Archive for the ‘The Diary – My Borderline Years – A.J. Mahari’ Category

A.J. Mahari first heard those three words, Borderline Personality Disorder, in the dark ages of “treatment”, in 1975. At a time when most mental health professionals deemed Borderline Personality Disorder untreatable and spared little time in banishing those diagnosed with it. Borderline Personality Disorder were three key words that would profoundly effect her life that, at the time, seemed screamingly-quiet words that meant nothing and that quickly faded into an obscurity that mirrored her own lostness.

It all began again in August of 1975, when at the age of 17, I physically left behind my family’s crazy dysfunction. Out into the world I plunged like a child diving into an ocean of life who didn’t understand that she had no idea how to swim. Drowning before I was aware of it. Lost before I knew it. So sure of all that I was unsure of. So oblivious to all that I lacked. Clueless. Clueless but feeling free.

Freedom at last, I thought back then. Freedom like a stone. A stone that I would push up the same few feet of my first mountain for 12 years only to have it roll back. Daily pushing the stone up a few feet. Daily having that stone roll back over me, knocking me off the mountain, flat on my emotional back. Day after day reality was obfuscated by my pretentious, swaggering, inverted display of courage. A courage that had at its core the helplessness of a terrorized child. A courage that wasn’t anything more than a narcissistic over-compensation for what was intolerable and vulnerable weakness – an extreme emotional sensitivity so easily shaken to its core.

I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in what could be considered the dark ages of what that really meant. It was 1975 and I was just a few months short of my 18th birthday. I wanted to see a social worker at a local hospital, where I had seen a few before. This time, instead of being given an appointment I was first referred by the out-patient psychiatry department to a psychiatrist in the hospital. I had a short but intense history at this hospital. Most of my history with this hospital unfolded and was documented in the emergency department where I was frequently brought in by ambulance for what was suspected to be a neurological problem. There were also numerous visits that resulted from sports injuries and my burgeoning self-harm practices.

I had no idea why I was being told to go and see this doctor. Up until that time, I was able to get an appointment with a social worker in the out-patient mental health clinic without incident.

This is where it was all about to begin again. “It” was something I had absolutely no understanding about. “It” had a lot to do with how I experienced relating. Relating that really was only barely real within a more narrow context of the lack of it really. A lack of connection. An approach-avoidance dilemma that had a been a theme in my life all of my life.

“It” was about to begin again courtesy of my experience with the first psychiatrist I ever saw. A psychiatrist that I only saw this one time, at his request, not at my seeking him out. Just this one time – just long enough to be summoned and dismissed before I knew what hit me. “It” began again there. “It” began again there in a way that mirrored my lack of relationship with my parents. I had been invited in only to be pushed out. So unclear to me, yet so familiar. Abandonment. Rejection. Invalidation. That psychiatrist would remind me so much of my father. “It” was all just beginning again. “It” was intensifying in a much more pervasive and palpable way than “it” had ever unfolded before.

He was about to give me my first experience with the stigma of mental illness, generally, and Borderline Personality Disorder, specifically. He threw those three words at me with disgust, “You have, Borderline Personality Disorder“. He literally threw my already thick hospital file toward me in an arching fashion and it crashed onto the round table that sat between us with a body-jarring thud. He seemed to garner some pleasure from his provoking display of both punitive power and judgment. He was angry. He was aggressive. He wasn’t kind or caring. He announced that they, meaning, I guess, every mental health professional in that entire hospital couldn’t help me. He inferred I should just go away. I remember thinking, he doesn’t even know me, how could he treat me this way. What had I done to deserve this?

He may not have known me. However from my hospital (out-patient) records he obviously knew more about “me” than I did. I didn’t know much about who I was or how others experienced me. I didn’t know that then, but, that would be become painfully obvious years later.

That was my introduction to a diagnosis not really sought, not professionally given or communicated. That was my introduction to systemic rejection, systemic abandonment, systemic invalidation, and it devastated me. It was devastating in a bland and rather numb way. I was angry as hell but I didn’t really feel much. I wanted to punch his lights out. I remember literally sitting on my hands. I was full of rage. His judgment challenged me inside. It was like he had rung some proverbial bell that I felt compelled to answer. I immediately felt agitated. I had this massive adrenalin rush that I knew would be futile and dangerous to answer. Still my body began to shake. I held my breath. I was reacting to his dismissal of me. I didn’t really understand or care much about what he’d just told me. How could I? There was no explanation. I had no understanding of what he had just told me. In some ways I knew way more than I was aware of. In other ways, I was clueless.

