Borderline Personality Disorder

Hello everyone, welcome to the Said in Therapy Podcast. Have you ever considered going to therapy and you ended up not going? My question is why? In my humble opinion, I believe everyone can benefit from therapy. In fact, I believe everybody should go at least once in their life.

My name is Iman Tohami and I'm a psychologist. This podcast tells you all about everyday cases with everyday people who have everyday problems and difficulties and sometimes they carry around really deep wounds. These are their stories.

And if you would like to share it with me, oh my god, I would love that. I'm always happy to connect with all of you. It's actually amazing what has been happening since the first episode came out in January.

We have built this beautiful community, and I would love for us to nourish it even more. So please feel free to contact me anywhere you wish. So, welcome to the second season of Said in Therapy. Some of you might remember I promised a trauma episode before season one concluded.

It was never published. There are a couple of reasons for that, but simply put, I was really overwhelmed. At times I thought, what a weird time to be alive. And sometimes I was perfectly happy in my bubble. But as live events unfolded in our world, I just wanted to take a break.

And then I realized it's not a big deal, it's just a break, so I just took it. Oh, and that trauma episode, it's still definitely coming, so stay tuned for that. But enough of the intro. I want to jump right into the episode.

I'm talking to my former patient Nura. She was diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder, so just take a listen to what she has to share.

And I am not a conservative by any means. And to the question of who I am, I'm still searching for who I am, to be honest, and there has been a lot of struggles in my life. So you can say I'm one of literature and I'm one that enjoys writing casually and enjoys seeking and knowing who I am.

And it's different from time to time.

I wanted to ask you, what was for you the trigger to decide that you wanted to talk to someone in a setting that is therapy? What made you decide that you needed help in that way?

Yeah, um, it was back uh I I remember when I was like, you know, 14, 15. I realized that I I I felt like I am not happy.

Everybody viewed me like the person who kept laughing, I was I was like, you know, the the clown of the family, you know, and people like enjoyed me being there because I was just laugh, but in reality, I wasn't I wasn't happy and and I felt lonely.

And I came to my parents and I told them I I want to seek therapy. I was aware of my you know my mental health and I was aware that this was important. But my family, you know, the typical Middle Eastern family, um did not view mental health as a huge thing.

I mean, they did they thought that whenever you're sad, you go back to the Quran, or you know, there was something, there is something missing. But I was reading the Quran, I was really like conservative myself at that time.

So that didn't happen. My dad was like, I think he was thinking, oh, that's the phase and it's gonna go high. And by the time I graduated college and I started working, I found myself really, it was really difficult for me to operate in days.

Like one day I would be fine, the other day it was like my friends would just look at me and like know there was something wrong, and I couldn't like, you know, you know, gather myself together and I didn't really feel like talking, and they would come by, they were like, Are you okay?

And just like I feel like I wanted to cry, and I would cry and I didn't know what was going on. And then there were days that like like I was really overworked. I worked in the morning and had school at night.

I was trying to achieve something better of me, and I couldn't, I couldn't wash, you know, when you try to fill up gaps by overworking, yeah, being the perfect, you know, person, you feel a lot of rejection from work because you're you're lacking something, you're not the same employee as you were, and then at school you're you're a lot of rejection, and you feel like you don't fit in your family.

And then I I I decided to go to therapy. Uh and I went to therapy and then a few talks here and there. It was only a four-day session, and it ended. Um on the like the second day, my therapist at the time, she was like, she put it drew a line, and she was like, This is zero percent, and this is hundred percent.

Uh how angry are you? And I remember I kept looking at the line, and it was like, you know, you're going to score high, but you're probably going to just like, you know, this is not right. You're just exaggerating.

And she could see it in my eyes, and she was like, It's a hundred, right? And I was like, Yes, it is. And that's when I realized I was filled with anger. And yeah, that was the first time that I realized that I really needed intense therapy, but I didn't manage to pursue it like more until later on.

So you have been diagnosed with uh borderline dis um personality disorder. I think we need to explain a little bit what that means and how this unfolds in your life and how it feels to be affected by this on a daily basis.

Um, right. So basically, since I am I I am new to the diagnosis and I still feel like I need to know more about it. So what is borderline means that you are constantly between mood swings. It's not as mood swings as in like, you know, being bipolar, being either constantly happy in one week and then the next week being angry or sad.

Um, it's basically in one day you go from up and down, and it could last for a couple of days or a couple of hours, being suddenly happy and suddenly sad, and going back and forth between these kind of feelings.

