Borderline suffering is born out of an
over-exaggerated sense of a need to protect
your lost "self" at all costs. We have essentially
two choices, in life, to live to protect, or to live
to learn. It is very difficult, if not next to
impossible, to do the two at the same time.
Living a life that seeks to protect one from
old, un-healed hurts and scars is a painful way
to live. In this borderline reality, life is
treated as something to endure rather than
something to revel in and be involved in to
celebrate, and to continually open further and
further in the joy and the sorrow of what it is
to be alive.
Are you ducking, hiding, and pushing life away
out of fear? Are you choosing to stay stuck?
Are you determined to continue to hate and to
devalue yourself? --Don't you want to stop abusing
yourself? You have no obligation to anyone to continue
to be your own "abuser".
When will the pain be enough? When will you have
had enough? Do you know that you can unchoose it?
Do you know that you can feel it, grieve it, and
leave it? YOU CAN !!
To the borderline suffering has value or the
borderline would find a way to end the
suffering and to embrace the living of life. Are
you afraid to reach for you what you want and need?
Are you afraid to take care of yourself? Are you
afraid to be the adult that you are meant to be?
WHY? -- WHY? -- What is the value of your
continuing to suffer? What?
Borderline angst and pain are real. Borderline
suffering is perpetuated whenever one is not working
toward deepening one's understanding of what hurts
and why. You HAVE the answers within you. YOU
REALLY DO! Help, hope and healing can be yours
when you choose to embrace them and to dedicate
yourself to them. In order to do this you MUST be
willing to lay down the "need" to be "right" and
the "need" to win, and the "need" to control. You
must surrender to the helplessness that drives your
rage. Surrender to the victimized-helplessness of
all of your past wounds -- feel that pain -- cry --
set yourself free. Accept your losses first with
the grief of a child -- pour it all out -- and move
toward accepting your losses as an adult with choices
and the ability to live through what has hurt you.
Surrender the cognitive-distortion that things will
"always" be "this way".
The only value of continued or prolonged borderline
suffering is staying stuck. If you choose to continue
to suffer you get to "control" your destiny. You will
be lost to that illusion of "control" and your destiny
will become a "self-fulfilling prophecy". If you
choose to continue to suffer you get to continue to
think those same old patterned thoughts - which in spite
of their pain have grown to feel comfortable in their
familiarity. Those same old patterned thoughts will
continue to produce the same old negative feelings that
you've always known -- often leading you to undertake
actions that you've regretfully undertaken regularly,
so many times before.
There is one potentially positive reality to
borderline suffering -- IT CAN TEACH YOU SO MUCH --
IF YOU WILL JUST LET IT!
No matter how much you were hurt in your life,
let down in your life, abused in your life, abandoned
in your life -- you have the power to change it all.
You can decide to take personal responsibility and to
get honest with yourself, your therapists and doctors
and the people in your life. You are loveable
and you are worthy and somewhere inside, if you
don't believe this: YOU WANT TO!
When suffering no longer
has value, healing is instantaneous.
--(Unknown)
I have experienced this in my recovery process. All
it takes is coming to terms with what leaves you feeling
victimized and taking back your personal power for the
positive and the difference in life is like night and day.
Many borderlines seem to think that, somehow, if they
suffer long enough they will be validated. There can
be no greater validation than learning the lessons that life
holds afoot for you. There can be no greater validation than
self-validation. There can be no greater validation than
learing to grieve what you know to be your truth. There can
be no greater validation than re-parenting that little
boy or little girl (inside) that so needs you. There
can be no greater validation than accepting your truth
from the inside out and learning to live with it, and to
accept it.
Life beckons us to journey toward peace. Life beckons
us to keep moving forward. Life challenges us to overcome
the obstacles of circumstance and happenstance. Each and
every one of you, borderline, or not, can give yourself
this gift.
It is in the opening up, that the pain, powerful though
it may be, is precious. It is in the determined decision
to strive to be healthy that the wonder of who you really
are can be found and sustained.
Borderline suffering and all of the damage that it leaves
in its path is but for one purpose: to teach you who you
are. Do not squander the lessons. Do not sit still behind
the rock that is your challenge -- NO -- get up, and slowly,
one step, and one push at a time, begin to move it. With each
step and with each push you will move the rock that is your
suffering and you will find in its place the roots of the
identity that you have for so long wanted to find.
Borderline Personality Disorder is not a life-sentence.
It is not bigger than you are. It is merely a "part" of
who you are. Isn't it time that you gave yourself the gift
of discovering all of the other "parts" that make up who
you authentically are?
I suffered for a long time with BPD. I look back now and
I see that I made that choice. No, I did not choose to be
borderline, but I did choose to continue to live out the
patterns that held me there for years. Surrender to what
hurts you and to what you are most afraid of. As you climb
your mountain, you will climb above the clouds and you will
be able to stand squarely in a shower of sensational sunshine.
"The road is long", but better to be on that road, even if
it feels all up-hill than to choose to sit by the roadside
and suffer.
I was able to heal from BPD because I wanted to badly
enough. I was able to heal because I new that I was worthy
and deserving of much more. I was able to heal from BPD
because I was willing to learn to risk that my long -
standing suffering had outlived its value to me.
In fact, for years, I clung to that suffering. I came
to find out that it was my way of clinging to my "daddy".
My dad, a man that I NEVER was able to get along with or
develop a healthy relationship with. (He was an untreated
borderline) and he has since died. It was my not wanting
to let go of my "little girl dream" to love him and
to be love and validated by him that kept me tied to the
choice to suffer.
As I opened my broken heart to the agony of this most
profound loss, and as I worked it through and grieved it
and began to let it go, to let him go -- AH -- at last,
I found MYSELF! I was not going to be able to find myself
as long as I was in anyway invested in my dad. My dad had
usurped me years before through his abuse and his neglect.
When I write about it now and when I think about it, it is
definitely sad. Other than that though, I categorically
know that it is not worth suffering over any longer.
I now can and I now do validate myself.
There comes a point in time for all of us, borderline,
or not, when we just have to let go of the old to make
way for the new; when we just have to let go of who "they"
defined us as, as we chased them to no avail -- and we
have to choose to end our suffering by giving re-birth
to who it is that we were meant to be -- before our
development was interrupted. Simply put, we have to learn
to grow up and to emotionally mature beyond the wounds
that of the past. We must learn to live in the here and
now. This moment: each and every moment that we have comes
truly only but once. So much of borderline behaviour is
designed to keep you away from the pain that will give
you re-birth. When you have suffered long enough you will
find the strength to welcome in that pain and the freedom
that is to be found in the healthy expression of it.
Haven't you suffered enough?
Hasn't your suffering long out-lived its value?
No, you don't have to be borderline forever. No you
don't have to feel that pain forever. Climb your mountain.
Change your world. Hope, dream and take positive action
today. Suffering is NOT the only way.....
The value in having Borderline Personality Disorder and
in borderline suffering, I found, was in the un-winding
recovery from it: in the endless lessons that it taught me
as I healed and that it will teach you as you heal. Yes, the
suffering has value, just don't cling to it, and don't let
it become all you know or all that you think you are.
"Your joy is your sorrow unmasked" (Gibran)
© Ms. A.J. Mahari - February 13, 2000
as of January 5, 2002
