Unacknowledged Grief Can Keep You Stuck in the Throes of BPD

Grief is intense emotional suffering caused by loss. It is a deep sadness and or an acute sorrow. For many people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) loss is all-too-familiar. Loss results when a child's basic needs are not met. Loss results when one is abused physically, emotionally, verbally, and even more so -- sexually. Loss results when one is or when one feels neglected and or not cared about. Loss results from a wide-variety of experiences. Loss, in life, is inevitable. Learning to cope appropriately with loss is a major part of recovery.

For many people with BPD the losses just continue to compile until at some point they have become so overwhelming (whether one is aware of them as the source of their grief or not) that they become the embodiment of the fear and the avoidance that have attached to initial trauma in such a way as to fuel the development of defense mechanisms, walls and denial that keep a borderline dissociated from their grief. If you are dissociated from your grief many of life's average situations and interactions will set off pain and distress inside of you. You may or may not understand and be aware of the connections. Refusing to acknowledge your pain and to grieve that pain will keep you stuck in the active throes of BPD.

Remaining dissociated from your grief serves to increase your pain because so much of the behaviour and the resulting distorted thoughts govern the patterns that emerge from these efforts to protect and avoid the pain of your loss or losses. Unacknowleged loss hightens the tide of the borderlines' ocean of pain, constantly adding to an ever-swelling sea of suffering which remains submerged and results in yet more and more grief. This grief, if it is perceived at all, consciously by the borderline, then takes the shape and has the depth of a maelstrom of whirlwind proportions that is experienced as being outside of self rather than being correctly perceived pain that is a part of oneself. You are alienated from yourself because you have chosen not to "live" with all of your truth -- the good and the bad, the happy and the sad. The threat to trying to face your pain at this stage is that you have lost your self to the externalization of it. You have built it up into some big foreign monster that has the power to annhilate you.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Your loss, your pain, and your grief are all yours. They