The very definition of BPD means someone has to fulfill at least 5 of the criteria. As for how consistent the behavior has to be to qualify, I don’t know, but I can say that every BPD person I have known (admittedly few) has been consistent in their BPD behavior. As with anything, the intensity of the behavior will vary from person to person.
The thing about BPD (and any personality disorder) is that all of us will experience some of these behaviors from time to time. That doesn’t make us BPD though. Someone who is BPD will take things to an unhealthy extreme that impacts their personal life and the lives of those around them.
It’s something that I struggle with a lot, because it’s hard to grow up with a BPD parent and not assume some of their behaviors. My biggest fear in life is behaving like my mother. Children of BPD parents often have a hard time coping with the ‘normal’ need to engage in some of the BPD behaviors. For example, we often have to teach ourselves that it’s ok to feel abandoned sometimes, or that it’s ok to be angry. Those are normal emotions and don’t in and of themselves make us BPD. But, because we have had those behaviors modeled for us and because we do not want to follow in the footsteps of our BPD, we may not allow ourselves to engage in otherwise normal, healthy feelings and behaviors.
Hmmm…interesting that you say “5” and that site says “3”. It makes me wonder if some people at that site are mistaken regarding their or their loved one’s problem.
Perhaps you were looking at the criteria for antisocial personality disorder? They also list criteria for narcissistic personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder, since there seems to be overlap or commonality between the disorders.
Can someone explain “identity disturbance” to me? What does that look like from the outside? A person who constantly changes their outward appearance? Or who changes their career? How do you know when it’s an identity disturbance and when it’s just normal changes of life?
I also wanted to thank everyone for this thread. I’ve recognized a lot of my mother and aunt’s behaviors in this thread. They will never ever acknowledge that anything might be wrong with them; mental illness isn’t a scale to them, it’s “sane” and “batshit crazy” and of course they will never want to be countered as the last.
A normal person would not change, say, from a bleeding-heart liberal to a staunch republican overnight. At least, not without some major life-changing experience.
People with BPD often try on ideas and lifestyles like the rest of us try on clothes. They don’t have any sort of consistent sense of who they really are, so they can be almost anyone they decide to be at any time. People with BPD tend to look outward for guidance on who they should be, and often let powerful people around them exert undue influence.
It’s tough to give a concrete definition because how it manifests from person to person is going to vary. But basically, because they do not have a sense of identity, anything they purport to believe in can change on a dime.
My mom is a perfect example. To meet her, you’d think she was a die-hard Republican, very much entrenched in the religious right. She has a tv in every room of the house and they are all tuned to Fox News all the time. However, on many occasions she’ll send me some bit of propaganda, but she never sends any commentary because she just flat out doesn’t have an opinion until she’s run it by someone else.
If I agree with her, she’ll puff up her chest and act all proud and righteous, and then send it around to everyone else she knows.
If I disagree, and provide rational information to disprove or discredit her source, she will generally reply with something like, “Oh I know! I was just making sure you saw it. Can you believe what some people will make up?”
It’s so predictable it’s sad. She is a very judgmental person up front, but if you challenge her on it she will either get defensive and completely shut you out, or completely flip and act as though she agreed with you all along and you were too stupid to realize she was joking.
I want to add to XJETGIRLX’s perspective of visible personality change and give you a more internal example. As has been discussed before, BPD and Complex-PTSD share several characteristics, of which identity disturbance is key. So at the risk of sounding like a complete psycho I am going to attempt to explain my own identity disturbance, which has always been present but is not always visible.
From Identity Disturbance in Borderline Personality Disorder: An Empirical Investigation
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, A.B., and Drew Westen, Ph.D.
When you grow up, as both me and Mom had, repeatedly exposed to traumatic experiences, you lose a sense of self in the process. I’d already experienced a lot of instability and some abuse by the time I was 7, but I was still an extremely extroverted, arrogant, spoiled kid. I was a superstar, a total ham, into theater and music and whatever else would get me attention.
By the time I got out of that house I was a nervous wreck. I didn’t trust my own perceptions about anything, I was afraid, overly apologetic, self-conscious, felt worthless, viewed the world as malevolent and uncaring, refused to take personal risks and avoided other people at all costs. I felt, and I admit I sometimes feel, that I was not only born horrible, but also that through some mystical means I have been cursed. I had developed these reactions and coping mechanisms over time to protect myself, to the point that all that was left of me were reactions and coping mechanisms.