It was the summer of 1975. I was a month away from starting College having just escaped my abusive and dysfunctional family that summer at the age of 17. I had no idea who I was or what I was supposed to do or how to function or relate to people. All I really knew was I wasn’t ever going to know me if I lived with them – my family.

Those three words, Borderline Personality Disorder, were not known then, as they are today. There was no internet. There wasn’t the plethora of books that are out there now. The words though they seemed to be thrown at me in some punishing and rejecting way really meant nothing to me. I had no way to find out what they meant. I didn’t even ask. I didn’t ask the doctor and I didn’t ask anyone else. Though I knew rage well, there were these long periods of quiet desperate suffering deep inside. The times when I felt so far away from any reaction inside. Times when it felt as if I had just curled up into a fetal position somewhere deep inside.

I was lost. I didn’t exist. I was too busy just trying to survive all that I had no skills to cope with to even stop to consider what those three words meant. I quickly and intensely vacillated between feeling four years old and feeling so tough that no one could get the better of me. I was competently-incompetent. Living in a world of illusion and delusion that was for me, my reality.

Where “it” all began again was also the place where “it” was again going to escape the “me” that I wasn’t.

For the next 12 years of my life I wouldn’t ever again think of those three words. I didn’t ever hear those words spoken to me despite seeing numerous therapists over this period of time. I was always a seeker. I continued to seek. Problem was I had no clue as to what it was I was seeking after. I was in search of answers to questions that I hadn’t yet even contemplated. Life in the dark. Life in the bright-light of an enduring darkness.

There was no connection in those 12 years, for me, between those three words and my intense lostness and incredible emotional suffering. Nothing, nothing, existed, really, nothing other than an abandoned and disconnected free-floating anxiety that was the partner of my rage.

Blindly I went on. Somehow, I went on. Failing miserably. Lost. Disconnected. Alienated. Lonely. Feeling the incredible pain of numbness. A searing lack of sensation that alternated with an abundance of sensations, terrifying sensations played out in my body in most distressing ways.

Blindly I went on dysfunctioning my way, in circles, through what should have been one of the most wonderful and exciting times of my life – my 20′s. Gone. Lost. Lost to three words that had no meaning or context to me. There wasn’t any information. There wasn’t any help. There wasn’t any support. There wasn’t any enduring connectedness. There wasn’t any sense of direction. There wasn’t any stable sense of identity for me.

For the next 12 years of my life I saw one mental health professional after another, too many to tally really. Surely, those three words were following me around on paper? No one ever mentioned them again to me in those years. All that seeking. 12 years worth of seeking in circles. Seeking in the dark. Being kept in the dark. A dark most familiar. And yet a dark that was often, at times, also equally most suddenly strange.

Darkness that held both the coldest-warmth and the warmest-cold of significant-insignificance within the lostness of a self aborted. An aborted self that in its own death was fighting for its life.

The dark ages of Borderline Personality Disorder ushered in my failure to transition successfully through yet another stage of life development. I remained, oblivious that I was, a frustrated and wounded child in search of a mother.

? A.J. Mahari, and Phoenix Rising Publications – May 8, 2010 – All rights reserved.

Borderline Diary – My Borderline Years – Mirror Without Reflection – My borderline mother, my mirror without reflection. My borderline mother, blank face, blank stare – angry. Always so angry. How many more times will you reach out to her only to be abandoned again. Only to be rendered just a little more invisible? How many times? She hurts me. I hate her. She hates me. I love her. I hate her. I need her. I can’t stand this.

She says, when I ask if she loves me at all, oh so disengaged, “Well … let me put it this way, you know how you can love someone but not really like them?” Oh sure, mom, sure. I know. I thought to myself as it felt like I had literally disappeared. Standing in front of her bearing way too much,  again, essentially with my heart in my hands, she just smacked my hands together. She squished my heart. A heart that hasn’t ever been whole. A heart that has always been so broken. A heart that she fragmented so many years ago.

