Emotional reactions in BPD

What are the hard and fast rules of dealing with emotional turmoil? Please. Please! Someone give me the magic cure-all, the answer, or at least a hint. It’s defeating having to pull myself out of the horned brambles every time I crash down where others merely trip, stumble and get on with their day.

I have come across a greatly validating Blog of late written by a very talented and truly compassionate therapist; Karyn Hall. She is the founder of the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Center in Houston and writes for Psych Central Blogs. Her Blog, The Emotionally Sensitive Person is a wonderfully corroborate part of the web for anyone suffering with intense emotions. While reading a recent post of hers I realized that I live in a world filled with heightened emotional responses to everyday life and as of yet I am totally at their peril. I am afraid of my emotions.

This is what I find hardest about my disorder. Everything affects me to extremes, and the extremes are where my ‘crazy’ comes out. Yes, I am that girl who falls hard and fast for the boy who is nice to her just once, the girl who takes the contrastive criticism to heart, the one who fails to see the room for improvement and thinks she has failed completely when she doesn’t achieve a perfect score on a test, she lets her sadness pour over the good things in life.

My heart breaks when I see a homeless person and I say a little prayer that their luck will turn around someday and they won’t have to live in the cold anymore. My eyes fill with tears at the pictures of sick children in third world countries. I am rattled with guilt that I am on social welfare when there are others out there who have not had such a fortunate life as me. I am ashamed that there are cancer patients dying, not out of choice, who would give anything for just one more year of life, while I spend an unhealthy amount of time planning and researching my own suicide. I am guilty as hell about the loss of my twin babies during pregnancy due to my illness, while other women would give their left arm for the opportunity I had and let slip away because of my eating disorder.

I got upset today; I had to gulp back big overwhelming silent sobs because of the guilt I felt as I walked past a shivering homeless man on the way to Starbucks. It put my problems in perspective; at least I have a warm bed at night, and the ability to provide for myself a safe environment in which to live.