And there are there is also the feeling of emptiness, the disorienting feeling of self, you don't know who you are, and um basically fearing abandonment, which uh checks out most of my lists. And it does um I when I look back in my uh my history, it was I've always felt empty.

I just thought people felt it the way the way that the same way I felt. But I learned that in a certain situation, you just feel a normal feeling sad, happy, angry. It's just like you know, you just feel a tip of it.

But in my case, I feel it deeply. What you feel as you know, 10% of happiness and emptiness, and what's so on, I feel it's like 10 times more. And I I remember I read this quote from I even forgot her name, a famous like uh uh person, a doctor who diagnoses borderline.

And she was like, it's kind of like being borderline, it's like being a third-degree uh burn patient. So basically the sensitivity of the skin is like the emotional pain that the borderline person goes through. And it made sense because every time something happened, a situation that I got angry at or I was sad.

I mean, I could see that other people would like, you know, oh, it happened, I'm sad now, okay, I'm letting it go. But for me, it wasn't like that. It's just like it kept going deeper and deeper. It just hurt.

It wasn't it wasn't like a normal kind of pain. And I I I saw myself, like, you know, why am I like that? Why can't I can't I be like normal people? Why do I keep tearing up very fast?

I don't get it. And when when I looked into the diagnosis, I realized that there is an explanation to it. And I felt comfort in it because I could find uh a reason, uh uh a way where I can deal with my problems, these kinds of pain and again feeling empty, which was chronic to me, always kept coming back.

I'm empty, I need to fill this up, and I don't know what to do with this kind of emptiness. That's um my history, like the brief history of how I realized I am borderline.

You know, it is only one part of the whole process to understand a diagnosis or to be diagnosed. There's also this whole other side that is life and what happens in life and all the traumatic events in life and how you process them and how you continue to process them, but also heal and move on, and when the context of that is difficult, it becomes even harder to take care of the own mental health.

So, without going too much into the context of what's happening in your life, unless you really want to, how are you able to survive a diagnosis like this, but at the same time reconcile with your own life and understand that not everything that's happening to you was necessarily right?

Well, I don't think I came to the point where where I'm fully reconciling with what is happening and to not to go too much into details, just to to go um by the with the gist of it, I have a lot of problems with my family, especially with you know feeling accepted into it.

I can give you a simple uh explanation is that uh how we are in the Middle East, we're not very emotionally intact. Like, you know, parents are not, you know, they love you, but they don't show you that they love you, and they're like, you know, it's the the harsh way of loving you.

And that didn't really work well with me because I grew constantly afraid of my mom, for example, my parents in general, but my mom specifically, because she wouldn't say, Oh, you did great or or you're amazing. She would be like, You didn't do that, I am angry at you with that, and the good things would mostly be left off.

And that was like through childhood, I'm not ta telling you, you know, just now. And that had a huge impact on me. I'm still trying to figure things out. But through through therapy, uh, like which I'm still going through now, um I realized that, you know, I could misinterpret a lot of stuff.

I mean, I take things like words you say it, and then I would I would like hate myself for it, and I would take it and feel guilty about it because we feel a lot of guilt, right? Because we're not sufficient enough and we're not good enough for other people.

And then, for example, my mother's angeriness is directed toward myself, where okay, I'm not sufficient enough, I'm not good enough, and I'm not a good person, basically, and I'm guilty about it. Uh, I remember because of therapy uh right now, I realized that I need more honesty.

Okay, it's not just okay, you can't just be angry at me and I don't know what's going on, because I will definitely interpret it against myself. So one of the skills I learned is that, you know, try to ask more, to reconcile more about what's going on.

And I would like one time I hai like there was like I acted irrationally about what's going on because you know, my my my I can't hide my emotions, but like it comes right out of my face. And my mom, she misinterpreted something else and she got angry, but you know, my mom's angriness is like giving me the silent treatment, and you have to figure things out yourself.

And since being diagnosed, my mom read about things and she came in terms that okay, I need to deal with my daughter in a different way. I need to be like, you know, different a little bit. So I came to her, I was like, you know, what's going on?

Why are I angry right away? I didn't even want to dwell in this kind of pain because it hurts me right away. Her giving me the silent treatment. And I came to her and I was like, what's going on?

And she was like, you did this and this and this. I was like, I didn't know that I did this. If you saw something wrong that I did, please tell me right away. Because I didn't know, and I didn't, I wouldn't know that you took it in another way and you're angry about it.

