A deep sadness

Reading the seventh story in the book Beyond Borderline : True Stories of Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder, ‘If I were to tell you’, reminds me of how the pain we experience in our soul when we are invalidated grows.  In this story the emotional pain of the sufferer became localised in her abdomen.  When she went to her mother to express it,  she was told ‘just take an Advil’.

We can carry so many feelings deep down in our gut.  It is here that I have learned the inner child in us lives.  If our needs, wants and feelings were not met, understood, responded to or validated the can get buried, often the people we are trying to connect to don’t have a strong inner connection or any empathy for our plight or sensitivity.  Its something I relate to, as growing up often I was told something didnt hurt that did.  Or Dad would refuse to stop the car on a long trip for a toilet break.  I remember one night Mum, Dad and I went to the movies and Mum went over on her ankle in the car park. Dad kept telling her there was nothing wrong, but the ankle had a broken bone.  This is just one of many incidents.

In the story above the teller speaks of how sad she became when her pain was not responded to.  At the hospital she was accused of being ‘an attention seeking anorexic’.  How fucking awful.  Our souls need to be heard, as do our feelings.  In BPD feelings begin to feel unmanageable to the sufferer as they were never mediated or soothed properly, they often become somatised.  It takes so long to overcome this burying of our feelings and in order for it to happen we need empathic people around us.  When our true self and feelings are not responded to our soul goes ‘dead’, we feel empty and bereft and want to die.  Its not rocket science.   It really isn’t.