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Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure  Audio Program

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Borderline Diary – My Borderline Years – Mirror Without Reflection – Invisibility’s Painful Perfection

July 17, 1994

3:20 am

Okay so here I am again writing stuff down. Remembering so much stuff. It’s all bad stuff. It’s all stuff that hurts. I am learning so much in therapy. So much I just never knew before. Never understood before. Never could have withstood before. Can I bear it now, really? Will I get through this pain? Really?

I don’t know why I saw my mother last night. What a useless visit and conversation. What a pain. It still pisses me off beyond description only now I don’t just feel the rage there are also tears. Tears of a little girl. I was that little girl seeing my mother’s face. A face, a mirror without reflection. A blank slate most of the time. An unhappy and often rather blank stare on a face that definitely hated me the more she saw herself in me.

She hates me. I hate her. I love her. She sees in me the little girl in her who she was taught to hate. So hate me mom, hate me. I hate you too. I love you – I hate you. In times when I have tried to say I love her or reach out for something more – for something – she lashes out with a violent vengeance. She can’t tolerate the thought of us connecting or of there being any demonstrated love. This seems nuts to write but I feel abandoned when she spurns the love I have tried to give. The times when I have extended myself to care for her and look after her in ways that she has never been able to do for me.

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Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

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She hates me. I hate her more. She hates me more. I love her. I’m lost. She’s busy. She’s raging. She’s drinking. She tells my father lies and he beats me right in front of her. Silently still she sits condoning his violence. Powerful she must feel in these hateful choices. All my life my fantasy was to beat her to a pulp. I so wanted to punch her head in. I still feel it. I dream about it. I feel urges to do it.

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Excerpts From The Diary – My Borderline Years

Why did my borderline mother hit me? Why was that her only solution to what wasn’t even that stressful a situation? Why was it that I could do nothing right in her eyes as a child? Does this woman, or will this woman ever, have even a clue how much she has negatively impacted my life? I have a million questions about so much about my borderline mother. I have most of my answers, not from her, but from the reality that I too was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Living inside the world of borderline hell has provided me a lot of insight into my mother. But, to what end, I wonder?

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Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

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Borderline Diary – My Borderline Years - Why Did My Borderline Mother Hit Me?

September 7, 1993

1:20 pm

It is Wednesday and I have just returned home from group therapy. The weather is so nice out but my emotional temperature is stormy. I can’t believe what I just went through. Sitting in group and being so triggered by that woman “Lady Jane” as we call her. What a drama queen. What a snob. What a bitch, actually. What a reminder of my mother she is. God, I can’t stand her. Every time she opens her mouth I just want to shove something in it so I don’t have to hear her. I wish someone would just make her go away. She thinks she knows everything. She’s been in group all of two days and I am already at my emotional wits end. I’ve been reprimanded five times in two days for getting into to “it” with her. As if it’s just my fault? As if “Lady Jane” isn’t in the game. She’s in the game alright. She’s the one spinning the games but as usual it seems I’m the one getting all the blame. Unfair, unfair, unfair. I can’t stand it!

Art therapy was just hell today. It sure feels like the last straw for me. I can’t – just can’t listen to or put up with “Lady Jane” anymore. What am I going to do. I’ve been in enough trouble lately. I’ve been high on the group’s radar in terms of feeling like my every word or choice to not speak is overly scrutinized. This entire experience is my friggin family all over again. Like I need that – NOT!

The therapists seem to think that everything that happens with and/or is said between me and “Lady Jane” is somehow my fault. It’s driving me crazy. How can it all be my fault? If C…. says it’s about my “upping the anti” one more *&*&*^%^ time I swear I’ll just lose what’s left of my mind.

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Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

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I hate art therapy. It sucks. I don’t like crafts. I can’t draw. I don’t paint – houses, and walls maybe, but not canvass in the artsy fartsy fancy. Oh “Lady Jane” is just so perfect – so she thinks. Between her and J bragging endlessly about their unending artistic skill there really wasn’t air let alone space left in the room for the rest of us peons whose artistic talent peaks with stick people and child-like suns with straight-line rays.