What happened, exactly, between then and now is hard to say, but all those traumas somehow managed to fracture me into this confusing jumble of experience and thought, none of which I could comprehend for a very long time. Part of healing, as outlined in Trauma and Recovery, is taking all these traumatic experiences and piecing them into a cohesive personal narrative. That is one very big reason I have discussed all of this so extensively on the Dope–until you get it down on paper, it’s just a bunch of bizarre, painful fragments of a life, sans meaning or comprehension.
As a result of this, it took me a long time to feel like I was anybody. All my reactions were just recreations of trauma, using old behaviors to cope with new (non-dangerous) circumstances. Even today I have very conflicted feelings about the person I am. I often wonder who I would be if it hadn’t been for all that shit. The sense of loss is difficult to describe. I envy that 7-year-old for all her confidence, and in many ways wish I still was her.
In struggling to figure out this ‘‘who I am’’ nonsense, a question which has obsessed me for as long as I remember, I’ve changed religions, changed career tracks, spent hours at night poring over philosophy books to figure out what I really believed about the world and treated every decision, however minor, as a reflection of my identity and by extension my self-worth. I used to have life-changing epiphanies about once every ten days. Who I am and how I find my place in this world has been a continuously unfolding drama I can’t let go of.
In addition to this I had a persistent feeling that I was losing my mind, becoming psychotic, ceasing to exist, or that I would lose control of myself. I couldn’t stand by a railing because of my fear I would hurl myself over it–not that I WANTED to hurl myself over it, but I was afraid it could somehow happen against my will. I thought thinking would make reality so. That I actually have control over my behavior is something I had to learn. In a very literal way I believed that my fears dictated reality. (This sound bizarre, but it’s not really uncommon for sufferers of severe anxiety.)
Then there is outright dissociation, which is nearly impossible to describe because it’s an altered state of consciousness comparable in some ways to psychosis (but not psychosis.) Basically it is a lack of connection to the self or to the present. There have been times I was so depressed I shut myself in a dark closet and lay there for hours, emotionally numb, feeling myself dissolving away. Sometimes dissociation takes the form of a direct flashback, which is not remembering a bad experience so much as physically reliving it. The way a war veteran can hear a car backfire and suddenly be back in the trenches, I can hear a glass break and be instantly 12 years old again, backed up against some wall. Some people have visual and auditory hallucinations with their flashbacks–I don’t, but I experience physical sensation… as if I am being touched in that moment. I am getting nauseated just thinking about what it is like to have a flashback.
The reason for dissociation appears to be that traumatic memories are chemically encoded in the brain in a different way than narrative memory, and once triggered the memory retrieval process kind of derails and brings up all these shattered perceptions from the past. At its most extreme form identity disturbance could be said to take the form of alternate personalities, but I am quite skeptical that alternate personalities are a genuine phenomenon.
So when you have all that going on, it’s nearly impossible to maintain some tangible sense of self. The focus is always on the fear of losing control, of being the wrong person, doing the wrong thing, thinking the wrong thing, being rejected by others, etc, to the exclusion of all else. Everything is reactionary rather than reflective. Though I’m waaaay more together than I used to be this regard, I still often feel completely unable to relate to other people. I worry that people can tell by looking at me how different I am. And sometimes I vacillate back and forth between feeling completely unremarkable and feeling completely alien.
All of this is typical of many people who have survived repeat trauma, and is therefore partially responsible for the overlap of BPD and Complex-PTSD. Though I do want to make it clear, while flashbacks necessitate a traumatic experience, dissociation does not. Even fully functional people experience some level of dissociation on a regular basis, for example when you ‘‘wake up’’ from a long road trip and realize you have no memory of driving for the last 20 minutes. Some people, for whatever reason, develop this as a kind of coping mechanism when they prefer not to deal with reality.
Now I don’t know, but I would suspect, a BPDs identity disturbance has more outward and marked symbols than a person with Complex-PTSD, but I’ve discussed the above stuff with my Mother and she’s been through the same stuff, almost word for word (names, places and details changed, but symptomology equal.)
Anyways, I guess what I’m trying to say is that an individual may be married to the same person for years, have the same interests, style of dress and behavior patterns, and still lack a cohesive sense of self. Whatever you might see on the outside is really just a symptom of the chaos on the inside.
A lot of the same here. Random violent abuse left me unable to tell when I was doing well and when I might get smacked or worse for doing something that seemed perfectly normal. Along with that was the sense that I was wrong, that I was broken, that I was worthless, because I could never manage to do the right thing to avoid that abuse and could never earn proper approval for anything or for just being.
