Change: Hard Fought For And Necessary

Borderline Personality Disorder results from stunted emotional maturation at any early stage of development. This results in the person diagnosed with BPD being stuck in a child-like place from the past that then becomes an inappropriate place to be emotionally in adulthood. This results in so much of the maladaptive behavior generated by those who are borderline. This personality disorder can be recovered from. Change is necessary. Change in the way one thinks, feels, and acts. Learning to re-parent oneself so that one can grow past the point where emotional maturation was interfered with usually by abuse, sexual abuse and/or an invalidating environment.

Change is a part of life. Radically accepting that change is necessary part of life can mean the difference between what you can learn to make manageable difficult moments, hours, days, or truly a lifetime of what feels like endless suffering.

For the Borderline, however, change has likely always felt very threatening. This, in my past experience, went back to the fact that it was what I experienced change as - namely abuse and all the very painful things I had to endure - that left me unconsciously for years trying to avoid change.

Avoiding change or refusing to change is really a choice to stay stuck. Yes, a choice. I know it doesn't feel like a choice but those with BPD make so many choices often at subconscious levels to protect themselves. What doesn't seem to be realized, often, is that it is this very aversion to change that keeps borderline stuck making the same choices over and over no matter how much evidence that those choices don't work is available in the way things aren't working in life.

When you have been hurt and have learned fear you learn to protect yourself at all costs. The very protection that you think you will keep you safe and the very maladaptive defense mechanisms employed in the war against maturation amount to the "borderline behavior" that keeps you from getting healthier.

If you can step back and realize that what you are doing today, in the here and now, as someone with BPD, isn't working in your life, isn't making you or those around you happy, then you will be able to realize on some level that change is necessary.

Change can be threatening. It can feel very scary. Even though what you know in your life, if you have BPD, is that most of your attempts to relate to others and to feel good about yourself have left you hurting like hell and not much works out, especially relationally, still the thought of trying new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving just mirrors your worst fears based upon the unresolved losses from your childhood.