The Most Prolific Nine Years of My Writing Career

I didn’t wanna write at all for about 5 years, after penning my 25 articles on BPD. Those pieces passionately gobbled-up nine straight blissful years, during which I’d start writing early each morning, and not stop till after it was dark outside. I literally couldn’t not write about this topic once it landed in my lap thru a client who’d been Blackmailed Into Fatherhood (the title of my first BPD article)~ and the more I wrote, the larger my consulting practice magically grew.

I’d never even imagined writing more about Borderline Personality Disorder after that first piece, but as they say, “life happens when when we’re making other plans.” Turns out, that one article put me on the map, so to speak. Many years prior, I worked almost exclusively with Anxiety Disorder clients, who finally got to resolve that issue.

While writing my BPD articles, I was basically transcribing painful stores shared with me by thousands of men from all over the globe, and crafting them into easy to read, highly relatable articles (one in emotional trauma has a hard time focusing on anything else besides their persistent anguish). The eerie thing was, their pain-filled tales were all identical, down to the smallest detail! Their Borderline lover or spouse’s patterns of behavior and castrating, vitriolic verbal assaults became so familiar and predictable to me, I could complete these men’s sentences.

Many called me sobbing. Me, a total stranger (and a woman, no less)! My heart broke for these men. They’d gone from feeling euphoric for a few weeks or months, to deeply depressed (and sometimes, suicidal) in an instant. They’d all believed their Borderline when she said she’d “never felt like this about anyone before” or, she couldn’t imagine living without him!

These men could finally accept that they might actually be lovable, under their Borderline’s intoxicating gaze. She made ‘em feel like they’d hung the moon and the stars, and could walk on water! They literally could do no wrong, in her eyes.

Sadly, they’d never been certain of their lovability, during boyhood. None had grown up feeling “good enough.” All had mothers with BPD traits, at the very least. Some felt only coldness, judgement and disdain from their moms. Many couldn’t recall hugs, kisses or holding and comforting, but assumed (as all children do) their mother “loved them.” The human psyche does whatever it must, to survive~ even if survival is based in fantasy, or embellishment of facts or truth.

Can you even imagine what happens to a man-child when he thinks he’s finally found his Happily Ever After in a beautiful, seductive female~ and is abruptly dropped on his head by one who spawned those rapturous dreams?? It’s nothing short of emotionally devastating.

One who’s been ‘blitzed by a Borderline’ believes this is the most excruciating pain they’ve ever felt, but they’re wrong. They’re actually revisiting agonizing feelings of unlovability and shame they experienced during infancy and early childhood, due to growing up with a woman who was incapable of attaching to a child~ or anyone, for that matter. Every child blames himself for this deficit.

Many men have told me they just want to get back to feeling about themselves the way they did before they met their Borderline. “I want my confidence back,” they’d always say. I expressed understanding and empathy, but knew for a fact that poor self-worth and an inability to trust their instincts and intuition landed them in the arms of one of these creatures, to begin with.

We are all drawn to people who precisely match our own level of emotional development. A fully-feeling, functional, self-actualized and genuinely confident being does not need nor crave validation from others. He has grown to own his empowerment, feels it on a cellular level in his body, and knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is good enough, and fully worthy of being loved.

Add to this, his emotional development matches his chronological age, so his instincts and intuition are well developed and finely honed, and he trusts them implicitly to guide him toward making sound, productive choices and decisions. In short, he is feeling his way through life, rather than thinking his way along. Hence, he can readily sense when someone he meets is authentic, and safe to emotionally invest in, or not.

No amount of ‘psychotherapy’ can grow or establish these capabilities in a person. Emotional growth and healing work, is the only solution to making one invulnerable to seduction by someone with personality disorder features, or is simply not a suitable fit. One who acquires emotional completeness and wholeness thru this type of inner work develops extrasensory abilities~ a built-in GPS guide, if you will. He is literally repulsed by people who once attracted and excited him.

We all emit a vibrational frequency. You might notice this in others who are either depressed or joyful, when you pass by them in public spaces. It’s not their behavior per se that gives ‘em away~ it’s their affect. Their mood seems to seep out thru their pores, and it’s not difficult for you to observe and feel where they’re at~ that is, if you’re paying attention and actually observing those around you, and not just busy in your head about an immediate challenge or issue.

