“They’re very very sensitive to rejection. I used to say to
all the people I trained imagine when you’re talking to somebody with one of
these problems that it is them listening to you but also behind their eyes
there’s a little animal and that animal isn’t listening to what you’re saying,
they’re listening to whether you like them or not or whether they think you
like them or not and for that little animal ‘listen I’m going to be away on
holiday’ it doesn’t mean ‘listen I’m going to be away on holiday’ it means ‘I don’t like you enough to stay here next
week.’ It’s an animal, it’s not thinking the same way as you or I might think
in a calmer moment. They’re very, very sensitive to rejection.”
This is a quote by an NHS Medical Director and severe Personality Disorder specialist (Dr Chess Denman) in a talk about Borderline Personality Disorder. A few days ago I was thinking about the idea of mental illnesses as little monsters. I’ve always felt like the BPD ‘monster’ doesn’t quite fit the bill, and I’ve never been sure why. I have been coming to the realisation that it isn’t a monster; it’s a team of monsters. In her talk quoted above, Chess Denman described the animal of rejection which sits behind your eyes. This animal is definitely there for me, overwhelmingly, and I know that it is joined by the little animal whose role is just to project suicide into my brain, and the anxious animal beside it who quietly whispers all the time that I am doing everything wrong. There’s a paranoid animal which feeds poisonous thoughts into my brain about how much everyone hates me, which is great friends with the animal who is there to remind me constantly of how disgusted I am by my own existence. One of the hardest animals is the little guy who sits very quietly in the back of my brain, he spends most of his existence just watching. But then, occasionally, at seemingly random points, his hatred is so overwhelming that I end up furious. It isn’t because something understandably anger provoking has happened, its usually because I feel rejected and like the fight is over, and this little animal turns me off completely. I hurt myself, I hurt people I love, I say things which to be honest are fairly rude. Things I would never say if I was left as myself.
These animals can’t be summed up in one sentence and are one of the reasons that Borderline Personality Disorder is so hard to explain and to understand. It has so many faces that it it gets hard to recognise – even my happiness is often the disorder rather than myself, which is something a lot of people struggle to understand.
My entire life is trying to control these animals – so if you catch me in a good moment, it means I am controlling them well, not that they aren’t there, because I am nowhere near that stage yet.
This is a quote by an NHS Medical Director and severe Personality Disorder specialist (Dr Chess Denman) in a talk about Borderline Personality Disorder. A few days ago I was thinking about the idea of mental illnesses as little monsters. I’ve always felt like the BPD ‘monster’ doesn’t quite fit the bill, and I’ve never been sure why. I have been coming to the realisation that it isn’t a monster; it’s a team of monsters. In her talk quoted above, Chess Denman described the animal of rejection which sits behind your eyes. This animal is definitely there for me, overwhelmingly, and I know that it is joined by the little animal whose role is just to project suicide into my brain, and the anxious animal beside it who quietly whispers all the time that I am doing everything wrong. There’s a paranoid animal which feeds poisonous thoughts into my brain about how much everyone hates me, which is great friends with the animal who is there to remind me constantly of how disgusted I am by my own existence. One of the hardest animals is the little guy who sits very quietly in the back of my brain, he spends most of his existence just watching. But then, occasionally, at seemingly random points, his hatred is so overwhelming that I end up furious. It isn’t because something understandably anger provoking has happened, its usually because I feel rejected and like the fight is over, and this little animal turns me off completely. I hurt myself, I hurt people I love, I say things which to be honest are fairly rude. Things I would never say if I was left as myself.
These animals can’t be summed up in one sentence and are one of the reasons that Borderline Personality Disorder is so hard to explain and to understand. It has so many faces that it it gets hard to recognise – even my happiness is often the disorder rather than myself, which is something a lot of people struggle to understand.
My entire life is trying to control these animals – so if you catch me in a good moment, it means I am controlling them well, not that they aren’t there, because I am nowhere near that stage yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment