***TRIGGER WARNING***
This post will talk about living with personality disorder and some of the mixed up feelings it can cause for you and those around you. Please only read on if you feel strong enough. For help and support you can visit the mental health and suicide prevention support lines page of this site, where you’ll find a long list of contact numbers and websites that can help. Please also call your GP or the NHS 111 service to enable long term support. Thanks for visiting. ***
Many stereotypical assumptions are made about the words ‘personality disorder’. Although it’s often confused with versions of psychosis, such a schizophrenia, personality disorders don’t always mean that a person is living with psychosis. Pre-diagnosis, I was incredibly misinformed myself, and assumed that PD meant multiple personalities, and someone living with PD would be difficult to untangle emotionally, almost as if they’d be living as two people. How wrong I was.
It’s not just stigma and misinformation that causes these mistakes. The truth is psychosis and personality disorder don’t have to be mutually exclusive, they can work together or they can be two completely separate things. Quite often, as with all mental illnesses, it’s only the people closest to the person living with the illness that actually sees the additional faces of the syndrome. But let’s be clear, they are normally very carefully melded into one person, intrinsically connected personality lines make them one, but there is an internal change that someone living with PD might learn to understand but also dread.
This problem for me is double bubble. I’m a Gemini and I’m diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder (or EUPD (emotionally unstable personality disorder) for those who recognise the newer terms). How many faces do I have? How many disguises do I have? How many different versions of Steph are there and most importantly, which one is the real one?
If what I’ve been told is true, BPD isn’t something that I developed very suddenly – it’s actually something I’ve been living with for many years. My best guess is probably decades and gradually, as mini traumas occurred, my personality disorder grew. I believe this because the multiple personalities I now protrude in reality, are the same multiple personalities I was keeping internal for a long time. The voice in my head, the ugly version of Steph, has always been there, certainly for as long as I can remember. Arguing with her has always been a time-consuming and often insurmountable task. As most people feeling unstable will know, the nasty voice is difficult to silence or ignore and has plenty of ammunition in its arsenal.
But it’s not a Jekyll and Hyde situation, it’s not that two people exist within me and to someone on the outside it’s hard to understand who they’re talking to. That’s the stereotype and, for me at least, it’s actually far from the truth.
My BPD world becomes problematic when I’m paranoid, and the deeper my illness gets, the stiffer my depression becomes, the more paranoia I’m able to find. It’s at this point that ‘Steph mk. 2’ kicks in, and she’s an incredibly anxious person, usually catastrophising events around her, and she battles those problems externally by using tears and (in desperation) anger.
It’s only very recently that I started referring to ‘Steph mk. 2’ in the third person. Prior to this I’d believed that acknowledging a second ‘me’ was, at least partly, a style of psychosis, a mark of my growing madness. In fact, finding the ‘mk. 2’ version has allowed me to understand her a bit better, and learn from the vicious cycles that end up spiralling downwards. Prior to this, the internal narrative was very negative, and sometimes the paranoia spread within. I’ve found that having good self awareness and knowing when I’m falling down the pit at least gives me a chance to correct my thoughts and behaviour before they are uncontrollable.
Externalising those thoughts also helps me to rationalise them, which makes it much harder for my paranoid monster to survive, and when I understood all this, I started to accept that I needed help with it too.
And that’s one of the biggest misconceptions of all, the belief that we should be able to manage it all on our own, and that long term recovery is possible without external input. Simply put, it isn’t, and these thoughts, feelings and actions need support from people who truly understand.
If you’re finding yourself depressed, you’re extremely anxious, or your thoughts have changed and are causing you concern, please don’t wait 30 years to ask for help like I did. Speak to your GP and get yourself on the path to recovery as soon as you can. Talk to someone you trust, be open about what you’re going through, and offer mutual support wherever you can. Believe me, one of the best distractions from your own mental health is hearing about other people’s problems.
Thanks for reading 💜
Creative Steph 