I wouldn't know about that. I was just it would just feel bad about it and and other things would happen. I need you to be more honest about the things that you feel that I didn't do well, and we can talk about it.

And I think that that's the moment where I feel like therapy did kind of help me in in ways where I can like you know apply it in life. And sometimes when things are bothering me, I try to resort in things like mindfulness, trying to soothe myself with whatever is going on, sound, taste, uh, vision, and so on.

It's just that, okay, this is bothering me right now. I need to go in another place where I would stop feeling this way. And to realize that change is constant. And okay, even though I'm feeling this way, it's not the end of the world because that's how I felt usually when it would feel really, really bad.

I I was like, I can't take it anymore, which is true. I I'm like, I can't, I don't know how much I can take. And then I would try to remind myself that change is constant, this is not gonna happen all the time, and this feeling would eventually go away.

Obviously, therapy isn't the easiest thing, it's uh a learning process and readjusting constantly to situations and understanding how you feel, why you feel that, and what you can do to get out of a certain situation emotionally. You powered through.

I have observed that, and you were really determined to find out how you can help yourself, and I think this is key here because when you came for the first time to talk to me, it was not simply a sentence like help me, it was more like help me to understand, and I think this is something that I want to highlight here about you, but also about everyone else who is considering this, because when you go

to therapy, it's really hard work, it's not something that comes easy. You don't go and sit somewhere and talk to someone and wait for this someone to tell you what's going on or to tell this, tell you, here is what you feel, and this is how you this is how you need to control these feelings.

It's more like a guidance process, but at the same time, the work is on you. I want to know why you never gave up.

Because I mean, happiness is key, right? Being like we always look at pictures of people or people around you who's very content and they have amazing lives. And the the thing that we always look forward is being happy.

And in a very, very long time, I haven't been happy for you know for a long time. Usually, you know, you're happy, you're content of your life, like that's how I view people, and then they go through a tough time, and then they go back with having a normal life and happy life.

And I look at people and felt so envious because my happiness would not, you know, it's just one moment, and the rest of my life was like I'm always down, I'm always unhappy, and that's what I think led me to to go because I wanted to eventually be happy and be content with what I have because I can't change a lot of things in my life, but I can change what I how I feel about it.

And I knew from the beginning, as you said, that like I wish it was a magic wand where, like, you know, I did have these fantasies where, like, okay, I want to go to therapy, and the first session I want to go out being happy, but that's just you know, fairy tale world talk, right?

I knew that this is on the contrary of what's going to happen. And for me, I don't know for other people, I knew therapy is like a like a roller coaster. First, you begin therapy, you're going to let out a lot of you know negative emotions, and you're going to realize things that you haven't realized before.

And most of these things are really bad, which is going to let you go on a negative stage, which which I I call it stage of realization, and then For a couple of sessions, you really feel worse than you felt before.

And that's the I think the critical point is that I knew that I had to remind myself that this has to happen for me to be better. And if I didn't have that at the back of my head, I would definitely let go of therapy right away.

But I think it's really important for people to know that this has to happen. In order for you to reach the content part, you have to know where all of the these things came from, right? And that what kept me to push, to keep pushing.

And I had to remind myself also, and this is not part of your question, but I had to remind myself also that not all therapists are matching, right? They could be good therapists, right? But they they might not match with you the way that you you want it to be, and that's okay.

But I it's not a I I want to say it's not it's not an indicator for you to give up on therapy at all and all. It's just that, you know, since like one person uh could be your friend, and another person can't be your friend because of you know how you don't match in personality, and that doesn't necess does not necessarily mean that they're a bad person.

Same thing goes with therapy, same thing goes with any kind of doctors, and it's like you always want to go to a second opinion, and that's fine. And I remember that I had to go through a couple of therapists to go to the right one, right?

And feel comfortable with it. And I I remember that like when I started with you, I felt really, really comfortable and I didn't mind talking about the things that we spoke up about before. And um, yeah, that's what kept me pushing because I knew that there was an importance to mental health, and I knew that I wanted to be happy.

I don't want to be stuck in the same situation all the time, despite me being like feeling like I've been drowning.

Actually, this is something that um I'm very happy you brought up because I know so many people who started therapy at some point and gave up because they didn't feel that the person they went to first um was understanding them enough or understanding their context enough, and they simply gave up on the whole idea of therapy because that one person didn't work for them.

The reality is here, when you go to a dentist and the dentist is someone you really don't like and you don't trust, you will not go to that dentist anymore. But whenever you're you have pain in your tooth, you will go to another dentist, you will take care of it.