ARE you in your body, as you move thru your world~ or is your mind a thousand miles away from where you’re standing and what you’re doing? (This habit can leave you accident-prone, incidentally.)

One of my favorite movies involving a BPD female is, “(500) Days of Summer,” starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. It’s a lighthearted romp thru a roller-coaster infatuation, and if ya haven’t seen it yet, you should. When “Summer” is loving, sweet and attentive to “Tom,” he’s dancing on top of the world~ and all is delightfully ‘perfect’ in his sphere (which is brilliantly illustrated with the help of animation). When the object of his love-struck crush is distant, moody, unavailable or insensitive, his despair is palpable. I’m guessing, we can all relate.

JGL’s character, Tom is wholly dependent on Deschanel’s “Summer” to control and dictate his emotions. He cannot access feelings of lightness or happiness on his own, which traps him in an ongoing cycle of intense ups and downs within this romance with a mercurial, highly unstable girl.

What’s crucial to realize is, dead people feel no pain. So, even when Tom is struggling with confusion, depression and feelings of shame, he is experiencing emotional intensity.

Intense feelings, whether they’re pleasurable or painful to us, help us know we are alive. When we are forced thru various life events to experience intense emotions, we experience sensations of energy and aliveness~ which is why Borderlines often pick fights with their partners on the heels of calm, serene times spent together. Conflict feels activating and enlivening to the borderline disordered personality, due to long-standing dissociation from myriad feelings.

Borderlines live with a huge emotional void inside, which might be thought of as inner-emptiness. Emotionally speaking, there’s an enormous space in their core, where a plethora of feelings are supposed to have been housed since they were born. Emotional dissociation from various painful and/or uncomfortable feeling states since around the age of 2, has left the Borderline with a sort of internal ‘dead zone’.

When a toddler begins to develop language skills and vocabulary, they start asking themselves WHY they feel bad, sad, lonely, etc., in order to make cognitive sense of the difficult sensations they experience in their body. When the mind gets very busy analyzing the pain they feel, they are distracted somewhat, from their physical discomfort. Any activity or behavior which lessens our pain (even just a little), is one we tend to repeat over and over, until the process becomes habituated.

Depression does NOT reside in the head. It lives within our body~ and very early on, we develop a compulsion to understand why it’s there, so that we can figure out how to “make it go away.” Psychotherapists have made a living for hundreds of years, trying to help their patients or clients achieve this aim, yet core pain exists on a cellular level in one’s body, and no amount of mental analysis of painful feelings has ever altered this fact.

In reality, mentally analyzing our inner pain typically exacerbates it, because a depressed individual tends to harshly judge his pain (and why it exists), and there’s no unbiased, rational voice of reason inside him, which can offer a kinder, gentler, more accurate perspective. This incidentally, is why most are incapable of healing themselves~ regardless of how much they may wish to.

Creative passion emanates from the second chakra in our body. This is the same region that houses sexuality and reproductivity. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to feel motivated to express any creativity when you’re feeling depressed or a little bored or empty? My creative passion was in full swing, during the writing of my BPD articles. It was a subject that totally captivated me, and I lived with an irrepressible need to express that passion, which seemed (for years) indefatigable.

When we suppress any kind of emotion, especially passionate ones like hatred, anger, rage, envy, jealousy, joy, fear, etc., our passion loses its intensity across the board. Within the world of feelings, we cannot amputate ‘certain’ emotions out of our emotional repertoire, and expect all others to remain alive and vibrant. The goal of healing work is not to merely help you “feel better.” The goal is to help you learn to feel Everything, without self-judgement, dread or fear, so your core void can steadily shrink~ and “emptiness” becomes a thing of the past.

Every time I construct one of these newsletters, I feel the same, vibrant passion I felt all those years ago, when I couldn’t stop writing about BPD. If they enlighten you a bit, or help you learn something new about life and/or love, I feel utterly joyous about it. If not, that’s fine with me too~ because I’ve always believed in that old principle, “when the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

May God bless you all, and keep you safe and secure this next several years. Me? I’m just gonna keep expressing my passion, ‘cause it feeds my soul, puts a smile on my face and a little pep in my step!