hand.

Best of luck to you.

He is a psychiatrist. That’s what he does for a living. That’s what he deals with it on a regular basis

Your frequent extreme shift from admiration and idealization of people to disliking and almost hating them and then back to admiring them is a trait that you might want to discuss with your pdoc/t. Also frequent desire to quit and not follow through. I know you don’t want to talk about diagnosis but talk about these traits and symptoms without mentioning diagnosis. Yes you can ask him if he thinks you might also have BP. No harm in asking.

I doubt he diagnosed you because of his huge ego. He is trained professional and he likely based it on observation and his knowledge. I don’t see ego in play.

I’ve never been so upset at him. But I’m about to start trying to work through it.

Hope, I am only saying this to try to ease your pain. If your GP told you had a serious disease but it could be treated would you be mad at the doctor for diagnosing you or would you push to start treatment immediately? Running away is not going to make the symptoms go away. You have to put in the effort and follow through with treatments in order to be healthy.

I did the same thing at the ER one time when I had pneumonia and I left before they started treating me.

Now I want to fix things with T but I have no idea of where to begin.

But that's what therapy is for, no? When I was in therapy, I definitely did not let my vulnerability and chaos show, I more engaged in my usual habit of trying to do everything to appear together and progressing. Of course it did not serve me well - even when I had a good T, I just did not allow him to reach the messed up places. My Ts commented on that feature of being "armored" multiple times, and so did numerous other people in my life. But then what do we pay high $ for?! I also don't think this is a BPD trait at all, maybe more a behavioral pattern of people who learned to be independent and not to trust the environment/other people too early but show resourcefulness and autonomy to the external world. Of course then one will intensely fear that resourcefulness and autonomy to crumble, and others to find out it is not as great as it may seem. But it is much more effective to let the therapists and psychiatrists we pay to see the reality, otherwise everything may just continue to run in circles. I am no longer in therapy and don't plan to be anytime soon, but this is definitely a lesson I have learned from my experiences, both with therapy and just life in general. Also that most people are actually very tolerant and welcoming of vulnerabilities when they are openly acknowledged and not too extreme/causing dishonesty and abuse.

The ones that are not willing to tolerate (vulnerabilities and negative feedback) and adapt at all are usually some of the people who are mentally less healthy. Of course, if you were surrounded (let alone raised!) by people like that, it is likely you will fear it for a very long time. From your posts over time, Hope, I had the impression that you had some very decent people trying to help you and interact with you (I'm just also recalling a pharmacist from a while ago) but, exactly by the virtue of being decent and helpful, these people will inevitably have limits and boundaries. It does sound like you tend to recognize when someone is really okay and is trying to help but get into these cycles of upset when you are facing the normal, healthy limitations coming with it. If this sounds accurate... it is something I relate to, although mostly from the periods of my life when I was drinking heavily and had poor sense of limits and self-control. I know how hard it is to regulate the impulses even though I never really have that issue sober. And it usually comes with intense spells of self-hatred afterward, which can be even worse emotionally than consequences of the actual messed up relationships... I do think it is good to let other people help you and it is the very point of therapy and the job of a mental health provider! For me, in retrospect, it might have helped to see them just as any medical doctor. I go there and pay them to help me figure out my problems and to find solutions I cannot find or have the expertise to apply myself. No need to care for them other than paying them according to mutual agreement. It may be a good idea not to get into extremes with chasing them and being unrealistic with demands - that will naturally alienate even the best meaning and most professional people if it is repeated over and over and over. I don't think psych professionals are immune to that effect.

The best way to begin working through this is by just trying (in my opinion). Just go back for your next session with this T, tell him how you feel about what he's said, what you think about it, what you think would maybe fit better for a diagosis, and so on...

So far he hasn't done anything that couldn't just be a difference in opinion or a misunderstanding (from what I've read). I'm sure if people on here had the opinion this T was trying to do harm, somebody would have spoken out.

Sometimes feelings are painful and they suck. But a good T will help you to slowly be able to tolerate those feelings better, to not feel like you suddenly have to run from him because he upset you (even if that feeling of being upset can be really, really strong and hard to tolerate). However, if you just switch your T (or don't see anyone at all) as soon as this happens, you will have a hard time ever learning how to cope with this, because it's hard to teach yourself.

I think @ArtleyWilkins has a great idea: Instead of blogging you might consider journaling in a notebook. By the way, notebooks should be really cheap now because of the back to school sales for kids. Anyway, you can even carry it around with you; when you think of anything, you can journal about it.

Maybe write about why you are so angry with him and that you feel like running away from him. Only if you are up to it, journal about your traumatic experiences. Then when you see him, just give him the notebook to read from.

But, I think you should stay with him and tell him about all of the trauma that you went through. Hang in there. I know it is easier said than done. Go through all of this with him, so you can get relief.

I have always read that Ts really like working with clients that come in regularly and put in the work.

If you think about it, thise are the clients that are going to naturally make the most progress. That is what Ts want to see the most. If they are good at what they do, they want to see us get better. My T always says his goal is to work himself out of a job so I can move on and have a better life.

Just try to take that first step. Help yourself and help your T help you.

It’s too late now. I felt like everyone in the office was mad at me so I emailed and told them to cancel next week and all of my August sessions .

Maybe that will help things calm down.

I do regret that but it’s too late now.

I got it straightened out. Now, I need to put myself back together and quit freaking out.

Your find talking it over with a T more rewarding than talking about it on the Internet.

BPD is not a death sentence...unless u make it one

Recovery IS possible

I recommend the book Get Me Out of Here

It’s not really BPD that I have a problem with. It’s the fact that my T isn’t following the DSM criteria and even though I don’t have enough traits to get the full diagnosis, he doesn’t care.

I also now have to talk to him about C-PTSD. I’m currently reading a book on that and that sounds like my experience.

I had so many traumatic things happen to me as a child and as an adult.

I want to talk to T about it but even the thought of writing it down makes me want to shut it down. I guess I keep those feelings hidden as a defense mechanism. There’s so much T doesn’t know about me because I keep a lot of stuff pushed down inside.

Does he say you don't have enough traits to the full diagnosis, or is that your assessment?

Does the T know that you are so averse to this diagnosis? Does he push you to talk about it in session? I imagine you could be free to reject it and not talk about it, if that's what you want. Just talk about whatever bothers you then.

One of the biggest problems that I have had with him as a T is that it seems like sometimes he refuses to listen to a different viewpoint and one time when I was talking to him about my future goals, he didn’t listen and made it seem like I couldn’t achieve it.

He keeps being vague when I ask him questions and I just want the accurate information.

I had a discussion with my sister this morning about the symptoms and she also agreed that most of them doesn’t fit me.

I understand that maybe my doctor doesn’t want to admit that he may be wrong but I would like for him to consider all the factors before sticking with that decision.

Also, I took a Bipolar screening test and it said that I have symptoms of Bipolar and should be evaluated. Bipolar does run in my family so that’s not impossible.

I don’t understand why it seems like he actually wants me to have this disorder.