And it's like going to a GP, you don't like him or her, and then you simply decide, no, I need to find someone else. And same goes for therapy. And I remember, even just for the audience to understand, we are no longer working together.

You are now with another therapist who works with you locally, so it's one-on-one. And when we work together, it was virtually. So we used online sessions. Yeah. I always knew that there are certain limitations to online sessions, especially when there is a need of additional treatment that needs to be put in place.

And I remember when you came to me and you asked me about um going to another therapist, and I told you, what do you have to lose? Just try. And it's exactly like you mentioned, it's you don't have just you don't only have one friend.

So you can have multiple friends, and everybody has a specific role to play in your life, and sometimes one person helps you more than the other person because they are more equipped or simply helping you out better because they can see you on a daily basis, for instance.

Exactly. And I think this is something very important to say here, only because you had one experience with therapy that didn't work out for you, or one experience with therapy that helped you a little bit, that didn't help you further, it's not a reason to give up.

You can keep on going, keep going on and keep trying to find someone who helps you more or fits your situation more. So I think this is something very important, and I'm very glad that you brought that up.

Yeah, and there's always like, you know, the idea of perspective, each person is specialized with something. And once you have a diagnosis, it's it's better for you to know where you're heading to. Like it's all about the methodology of treatment.

I fully agree.

So, what I wanted to tell you is I am super impressed, but I was always impressed. You are a person who is so brave, you have so much courage, and I don't know if you really know that. You always went into situations, um, even if you knew that they might cause you a lot of pain, um, to unfold them and look at them.

You always did that with the intention to find answers. And I want you to understand that this takes a lot of courage. This is not a normal thing to do. It's easier to move on and just brush everything on the side.

I am really happy that you're on your healing journey and that it is finally working for you. Because before we two talked, there were many other stops and milestones you had to go through until you are here. Definitely.

When you came here, this was a long journey. And I want people to understand that this is nothing that can be solved overnight. Sometimes things need time and patience.

And when we talk about time and patience, it takes a lot of time. Can I imagine what happened in one of our sessions?

Sure.

Yeah, I remember like, you know, I even got angry at you at some point. Is that like you felt it? You were like, Are you angry with me? And I was like, Yes. And you told me to send you like uh an email about like why I'm an angry and you know, just vent.

And I remember saying that I'm angry because you're not letting me be better. And it's not and I knew like like was fully aware that my anger was not put into place, that um it wasn't your problem that I wasn't I was I didn't get better at this time, but it's okay to be to feel that you're angry, it's okay to vent, because this is the part where you feel impatience, right?

Don't give yourself a month or two months, give yourself indefinite time. Just don't look at time, just look at you know the resolution. Keep in mind that my goal is to be happy or to be content, and this is what I want to reach to.

And that's what I think what kept me going because I stopped looking at deadlines. And yeah, thank you for these words. I don't I don't honestly feel that. I I don't feel like I have given like a few, I just feel like I I'm not giving myself more uh credit than what I what people tell me.

Good to hear it sometimes. Yeah, definitely. And it's even better to see how other people perceive you. Not that it should alter the way you think about yourself, just get to see how people perceive your progress and so you can internalize that and maybe see that as a result if you feel you're not really moving forward.

Yeah, definitely. If like you become your own support system at the beginning, and uh it would definitely ha help if you had um other kinds of support system. And and I would like to say that my number one support system has been um a friend of mine who I didn't lose in this process.

Um, which like even the darkest of place, I knew that she would always be there for me. And she has proven herself to be like the person that I I mostly relied on. She like it's important to have this kind of person that doesn't ask too much of you.

It's just that, and I don't ask too much of her, like you don't want a person that you know just gives, gives, and doesn't take, and vice versa. And our kind of dynamic is like my what I require from her is just to be there, and the same goes the other way around, and that's how our relationship evolved.

I want to thank you for sharing your story with us. I know that this was not the easy thing for you, but even considering it means a lot. I I hope that this was also helpful for you and one more step in your own healing experience.

But I'm 100% sure that there are so many people out there who are going to listen to this and find themselves in that story and maybe be encouraged to seek help themselves.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I mean, it's one of the sources of happiness for me is helping other people. And if this does help other people, then I'm definitely happy uh that it resulted this way. And thank you for being my patient therapist and now uh now having me for this podcast.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode so far. If you have any questions or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. The handle is always @saidintherapy.