When There Is No Cure
there is no in-between, it is either all or nothing
sometimes you just explode
Our personalities stem from deep within our subconscious and are everything about the way we feel, react, and act. A personality disorder is when parts of our personality cause problems in our lives. A personality disorder will adversely affect how you cope with life, deal with relationships, how you behave every second of every day, and how you feel. There is no cure.
The symptoms of a personality disorder may be treatable, but the underlying damage to your personality is not. Because there is no cure, any treatment has to be long-term and specific to the individual concerned. For example, some personality disorders respond well to medication, (Bi-Polar Disorder), while for others medication is both useless and probably dangerous, (Borderline Personality Disorder).
The men in white coats now believe that personality disorders are hard-wired into whoever is unfortunate enough to suffer one of the 10 different disorders, and they say that’s about one in twenty of the population. (Personally I believe that far more than 5% of people are living with a serious personality disorder.) The theory is that is you have a personality disorder you will never be able to shake off its symptoms. This is not true.
Personality Disorders are most likely incurable, but the symptoms can be managed.
- Crisis management. Self-harm and suicide is common among sufferers of a personality disorder. I have Borderline Personality Disorder, (BPD), and about 10% of all those who suffer from BPD kill themselves. At times you may be hospitalised for your own safety and because you are a danger to others.
- Medication. There are some drugs to help sufferers of depression, anxiety, mood-swings, and psychosis. Medication does not treat the underlying personality disorder, merely the symptoms. Mostly antipsychotic medication is no more effective than a placebo, and has horrible side-effects.
- Talking Therapy. Depending on where you live there may be a few talking treatments that just might help suffers of a personality disorder. These include art therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive analytic therapy, and dialectical behaviour therapy.
- Sheltered living. Some suffers of personality disorders have such difficulty in dealing with everyday life that spending a long period in a therapeutic community is the only way they are able to cope at all.
- Learning about your illness. The likelihood is that anyone suffering from a personality disorder spends a lot of time in the confusion of not knowing WTF is happening to them. If you learn, then you know, you may understand, and then you may be able to recover.
- Self-Directed therapy. The chances of me receiving any suitable treatment in my lifetime are just about zero. Therefore my only recourse is to use self-help. Luckily self-help treatment for personality disorders does work ~ if you do the hard work, every single
fuckingday of your life. - Avoidance behaviours. Most sufferers of a personality disorder are / or have been into alcohol abuse, drug misuse, gambling, compulsive shopping, unsafe casual sex, never leaving home…..
Some say that if you have a personality disorder you may as well just curl up and die. And that extreme avoidance behaviour is the way to go. All I know is that if you do the hard work you can get over the sh*t and be happier.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
never leaving home is one solution
it is NOT a viable long-term solution
Angry Sadness
Mania and depression all at once means;
the will to die and the motivation to make it happen.
sometimes we entrap ourselves
Agitated depression and borderline personality disorder are an extremely dangerous and confusing set of mixed mental / emotional / spiritual states. Those of us who are unfortunate enough to suffer from a personality disorder, or serious character defect, often become confused because we sometimes seem to have two or more totally different and opposite problems at one in the same time. Believe me, I’ve been there more than once.
Have you ever felt really tired, but keyed-up and tense at the same time? You want to go to sleep but you’re full of energy and can’t relax? Or, you feel really melancholy, depressed, and sad, but at the same time you are very hurt and angry and want to strike out against whoever it is that’s hurt you. These contradictory conditions are a sign of something called Comorbitity, where one or more medical / mental / emotional / spiritual conditions are co-occurring with a primary problem.
Perhaps the most common instances of comorbitity are between people diagnosed with a mental illness who also abuse booze, drugs, and prescription medication. Addicts and alcoholics are often also mentally ill.
Anger, rage, and fury alongside sadness, melancholia, and depression at one in the same time don’t actually make a lot of sense. Anger is a very active emotion requiring a hell of a lot of mental and emotional energy, (and taken to extremes a lot of physical energy), whereas sadness and depression are passive emotions which sap energy and leave the sufferer incapable of doing very much at all.
More typical would be a period of extreme anger, followed by remorse, guilt, and sadness. Not the two things going on at once. But, especially in men, anger and depression often go hand in hand.
However, anyone who has been diagnosed with a personality disorder will be aware of just how chancy that diagnosis was, and may well have been misdiagnosed by several doctors / psychiatrists / psychologists / therapists before their correct diagnosis, and hence correct treatment was discovered, (found by accident). A hell of a lot of people who have Borderline Personality Disorder will at first have been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder.
In fact there are 9 or 10 distinct personality disorders, and very often a sufferer will have symptoms or traits of more than one of these disorders, at one in the same time. As if it’s not bad enough suffering from just one of these life-destroying mental illnesses.
So if you’re confused about your illness, or the way your loved one / partner / friend behaves, don’t worry. Instead put in the hard work and learn about what’s exactly going on ~ start with the internet, then talk with your doctors.
Some say that all alcoholics and addicts are just plain crazy. And that they just never know how their partner is going to be from one minute to the next. All I know is they’re both right.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
we all have demons inside us,
sometimes more than just one.
Reality and Denial
Surreal Seascape
Without a ruthless search for and acceptance of reality it is almost impossible to live a rewarding Life which will fulfill your true potential. Yet the vast majority of people would rather live in denial than accept the truth of their personal situation.
Chronic Denial of Reality can be seen in almost all alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, drug addicts, the obese, criminals, politicians, people in dysfunctional relationships… Yet without admitting there is a problem there is no possibility of fixing the problem.
Accepting and embracing reality is usually difficult and painful. But, the first of the Great Truths is that Life is Difficult and Painful. The path to recovery from suffering and mediocrity lies is recognizing this truth. In fact, dedication to recognising and accepting the truth makes us better able to deal with the real world, and not be trapped in the world inside our own heads. Real truth is reality, ~ lying to ourselves and lying to others traps us in an unreal, looking-glass world.
There is a strong tendency to hope that bad things will just go away. There is an even stronger tendency to lie to ourselves, and completely ignore negative feelings, events, and situations. This shows either a total lack of self-discipline, and / or an underlying psychological or issue. Even when one is searching for truth and reality, the real issues and problems are sometimes difficult to discover.
In my own case I spent years suffering all kinds of symptoms, from alcohol abuse to being in a series of dysfunctional relationships, before I was strong enough, and willing enough, to search deeply inside myself for the truth. For most of my life I was unwilling to accept reality. I have now realised that I suffer from a borderline personality disorder ~ a fear of abandonment. Which is one reason I live alone, as not having a partner means that I could not be abandoned by my partner. Fear of abandonment is common and if you suffer from it the disorder will blight every relationship you ever have ~ even to the extent of not entering into close relationships in the first place.
What is Denial? What is Truth? What is Reality? Denial is not a river in Egypt. Denial is actively refusing to accept the truth. There is no absolute truth ~ my truth is different from your truth. For me, searching for the truth seems to be a daily challenge to ignore the myriad surreal falsehoods which come my way. There is no ultimate reality. My reality is different from your reality ~ and I’m not ever completely certain what is real and what is a lie. For example, I firmly believe in the law of cause and effect, but I now know that simple model of the Cosmos does not always hold true. Reality can be as disorienting as any dream state hallucination. The picture above is a seascape, but it is both true and unreal.
To do more than just survive, to get by in this world without continually suffering, and without being the cause of suffering in others, we just have to do the best we can to be as completely truthful and real as we can.
~
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
JackCollier7 
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