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Borderline Diary -  "I know why the caged bird sings" (Maya Angelou)

I know why the caged bird sings because I am a caged bird. I am a caged bird that has been singing a song, a song that expresses my longing to be free for years. I long to be free from the cage that is my nutty family. I long to be free from being relegated to the invisible albeit "black sheep" role that they have me stuck in, in their minds. When I left "home" at 17 I thought I would find freedom from their caging me in. Hasn’t happened. Even since I have moved out to go to college I am still in this cage. Everyone is them and their criticism of me is in everyone else. I don’t know who I am but whoever I am I must suck and therefore in my hating them I think I hate myself too.

Phoned Home Like a Fool Looking For Support – As if …

November 14, 1975

7:34pm

I am not adjusting well at all to the dorm life at college. There’s just so much going wrong all the time. I have no idea why. Either I am pissed at everyone or everyone is pissed at me. It feels so much like being at home. Too many people. Too much confusion. I am always afraid and I don’t know why. When I am afraid I get very angry.

I tried out for the varsity hockey team and I made it and now I am being held back from playing pending a third neurological evaluation because of a few seizures I had. This is so unfair. Of all the areas of my life hockey is the one place where despite everything and everyone and how poorly I get along with people there is joy – just pure joy for the love of the sport itself. I am so good at hockey.

It’s killing me to not be able to play. It’s driving me nuts to be seen as so weird and to have people like being afraid of me. I seem to be even more of a freak than usual these days.

I called "home" today – as if I ever really had a "home" – against all odds even though I damn well knew better than to bother doing that. I don’t know why I did that. How desperate was I? My parents never listen. They don’t care. They don’t have time. They never get where I am coming from. They always blame me – see me as the cause of everything that goes bad. I am not allowed to feel anything.

I sat upstairs in the Newspaper Office, where I am the Women’s Sports Editor and feature writer. I was alone in the office. The office overlooks the ice rink. There were my teammates out practising for our next game and I just keep ending up in tears. It’s like I don’t feel real if I am not out there practising and playing too. I feel alive on that rink. I feel alive in the challenge of hockey. I don’t even usually cry about much at all. I can’t concentrate on my work for the paper right now at all. I can’t get my homework done either. Journalism assignments are piling up – maybe I have writer’s block? Maybe I journal too much?

Anyway, I called "home" which is technically 500 miles away though I feel more at home in Toronto with or without "family". Not that Sault Ste Marie was ever my home but my father got transferred there in my grade 12 year just in time to screw up my graduation with the kids I went to high school with from grade 9 until 2 months into my grade 12 year. I only lived up there with the parents for just under a year – hated it. I absolutely hated it. I couldn’t wait to get out of that city and my so-called "family".

When I called, my father answered and listened for a few minutes and then my mother got on the extension phone and they both sat there firing blaming and critical questions at me. It hurt. I was trying to express how hurt I am that I can’t play hockey right now and how unfair it is and all they could say is, "Well you must have done something wrong." What about the concept that they did lots wrong to me in my life?

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Borderline Diary – My Borderline Years – My Borderline Father’s Raging Abuse

Most years I was so protected at Christmas. Most years I was too busy having an anxiety attack at the mere thought of going "home" for Christmas so I would stay away from my "family". I had learned my lessons well. Our family was well off enough and toys and/or gifts were always aplenty. But what came with those gifts and presents was quite the opposite of the spirit of the season – quite the opposite of love. It was enmeshed abandoning betrayal served up as "love" – "love" borderline style.

The Joy – Not – Of Christmas – Physically Assaulted by My Borderline Father

December 26, 1982

11:15 pm

Oh God, as I write this I have such a pounding headache it’s unreal. Most years, at Christmas, I dreaded going "home". I dreaded the whole drunken thing. Relatives sloshing back all the booze my father can shove down their throats. And me, me having to constantly scream NO at him each and every time he tries to shove the booze at me. He thinks I think I am better than him and that that is why I will not drink. I have not ever drank and I don’t ever intend to. It disgusts me.