Kinda like you said, the personality becomes reactionary based (“gun shy”), constantly in a state of hypervigilance, looking for the slightest signs that I’m doing something wrong, that people don’t like it, that I’m going to be punished from random quarters without ever seeing it coming.
Unfortunately, a lot of that becomes a self-feeding, self-fulfilling prophecy. It astonishes and scares the crap out of me that I keep ending up with the same kind of shitty people in my life, over and over, without any initial signs that they’re going to stab me in the back or heart.
I don’t think that it’s any coincidence that my mother comes from a family of alcoholics, and there was a lot of verbal/emotional abuse and codependency issues. I really wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in my mother’s case, this is how she learned how to behave from a very young age. Her mother has many of the same characteristics, and I always got the sense that that was more calculated and manipulative.
My mom is exactly like this. Exactly. She basically has no opinion on anything ever until she knows what your opinion is. Sometimes, she’ll change her mind several times, back and forth, in a single conversation. Sometimes she just throws out a whole spectrum of options, fishing until she finds the “right” one.
(bolding mine)
I live with this fear daily. It doesn’t help that my father has his own issues. My entire life fluctuated between my mom flying off the handle at every provocation (or no provocation), and my dad who would internalize everything until he utterly erupted. To this day, I can’t cry like a normal person–I’ve learned how to cry without making a sound because of what would happen if they heard me. So…I have no idea what’s a healthy expression of emotion. I shut people out completely and internalize every thing. And always, always, always is the deep fear that if I get angry or frustrated or annoyed I’m just like them.
It’s strange, I keep hearing that about rationality – and maybe it really is a matter of perspective (and my lack thereof) – but I’ve never considered myself anything if not logical. Most people I know tell me that as well, with some saying that I think like a cyborg. It actually made things doubly hard because I was completely aware of my heightened emotionality at all times; one part of me would be going crazy with feelings while another would analyze precisely what was going on, and then it’d get curious and delve deeper and try to manipulate the feelings to see what was real and what wasn’t… then I would realize that I was experimenting with my own brain and I knew that was dangerous, but that would only draw me further in until I reached so many layers in my meta-self-analyses that I just couldn’t keep track of my thoughts anymore. And then I’d just start punching the walls and screaming into the air… all the while being perfectly aware of what was going on. It reminds me of that Star Trek episode where Data (the cyborg) gained an emotion chip and went batshit insane because while he lacked the internal controls to use them in moderation. My point is I wasn’t oblivious to my actions; I was fully conscious of what I felt and what I was doing; I was just powerless to control any of it. I felt possessed, except the demons were from my very own heart.
And yes, what I did to Mom was absolutely cruel and abusive. I am not proud of it in the least. You might not believe me when I say this, but I’m one of the kindest and most gentle people I know. It was a completely out-of-character incident and it still chills me to this day when I am reminded that I even had that capacity in me. I never, ever imagined I could do something like that. Especially not against a woman. I never hit anyone before or after that. It happened so suddenly that it scared everyone, me included – I’d never known, before then, what it was like to be totally consumed by rage. I can’t excuse or forgive what I did; all I can say is that I’m human and I fucked up. And I will absolutely try not to do anything similar ever again. I’ve kept that promise so far.
I think something in my head eventually snapped and realized, “Holy shit. This has gone too far. You could’ve killed your own mother.” When I found her again in the living room, she was slack-jawed, silent, and in tears. There was a look of such complete sadness and distance on her face that I felt the slightest pang of guilt. Then she started sobbing and bawling and what was left of my humanity finally kicked in and my little black heart actually felt like it was breaking for this woman who was guilty of the terrible crime of actually loving me.
I told her I was sorry and she said she understood and forgave me. Unfortunately, the anger secretly stayed with me inside and I would not fully forgive her until a few years later – yes, at that time, I had transferred all the blame from myself to her, and it would not be until later, with the benefit of growth and hindsight, that I would see my own responsibilities and roles in the whole situation.
That incident further messed me up: I was no longer the innocent, misunderstood victim of a cruel world; I had become either a “bad person” – which I tried (and try) hard not to be – or somebody who was really, really sick. I hated myself even more and I resolved to change.
Slowly and surely, things did change… but not enough.
Gah. I can’t write anymore. Sorry, this hurts too much. Maybe I’ll come back in ten years if things get better. Peace.
Edit: Sorry, there WAS going to be a point to this whole rant once I finished, but I can’t bring myself to say anymore. I’m just not ready – probably because I’m still living it. Sorry. Mods, please feel free to delete this post and my other one above to keep the thread coherent.
