BPD Awareness Month
Hi I’m Emily and I have EUPT (emotionally unstable personality traits)
This is a diagnosis I received in my first year of university at 19 but I personally can trace it back all the way to when I was 9 (I think).
I should start by explaining that borderline personality disorder (BPD) and emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD) are the same diagnosis and so are interchangeable. For this I will be using BPD because it is the name of the awareness month. Although my personal diagnosis says EUPT, actually it has a typo and says emotionally ‘unable’ personality traits, which I personally find hilarious as it sums me up the way I am most affected by this disorder almost to a fault. The difference between disorder and traits just comes down to when something has a ‘significant personal distress or impairment in the person's functioning’ according to the internet, in my experience it was because I am incredibly self-aware and explained to the psychiatrist exactly what was going on in my head and how the world around me had affected that, meaning they were not particularly happy to give me a diagnosis at all but I fit the criteria too well not to.
So, what is BPD? When I got my diagnosis, I had no idea, so I googled it and mind.org.uk explains it well it’s when you experience at least five of the criteria and it affects you for a long period of time or has a big impact on your life. Well having it for over half my life means it had been a long time and having just started university had been a stressor that had it make a big impact in my life. I am not going to list the criteria here if you are interested go look up on mind.org.uk and look for yourself, I don’t think that listing a tick box of things is always helpful as it makes people try to self-diagnose, if you have any concerns about mental health please go and talk to your doctor. Which is incredibly difficult most of the time, but I promise you it will be helpful in the end. I went at 13 and wasn’t taken very seriously and so went back at 18 was taken seriously and was immediately told I had anxiety and depression by my GP, then again at 19 when my GP sent me to a specialist who worked in the hospital and I was diagnosed with EUPT.
Once I got this slip of misspelled paper saying I had EUPT I thought it was going to fix something, I would finally fully understand myself and I would get what was going on in my messy head. But honestly it didn’t. Diagnosis is often just a word or in this case a random assortment of letters to tell you what you already experience, it doesn’t change how or what you are feeling. It left me more confused and empty than I already was.
For me BPD affects my every day in the relationships I form and in my mood. I often find relationships difficult I push people away then pull them back trying desperately to hold onto something that isn’t going anywhere. I remember calling my friend on multiple occasions and telling them we can’t be good friends because they don’t know my middle name, or my sisters name ridiculous things to expect that a person I had only known for a year at that point to know, especially as I hadn’t told them. My mood is interesting I feel nothing most of the time completely numb, except when I am depressed, I go from nothing to down, there isn’t really an up. Which if you ever meet me, you would never know, I seem incredibly happy and joke a lot but underneath that mask I feel absolutely nothing. Which when written down sounds horrible but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy life I do I promise, it’s just my feelings don’t always align right. Sometimes they are too much, most of the time they are way too few. This also means I don’t process things at the right times, I have delayed reactions a lot. If something traumatic happens and unfortunately it has happened it takes months for me to process that I am actually hurting. A friend did something that hurt me, and they apologised the morning after, I was fine we hung out and it was as if nothing had happened, and this was for literal months. Then one day something triggered me, it all came crashing down I suddenly was crying (which I never do) and didn’t want to see them anymore. They couldn’t work out what was going on so I had to sit down with them and explain that I was finally processing what had happened and that I needed time, they took it well, really understood and we did get through that together.
EUPD has an incredibly bad name at the moment, not helped by the very public Jonny Depp and Amber Heard trial. Amber Heard has been diagnosed with BPD, with all the talk about her and what she may or may not have done (as I am writing this the trial is not over and my personal opinions on this are very much not the point) it really hasn’t helped the opinions on BPD. For the record people with BPD are more likely to be abused than abuse but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen.
Whatever your diagnosis is it is just a start, it is the thing that tells you and your doctor what your options are for things that can happen next. For BPD that means that certain therapies simply won’t work for you and that’s ok there are plenty of other options and with everything somethings work for some really well and for others they don’t, mental health is so personal that you can’t have a one thing will change everything. For me medication didn’t work but therapy did, talking to someone about the trauma I had experienced and the way I process helped me understand myself.
This long journey has helped me explain BPD to so many, for something that affects millions of people in the world a lot of people really don’t understand it. That is why this month is so important to help people understand others and not just believe what they hear. The media and the internet are amazing for so many reasons but can also do a lot of damage when something is incorrect or misleading is written or said about something people haven’t heard of or don’t understand.