My approach to this Christmas was so different for some stupid naive reason on my part. I somehow managed to forget the reality of my borderline family – maybe because I haven’t lived with them since I was 17, I don’t know. This year though I got into the Carols, stuff I usually just ignore because it’s just too painful to bother with. For two weeks before I made the trip to London, Ontario, where my "family" had moved last – for my father’s job – I was really enjoying Anne Murray’s "I’ll be Home for Christmas" Like some unsuspecting deer about to be caught in the headlights of on-coming hostile traffic I went "home" for Christmas with some really unwise and unrealistic hope.

By only the second day I was there, I was bored out of my mind. As always the pairings left me out of the activities they decided upon – activities that bore the living hell out of me – either way I feel rejected. My aunt, my mother’s sister was visiting this Christmas too. Oh joy – not! God I hate this woman. Mind you the friction she causes between my parents is sometimes entertaining. Anyway, after a day of trying to get someone, anyone, my aunt, the parents, my brother and/or his wife, to play Trivial Pursuit or do or say anything that might remotely interest me – no luck. So they continued to do the boring crappy stuff they all decided they’d super enjoy. At one point they actually had a two hour conversation about head lettuce. Head lettuce just isn’t that interesting. My brother was working as the produce manager in a grocery store. Well, what a friggin’ hero eh? Did they enjoy it just because I hated it? Finally today I got bitchy. Not unusual for me at "home". I was trying to ask my father something. He was ignoring me. I did get pushy and demanding. I did ride the edge of the danger that exists in provoking this bastard, yes I did – as I had so often done throughout my teenage years as well.

I ended up following him around as he was setting up and testing some intercoms around his house. I was clearly bugging him – he bugged the shit out of me just in that he existed and what who he was. We did not get along – period. I wasn’t the girly girl he wanted. I didn’t fit his misogynous mold of what he thought a woman should be. I did not stay in "my place" at all. He was the biggest disappointment of a father who wasn’t absent that a daughter could ever be abandoned and betrayed by in the name of his borderline idea of "love". Anyway, I guess I let my "borderline" way of just letting loose with my oh so honest and tactless tongue get way too out of control. Fair enough. But my father’s response – well, way over the top and very illegal. Somewhat predictable, however. I must be more self-defeating than I realized?

As I gave up trying to get him to even respond to me and turned out of his bedroom to the hallway to go to the guest room I was staying in – that I would retreat to often just to try to get a grip on my own emotions – he lunged at me and shoved me face first into the wall at the end of the hall. I didn’t really know what was happening at that point.

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The Diary – My Borderline Years – The First Cut Is The Deepest

Cutting myself feels. Cutting myself makes the feel real. The first cut is the deepest. The first cut is the emotional experience that screws me right up. The first cut comes always from someone else. It isn’t my fault. I don’t do it. I don’t ask for it. People just deliver it to me constantly – treating me like shit.

Slighted By a Room-mate – Feeling Misunderstood

September 7, 1975

4:55pm

All I did was try to take a shower. How can I be in her shower at her time when there are no rules – no rules I understand or really care about for sure? Life in the dorm so like life in my crazy family at home. Freaky eerie how similar they really are. What does that mean? She pissed me off. She treated me like shit. She wondered why I screamed at her. Who the hell does she think she is? She got what she deserved and then so did I.

The first cut is the deepest.

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Excerpts From The Diary – My Borderline Years

Everyone is always mad me. What the hell is wrong with them? It seems like everything that happens is somehow tied to me, related to me – my fault. I don’t get it. It drives me crazy. How in the world can they seriously be blaming me for everything that’s always going wrong?

Everyone Is Always Mad At Me

Alcohol in the Desert

May 10, 1972

6:48 pm

Tonight the parents had a party. Pity the poor party-goers that aren’t alcoholics. My father is pushing alcohol on everyone like if they don’t drink what he wants them to when he wants them to they aren’t really his friends or something. I’ve seen this odd sense of what my father considers to be the most significant betrayal. It’s so embarrassing to see how people react to this – like they like him but they can’t stand him at the same time.

Big fight at dinner tonight. Dad pulled my hair and knocked me backwards off my chair real suddenly. Usually I least get a sense he’s about to blow. Why did he do that tonight? I am not really sure. All that happened was that my mother served desert. The desert came, though, after the parents had some dinner with their wine. So even the normal crazy of my everyday life and most dinners with the parents gets worse the more they drink. Sitting there like a dart board, already full of holes, my duty and my obligation to this loyalty that my father seems to think he is entitled to without condition and without exception, trying to predict which number he will aim his raging hateful and often violent darts at on any given day or night I am clueless and feel so helpless. I feel as if there is something going on here that I don’t understand or like there’s some information the parents have that I don’t.

