– Patients with borderline personality disorder remembered more difficulties with separation between ages 6 and 17 years, more mood reactivity and poorer frustration tolerance between ages 6 and 17, and the onset of more symptoms (most prominently sadness, depression, anxiety, and suicidality) before age 18 than did patients with other personality disorders.
I’m told I had instances of separation anxiety as early as 2.5 years old when my mother went into labor with my brother. She was in the hospital for a couple days and no one explained to me that she would be back. Which of course, she was. I’m also told I was an exceptionally well behaved kid until I was about 12. I excelled at sports to impress my dad, did extra work to impress my teachers
I moved when I was 6. I never saw the friends I’d made before that age again. I made friends quickly when I was younger. I still make friends easily, but I no longer let people as close to me if I can help it. I always had very close, bonded relationships with my friends. My best friend moved when I was 8. I was heartbroken. Every weekend since I was born we spend Sundays with my grandparents. When I was 9 my grandmother died. I never let anyone see my cry. I had to be strong for my brother and sister. When I couldn’t stand it I locked myself in my closet so no one would see me upset. When I was 7 I was pulled out of the elementary school I went to. I was placed in a school for gifted children for the rest of elementary school. I had the same small class, the same friends since the 2nd grade. When we were old enough for junior high that class got broken up and incorporated into the combined school and I didn’t have class with my friends anymore. I was still able to hang out with my best friends (especially my best guy friend) after school. When I was 12 and started to hit puberty our friendship wasn’t allowed to stay the same anymore. We couldn’t hang out the way we did, couldn’t have the sleepovers we had for years. I’m sure it was that parental fear that things would get ‘confusing’ but I’d been friends with this guy for almost as long as I’d known my sister, he was family to me, not a boy. Things kept changing. I began to resent the fact that I was female. Junior high and high school were filled with too much drama for me. People kept coming and going. My relationships with people ended abruptly. People wanted things from me that I didn’t know what to do with. I couldn’t stay in relationships for longer than a month and a half before pushing away. Friends started dating and our friendships weren’t as close anymore. Things kept changing. Nothing was stable. In high school my friendships were destructive. “Friends” would turn on me, conspire against me, then take advantage of my depression and I’d let them back into my life because I didn’t want to be left alone. I stayed in a rollercoaster of a relationship with a guy for 6 years because I couldn’t deal with the thought of losing my best friend, even though he did things to me I never should have tolerated. The one opportunity I was actually interested in to distract myself from this my ‘best friend’ helped me cultivate… then literally the day before things would have happened she tried to take it away. He asked me prom, but I told him I couldn’t go. I let her take away what I wanted to preserve our friendship, but I resented her ever since and our friendship exploded. Or she tried to explode and I walked away and didn’t look back, literally. A month later the guy she took away from me, I seduced and he cheated on her with me. He always liked me more anyways so it wasn’t hard. Of course, I never trusted him after this because he’d cheat on his gf. Ironic, no? By then I had no interest in him anyways. (So instead of working to get out of the abusive relationship I’d been in previously I let continue. Off and on. This continued even after I went to University before I finally severed the relationship completely.) This is when I decided it would be better to not let anyone close to me again. People can’t leave you if they’re never close to you in the first place.
That sadness, depression, anxiety took over my life in the 7th grade (11/12 years old). Every change made my world fall apart. I just wanted something steady. It was the one thing I never got. When I was 13 and tried to kill myself the first time, the friends that I thought cared about me the most, instead of encouraging me to get help, pulled away and left me to deal on my own. I understand now that it was just too emotionally traumatic for kids so young to handle, but I took it as though they didn’t care enough to stay. Things changed, beyond my control, and I’ve never believed anyone cared enough to stay. Never cared enough to do the one simple thing that would help me be happy. Not good enough to care about. Not good enough to not leave. So I left them first. I confided in no one. The problem with this? I was even more excruciatingly lonely than ever before. I had no one to turn to, no one to ease the pain and suffering that overwhelmed me. I threw myself into my studies. I pushed away friendships, didn’t let anyone close, but at
least my grades were top notch.
Writing about these things, so boiled down and simplified, don’t seem like such big things. They even seem normal for teenage years. They’re such deconstructed bits and pieces of the years and years of this I dealt with. Every single instance was a breaking point. I would rage, lash out, destroy the things around me. Harden myself to what I saw as inevitable eventualities. All before I even graduated high school.
Still to this day the only male I believe won’t ever leave me, is my cat.
– These results indicate that many of the features of adult patients with borderline personality disorder may initially appear during childhood and adolescence and that these features may be used to differentiate borderline from other personality disorders
.
No argument here. I knew there was something severely wrong with my emotional control, but refusing to tell anyone what was really wrong with me, I never had help. Didn’t know how to express what I was really feeling. Refused to talk to my parents. They’d never understand anyways (or so I believed) as we fought constantly. I wouldn’t even entertain the possibility of therapy. I was too young to really be diagnosed with BPD then anyways, but all the symptoms, all the signs were clearly manifesting.
beyondtheborderlinepersonality 