However, I am not a personality disorder. I am a person.
I've always balked at the use of the term "she's a borderline." It feels wrong
grammatically, but it also feels very invalidating. When therapists write they write about their "borderline clients." Would they also say "my depression clients"? Probably not -- they'd say "my depressed clients," which is a description.A better term I read recently described people like me as PBB. I had to scope around and see if he meant "peanut butter babies," or "pure bullshit barometers" or "pushes buttons battalion," but what he was abbreviating is People with Borderline Behaviors, or as I like to think of it People with BPD behaviors, because we're actually people with behaviors that fit the definition of the diagnosis, but we are not the diagnosis.
I know a person who believes that everything -- life -- is "just a conversation." He says that our feelings are conversations with ourselves. It's all about the language we use to describe things, internally and externally. In my conversations about BPD, I think I will try to use the term PBB. It is the only descriptor that remembers that I'm a person.
3 comments:
You have a point. Our thoughts are formed in words, words which later become our reality.
Personally I don't care much how it's call, as long as I don't use it as an excuse to stop myself from becoming all I can be. (And yes, I've been known to do this. Not with this disorder in particular. But I have used certain situations as an excuse to wallow and behave badly...)
Hear hear... I agree too that I am not my disease (which happens to be BPD). It's an illness, not who I am.
Thank you for this. It is a gift!
I know that my relatively new psychiatrist has refrained from saying I have borderline personality disorder and has instead called them borderline "behaviors" but I guess I had to hear it from one of my sisters to "get it."
I have MDD as well as GAD and the "borderline behaviors."
Lily
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