I don’t know what to say for someone who is living through that except that you’re doing the best thing possible by fighting it. Just keep listening to those who can help you and, most importantly, hang in there. From reading here, just admitting your problem seems like one of the biggest steps in the right direction. You have my prayers.
And thanks XJETGIRLX, for the link. As soon as I get up the courage to, I’ll head over and check it out.
Docs don’t know it, and you expect to get the response in a message board thread full of WAGs and IMHOs?
Reply: thanks for sharing, and I hope you’ll get better.
You mention that your behaviour with your online girlfriend was basically a way to scream “I can’t live without you,” and that it wasn’t a conscious attempt at manipulation, it was sincere fear. Thing is, to me (I grew up with an extremely needy mother) the idea of someone who needs me so much they can’t go on without me is terribly, terribly scary - “I can’t live without you” is one of the fastest ways to make me run out of the room. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’ve never had kids, although those at least generally do parents the courtesy of moving away at some point.
Hello everyone, I’ve been lurking around the SDMB off and on for a while now and this is the first thread I’ve ever felt compelled to respond to.
My ex-wife is a borderline. To say being married to her was the craziest experience of my life would be an understatement. She tends to create confusion, chaos, and misery not only in her own life, but in the life of everyone that is close to her.
In her non-borderline state, she is a joy to be around. She is caring, will do anything in the world for anyone, is a lively conversationalist, and can come up with some of the funniest one-liners you’ve ever heard. She can instantly become friends with a total stranger.
However, once she becomes close with someone, all bets are off as far as what she will be like towards them, or what her opinion of them will be. Many times, over the course of a single evening, I went from being the best husband in the world, to a complete dickhead, to an abusive asshole, and back to being the best thing since sliced bread. She can be manipulative and deceitful, lying and conniving, extremely needy, distant, or abusive.
Every afternoon when I left work, I would call her on the phone, under the pretense of letting her know that I was on my way home. In reality, what I was doing was calling to find out which wife I was coming home to. However, sometimes she would flip-flop to something completely different between the time I called and the time I actually got home. (A 30 minute drive)
She spent an unbelievable amount of money. At that time I was making a little over $50K The rent on our apartment was only $650 and our car was payed for (no car payment.) We were always always always broke. There were times we didn’t have the money to buy food. We’ve been divorced for 8 ½ years and sometimes I still wonder where all that money went to.
Then there were the lies. She had everyone who knew us, including my family, believing that I was abusing her. She would tell the neighbors horrible stories about me and how I was treating her. She would call up my mother on a regular basis and tell her how terrible I was. It’s interesting to note that, to the best of my knowledge, she never called up her parents to talk to them about what an asshole I was. The truth is I never laid a hand on her, although sometimes I would get so angry I had to leave to avoid hurting her.
The thing is, I’m not sure which one is the real her. Is she a caring person with a wonderful personality who is afflicted with BPD, or is she a crazy selfish bitch that uses the magnanimous personality to suck in new victims to use and abuse? I really can’t answer that. What I know for certain about BPD is that it is real, and it is a serious, serious mental illness. It effects not only the life of the sufferer, but the life of everyone who is close to them. I’ve only briefly touched on the insanity of living with a borderline in this post. I could write pages and pages of specific incidences, but I won’t bore everyone to death.
You could be describing the woman I’ve been divorced from for over 5 years. The only thing I’d add was that she WAS telling her parents that I was abusing her, and that she was the one physically abusing ME.
Same deal with the money. I paid off roughly $40k in her debt, most of it to her parents, who held the mortgage on her house. I paid off her car, her credit cards, I took over ALL utilities, payments, insurance and everything. Left her with only her own devices and her SSDI income. She STILL managed to overdraft her checking account every bloody month for six months running. After six months of that (and no screaming or anger from me, simply paying it off), she started crying about how the bank was stealing her money - while destroying her bank statements to make sure I couldn’t check where the money was going.
She demanded that I go down to the bank and confront them over them stealing her money. I asked for the statements. She refused, insisted that I go to the bank. I said I couldn’t. She got mad. Then she asked that I consolidate bank accounts with her and put her name on MY accounts, which had roughly $25k in them. NO. FUCKING. WAY. I spent the next week being slandered from one end of the country to the other, and she suddenly, despite a promise not to leave during the process of having our house worked on and over my birthday (which never meant anything to her) decided to run across country to visit a friend while we were having our house worked on.