Desert was those weird parfait things that my mother has recently began concocting. Some dysfunctional mix of smashed up oreo cookies – minus my favourite half, the half with the cream – jello and God-forsaken creme de mint – alcohol. Between trying to get me to drink wine with them night after night and now the alcohol in the deserts, how desperate are they to get me hooked on alcohol?

I refused to eat the desert as soon as I asked what the hot and weird taste to it was and found out it was alcohol. Again, my father erupted like dynamite thrown into a fire. He was screaming and yelling at me demanding to know what was wrong with me and how it is that "you think you are so much bloody better than us." What? I think somehow that’s a reference to the fact that they drink way too much and I continue to refuse to drink at all. Who pushes alcohol at a 15 year old? How is it that my father sees me as thinking I am better than them because I don’t drink? We play this game of shame ping-pong I think. He has, somewhere inside, shame for how often and how much he drinks. I feel shame for being different. My refusal to drink isn’t just to piss him off or to not be like him. It feels like it matters deeply to me – some part of me that "is" somewhere inside. I’m not sure why.

And again I had to hear how I’d ruined their night. How my not wanting that damn desert was going to put them in bad moods for their party. Like they’ll even remember the desert battle several drinks from now? Like I’ll be on their mind when they are busy getting the attention of others – not. I’ll be the one sitting up half the night thinking about this, feeling about it. I am the one stuck with this crap each and every time. I have no place to put this stuff. It just keeps piling up.

I can’t go along to get along. These people are crazy. Here I am again in my room, hiding, hoping to just be left alone. Hoping they get caught up enough in whatever they get out of these stupid parties to forget about their anger at me. Hoping that the usual anger at me for not being like them or being what or who they want me to be will pass tonight without him bursting into my room and screaming at me some more or hitting me again.

God I am tense. It’s so hard to predict. Will one of them come up here and keep it going or will it wait until tomorrow or the next day? It always does come back up. I can feel my heart pounding. Makes me so angry. It makes me so angry that they are always angry at me. Angry at me for the stupidest things and the weirdest reasons. I don’t know what to do with all that I feel. I feel like screaming but that would only bring my father’s wrath and violence down on my head. I feel like getting them back for how they make me feel. It feels like I hate them.

Doesn’t matter what I do I end up alone and feeling like I am the odd one out and that I don’t belong. The bad seed. The rotten kid. They don’t care about me. They just don’t care about me. They want me to be like them. God, that’s a fate worth than death in my opinion.

In the absence of anyone to talk to I just keep writing this stuff down, day after day, after day, after day. If this diary could talk it would let out the loudest and longest scream – it would be the kind of scream that would be heard around the world and yet for as loud as it would be it would also fall on deaf ears. It’s like people would hear something but not find it significant enough to really notice or pay much attention to.

I feel like I could go sit in the middle of a busy street screaming and no one would notice. No one would care. Cars would just run me over the way that the parents do. The irony of it all is that I must be that invisible. I feel that non-existent.

Part of me wants them to get it. Part of me wants them to care. They NEVER hear me. Part of me has so given up it’s ridiculous. Part of me just wants them to hurt more than I do.

When they party what do I have to look forward to? When it’s over they will violate my space and my mind by barging into my room to let me know that I did something that negatively impacted their night. What they say I did is nuts because I never go downstairs when they have their parties. They do this every time guests leave their party and the party ends. With both the house and each of them stinking like alcohol and cigarette smoke they seek me out like heat-seeking missiles to explode outward on me all that they can’t stand about themselves. I hate them. I hate them for hating me. I hate me for hating them. I am supposed to love them so I am told. Hate.

I hate them for hating the them in me that is all they see.

? A.J. Mahari 1972 – All rights reserved.

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I am writing my memoir about my life as a child of borderline parents, a person diagnosed with BPD and my recovery from BPD. You can check on its progress, up-dates, and up-coming excerpts by going to ajmahari.ca

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