Warning: This article discusses specific abusive behaviors which could be disturbing for certain audiences.  

I am diagnosed with BPD, as well as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (c-PTSD), the latter of which is connected to experiencing trauma regularly over many years. I want to be clear that many people have BPD without having experienced trauma growing up, and they are fortunate. However, my guess is that they did experience more intense emotions even around what, to others, would have been seen as everyday events.

When I first learned in my mid-forties about the nine symptoms of BPD–of which one needs five for the diagnosis and I had seven––I asked my psychiatrist about it. This diagnosis helped me articulate what was going on with my emotional thoughts (“I’m worthless—I need you to define my worth,” etc.), painful feelings (“I’m terrified all the time that no one loves me, or ever will love me,” etc.), and actions done based on these thoughts and feelings  (lashing out when hurt while simultaneously trying to do anything and everything I could think of to “make” someone love me). I brought all these thoughts, feelings and behaviors from my childhood into my marriage.

I don’t know which came first, or if BPD and the c-PTSD are inextricably intertwined. I must have been born with, or quickly developed, the super-sensitive emotions connected with BPD. As for the c-PTSD diagnosis, I know now that, before last year, I had subconsciously minimized the effect of the physical and emotional abuse I experienced growing up.

After spending from 2006 to 2023 learning about and using the skills taught in evidence-based therapy for BPD, my progress hit a brick wall. In the spring of 2023, my therapist, who was licensed in and trained other clinicians about many types of therapies including treatments for BPD and c-PTSD, she suspected there were things in my past which I needed to process in order for the adult me to heal. One of the pieces of evidence that led to that conclusion was that, when I was ten, I had written in my journal, “Mommy yelled at me again. I wish I were dead.”

My therapist recommended I participate in a weeklong workshop of carefully-guided exercises, proven to treat trauma. I was able to examine, in a safe space, different memories and feelings that I had either minimized or blocked out of my consciousness. I cannot remember a time over the years of my childhood when the abuse was not occurring at least a few times every month. I remember feeling physically and emotionally hurt, terrified, angry, and lonely for a good portion of my childhood.

This workshop helped me make sense of what others told me were overly emotional thoughts, feelings, and actions. Before then, I thought they were explained solely as symptoms of BPD. I think that is the case for many others with BPD, but, for me, (trigger warning) once I started thinking more about being hit, kicked, slapped, pushed into furniture, beaten with instruments, being pulled across the floor by my hair, and being told at least once or twice a week how stupid I was, and how ridiculous I was being, etc., it made so much more sense why I had them. I could hear the eight-or-nine year-old girl screaming inside her head, “Daddy, can’t you hear Mommy is hurting me?”

It makes sense that I have always believed I didn’t matter, my feelings didn’t matter, why I felt hopeless, lost, utterly abandoned and afraid of when the next dangerous event would occur. I had always been trying to see if I could get even a little bit of love which would never be forthcoming. It made so much more sense that I had intense emotions that would rapidly change as my parents’ abusive actions were there one minute and gone the next. It made sense that I didn’t know who I was when my whole psyche had been laser-focused on what my parents wanted from me before they would love me. All of my neural pathways were developed in a brain where all that mattered was, “Can I please give myself away so that I can finally get some love?” 

For me, perhaps because I was also an emotionally sensitive person, I believed that not experiencing love was like a life-or-death matter. I felt like I would die if I didn’t feel loved by the most important people in my life, the only people who were in charge of taking care of me. Even now, when I believe that my person doesn’t love me, it feels like I am actually being physically stabbed in the gut so many times that I literally cannot breathe. And I’m so tremendously afraid of that feeling that I subconsciously do other things, like raging and lashing out, to try not to feel like I am going to die from “lack of love.” I know all this makes no sense to others who haven’t experienced it, but this is the truth of my experience.

The science behind understanding BPD points to difficulties in two parts of the brain and the connections between them: the cortex (reasoning and logic) and the amygdala (in charge of the very intense feelings of fear, aggression and hurt connected to real life-threatening situations, such as a car crash, experiencing a crime, etc.). When we are terrified or extremely angry, the amygdala interprets these sensations as life-threatening in order to pump out the adrenaline to take action. In my experience, someone who actually has the “correct” connection to their cortex might be able to reason away the circumstances and disregard them as nonfatal. On the other hand, during my times of emotional intensity, I don’t have the correct connection to the reasoning part of my brain, and, thus, I can’t help but believe and feel it as real injury. 

After the c-PTSD workshop, I became aware of the power I had given various intense emotions over my life. After a life-time of using the “wish I were dead” thinking come up whenever I was in severe emotions, I was suddenly aware that there was a human being in me that actually wanted to live, even if it was to just barely peak out from under the heavy burdens placed on my shoulders growing up. I needed to be in a safe place to practice these new beliefs about myself and to try out some new messages in my head, such as: “I am worthy of having life, I am intelligent, compassionate, I do deserve the love and respect of others and myself,” etc.  I just couldn’t let my comfortable habit of giving myself away to meet the real or imagined needs of others to get in the way of my work of re-programing my brain and its neural pathways.

I don’t actually know what it would be like to “only” have BPD, or “only” have c-PTSD from childhood trauma, but it is not lost on me that, maybe, if I only had one diagnosis, it might be possible that my pain wouldn’t be as intense as it is, and/or it wouldn’t have continued over the forty plus years of me receiving and complying with every medical and therapeutic treatment recommended for BPD. It also occurs to me that, if a child is experiencing the amount of abuse required to receive a diagnosis of c-PTSD, which is devastating even for those without BPD, I am wondering if the horror from the abuse has an even (two or more times?) greater impact when the child is supremely emotionally sensitive?

About the Author Cathleen is a person who has spent over 50 years on her BPD journey. She is an avid volunteer with NEABPD because it is what gives her a sense of purpose to give back to a community where she feels valued and using her experiences with the illness to reach out to others.