This describes what happened when I got tired of checks bouncing, rent not being paid, etc. and closed our accounts. I opened another account in my name only. She went absolutely apeshit. She began another round of calling all of MY relatives to tell them that she was a prisoner in our house because I wouldn’t let her have any money to go anywhere, completely ignoring the fact that I had just given her $200 to do with whatever she wanted!!.
Borderlines do a lot of damage to people who love them. I was very heavily impacted emotionally. The daily craziness wore me down over time. It took a long time after the marriage ended to even think about dating again. When I did start dating, if there was any sign of them being a little “off” I would head for the hills.
Perhaps I’m a little crazy myself. Although I have now moved on to other relationships, there is still something about her that I love. If I could get the good side of her back without the crazy part, I’d take her back in a heartbeat.
Thank you guys for letting me rant. That was… incredibly painful… but also therapeutic. This thread and that book has convinced me that BPD is a real issue worth looking into, and I am / will be seeking help for it. DBT sounds particularly interesting.
You know, speaking from experience and from other possible-borderlines that I’ve met (or maybe I was just projecting, who knows)… the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive in BPDs. She could’ve very well been both, alternating between them depending on the alignment of the planets.
Still… sucks for others. Sorry you had to go through that.
I’m biased, but y’know… gotta say there is something hot – in an illicit, playing-with-fire kinda way – about a woman who’s just slightly out of left field. It’s all the passion and emotion, I guess There ought to be a borderline-only dating site so we could all hook up with each other and spare the rest of the world our misery. Or we’d all just drive each other nuts and off ourselves en masse or something.
Dear God. susan, thank you for suggesting Prozac Nation earlier in the thread.
I just saw the movie. It was the most effective cautionary tale I’d ever seen… what a fucking bitch! I’ve never hated a character in a story so quickly, so thoroughly, and so consistently through its telling.
Is the book similar? After the movie, I don’t think I can stomach any more of Wurtzel. Previously, mental illnesses tended to draw empathy and understanding – or at least some degree of pity – from me. Ugh. Not here. Kaysen is an absolute angel in comparison; heck, even Darth Vader would appear saintly next to this woman. I could feel nothing but absolute contempt and seething disgust for her. Even reading the Wikipedia page about her made me sick. Her picture on the book cover and the Wiki page… who the hell does this woman think she is?! Even movie stars and celebrities aren’t this arrogant and irritating.
Y’know, I didn’t completely grasp it before, but if Prozac Nation depicts what BPD is REALLY like… suddenly, all the vitriol here makes perfect sense. Wurtzel seemed so much more… I don’t know how else to describe it but bitchy… than anything the DSM criteria or these textual descriptions would’ve ever caused me to imagine. THIS is what others are actually forced to suffer through? That’s fucking horrible; in fact, I don’t think there are words strong enough to describe the negativity. This was harrowingly enlightening – it appears I haven’t been objective enough in the past about this condition.
:eek:
I’ve never felt so… ashamed… of having shared an diagnosis with someone . If any of you should ever find me turning into anything even remotely like that while we’re on this board… would you please, PLEASE let me know so I can go and immediately kill myself? Seriously. Just tell me. Or slap me. Hard. Or shoot me. Please.
One of the biggest complaints I’ve always had about the department I received my most recent degree from is that many of the classes mix school counselors with community counselors; no offense meant to school counselors, but they don’t actually counsel anyone. The crap that the administration piles onto them, and the fact that there may be one counselor to an entire school of kids, prevents it. Plus the majority of folks who go into school counseling are young female teachers, who already have a sort of warped view of the goodness of the world.
That said, I will confess that IRL I can be perceived as outspoken and abrasive. I am, after all, a follower of Albert Ellis. By the time I was in graduate school for the second time, I had already completed a BA and MA in counseling, and had been working in the community for for over ten years, three of which were spent on the forensic unit of a state psychiatric hospital. There wasn’t much I hadn’t seen (including one of my coworkers being killed by one of my clients with a piece of paper- THAT wakes you up to the reality of mental illness pretty quickly). ANYway, I was in a group counseling class that was being run by an exceptionally smart, easygoing first-semester professor, who told us that the first half of the class each week would be theory, then we would have a “growth group” for the last half of the class to get into practice. The first week we all sort of sat there looking at each other, not quite knowing what to do, so I asked the professor to clarify what he meant by a growth group. Being a good psych professor, he asked me what I thought it meant. :rolleyes: My comment was that I would like to be able to talk about various issues or concerns we have about being in/going into the field, and soliciting insight from others about said issues. He asked me to give an example, at which point I made my fatal mistake:
“I hate borderlines. They make my teeth itch, and I will pull out the referral pad any time I see one coming. That said, I realize this is an unrealistic response, especially when working in, say, a community mental health center, and I also realize that this attitude is my own issue that needs to be dealt with so I can be a more effective therapist, so I was wondering how others deal with clients whose diagnoses may cause a negative reaction in them. For example, what if you were assigned to work with a pedophile when your best friend had been molested? Or you hold very strong religious beliefs, and one of your clients is homosexual? How do you have “unconditional positive regard” for that client, and provide them the best treatment you can?”
