BPD: Learning to Honour Your Pain

Borderlines need to learn how to embrace, welcome in their pain because housed within their pain are their true selves and their true identities. Honouring your pain is the way to heal.

"I hear and I forget.

I see and I believe.

I do and I understand.

- Confucius (551-479 BC)

In Borderline Personality Disorder, so much of the pain that exists is made bigger by the fact that it is housed outside of any "true self". Your false self takes over and holds your pain out there like it belongs to someone else. What has caused your pain really doesn't matter anymore. It IS yours, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. Borderlines have a great deal of pain that stems from unmet devlopmental needs.

The prophet, Kahlil Gibran on pain:

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding...Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain...Much of your pain is self-chosen...

In so many aspects of our society pain is frowned upon. Pain is shoved under the rug, denied, pushed away and dissociated from. Pain is seen as negative. In order to honour your pain the first thing that you need to do is realize that it is actually a positive thing and is not a negative thing at all.

Don't keep your deeper understanding of self locked inside the protective shell that houses your pain. Welcome the cracking and breaking open of that shell. Welcome in your pain. Honour your pain and you will begin to heal your pain in ways that you may have thougt were impossible. You are the master of your experience with pain. It is up to you whether you allow your pain to teach you and enable you to grow or whether you run from your pain, and consequently run from yourself - in which case you pain will continue top multiply in attempts to get your attention.

It is in and through times of our most pain that we are able to grow the fastest when we honour our pain. Stand tall, not just enduring your pain, but welcoming your pain in as you set your sights down the road, to a stronger self who will be more equipped to meet your needs and to take care of you. This self, as I so often say, is waiting inside you of you to be tapped into and re-born.

Pain is a friend, a teacher, a purposeful reality that shows itself to help us to figure out what is wrong. This is true both physically and emotionally. Ignoring your pain can have many unwanted consequences, again, both physically and emotionally. The longer that you ignore your pain or the more that you dissociate from your emotional pain, the bigger than pain will seem to be. For many their own emotional pain has taken on monsterous proportions. You need to know that what you emotionally feel will NOT kill you. It cannot kill you. In fact, feeling it is, in the long run, way safer than continuing to allow it to be housed within your body.

The quicker you make the connection, in terms of what your pain is trying to tell/teach you, the easier it is to make the correction.

In order to make this connection you must open yourself up to your deepest pain, gradually, bit by bit. Identify your feelings, FEEL your feelings, and then give yourself permission to let them go through healthy expression.

If we are not careful we can become obsessed with our pain which will then just keep us all the more stuck in and with it. According to Paul J. Hannig, Ph.D "Take Action. Obsession is nothing but concealed emotional pain. If you cathart, abreact, cry out, or scream your way into the pain, eventually it is released from your system. Then the obsession begins to lessen and disappear."

The more you run from your pain, the more you hurt yourself, and the more you will have to keep using the protective and very self-damaging defense mechanisms that you employ to keep people far enough away (at the same time you push them out there you try also to pull them closer) so that you can feel safe. What is threatening your safety is your own perception of your past, your pain, and the choices that you are making today (consciously or unconsciously) to protect instead of to be open to life and to others. Herein lies the borderline dilemma. How to identify and learn to trust self enough to express the pain that needs to be grieved so that you can indeed have healthy and productive relationships.

Learning to honour your pain means taking personal responsibility for it and for everything that you choose to do or not do as a result of it. Your pain is NOT you. Your pain is a part of you. You may have let your pain define you. Well, don't. Redefine yourself and know that by honouring your pain you will give voice to it and by doing this you will begin to heal it. Change cannot be accomplished without pain. Pain is a teacher, a healer and a friend. It is not some monsterous enemy to be avoided at all cost. Your true enemy is your false self.

Honour your pain. Your true self and your future await you. Honour your pain and you will be come to know who you really are. Identifying your pain is akin to identifying your identity. Welcome home both your pain and yourself. The self that you have pushed aside with the pain that "it" feels and knows is there and the pain that this true self of yours so wants to release and to heal. Honour your pain and learn to soothe it and you won't have to live with or through the borderline triats that you've felt forced to cling to thus far.

© A.J. Mahari, November 11, 2001

as of January 5, 2002