Every other face in the room (other than the prof) was all: :eek:
For the next four weeks we talked about this issue. But not actually about the issue- no, they talked about how awful I was, how it’s evil to narrow a person down to their diagnosis, how I should be ashamed of myself, how offended they were about something I’d said the previous week, how my therapeutic orientation was wrong, wrong, wrong… ugh. You wouldn’t believe what my weekly journal entries (we had to write up a little journal each week to submit to the prof) looked like. At week four (I can’t believe it took me THIS LONG to figure it out), a lightbulb went on over my head.
Me: Um, is anyone in this room on the community track?
Them: Silence.
Me: You’re all school counselors?
Them: Nodding.
Me: Have any of you worked as a counselor at all, anywhere?
Them: Silence.
Me: Do you know what a borderline IS? (note: school counselors in our state are not required to take a course on diagnostics or the DSM, so most of them are unfamiliar with diagnoses beyond learning disorders, ADD, or the autism spectrum)
Them: Silence.
Me: Oh, good god. Okay. Who here has seen Fatal Attraction? (nearly all hands go up) Who here LIKED Glenn Close’s character? No? WHY WOULD I WANT THAT IN MY OFFICE???
It was like the tide shifted. Suddenly it made sense to them, and I was not an evil horrible psychologist. It was almost like that scene in Mask, when Rocky is trying to teach the blind girl about colors; they had never experienced a borderline, didn’t have a frame of reference, only knew that when a kid came into school “pigeonholed” into a diagnosis it was a Very Bad Thing, and I was a Very Bad Person for perpetuating the myth that no one can be more than their label. Which completely missed the point of my question, by that’s neither here nor there. Once I gave them something to base their opinion on, they realized I wasn’t just talking out my ass- these people can be AWFUL.
Oddly enough, at the end of the semester when we had to sum up the group experience, the majority of people said “You know, I hated you at the beginning, but now I realize that it’s just that you’re really, really honest and I’m just not used to that. Also, you’re right most of the time.” But you know, I never did really get an answer to my question.
/story break
IIRC (it’s been ages since I’ve read/see PN, and for some reason wiki isn’t opening for me right now), Wurtzel was actually diagnosed with major depression, but I’ve honestly never seen a client with major depression act/think anything like her. I recall an interview with her a few years after 9/11 where she said (paraphrasing) that she felt like everyone was overreacting, and that all these journalists were writing about what it was like that day, but no one had bothered to call her to get her take on it. :rolleyes:
Reply, the first step to truly effective change is recognizing the scope of the problem and being willing to deal with it- including facing it head-on and understanding that you may have done things in the past that are horrible and ugly. I had an unbelievable anger problem when I was a kid, but poo-poo’d it by saying that I was half Italian and half Irish, so it was just a byproduct of me genes. It wasn’t until I had two back-to-back incidents- one where I bit a girl’s hand so hard during a fight that I broke several bones in it, and the other when I found myself on top of my best friend, slamming her head repeatedly into the floor because she had said something completely innocuous that had rubbed me the wrong way- that I realized I was going to end up killing someone someday if I didn’t take ownership of the problem. I took the money I was making at my job and, after much research, enrolled in martial arts classes that went heavy on the inner calm/discipline/control aspects and defense only secondarily. Made a HUGE difference. Of course, there were a lot of other issues going on at the time that I didn’t deal with until much later, but that’s another story.
You’ve already made a big first step- now your choice is to either let it overwhelm you, or to take the next step into counseling. I think you know which one I’m going to recommend.
Wow- did anyone else expect this thread to a) go to four pages, b) be so civil, and 3) make such a positive impact on so many folks? I’m impressed.
There ought to be a borderline-only dating site so we could all hook up with each other and spare the rest of the world our misery. Or we’d all just drive each other nuts and off ourselves en masse or something.
But you know, I never did really get an answer to my question.