Does narcissistic equal evil?

The first time that a therapist told me that I had narcissistic traits I was shocked. Yeah, my friends had told me sometimes that I loved myself a bit too much... But I believed narcissism was having a grandiose image of yourself, and I was pretty insecure and even hated myself sometimes. So I simply forgot about it. Until it was brought up again later on by another therapist. I then did some research and read what the narcissistic traits are according to the DSM IV. I was told I only had some traits, but this is the list of traits of the narcissistic personality disorder:

• Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
• Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
• Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
• Requires excessive admiration
• Has a very strong sense of entitlement, e.g., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
• Is exploitative of others, e.g., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
• Lacks empathy, e.g., is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
• Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
• Regularly shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

The truth is that the way that it is worded, a lot of the traits sound like negative ones. When I read that, and bearing in mind that my grandmother probably had a narcissistic personality disorder, I thought that being narcissistic meant that I was evil. So I brought this up in therapy and my therapist explained to me how most of the traits are not necessarily "negative" in the sense that they don't make you a bad person. And there seem to be a lot of people who think that way, with images like this one around the internet:

So obviously I was very concerned about being told that I had narcissistic traits. Did that mean I was a bad person? Did that mean I was a manipulative person?

Let's have a closer look at some of these traits and analyze them:

· Has a grandiose sense of self-importance

This can also be understood as thinking that your life is a mission to do something, that there is a meaning to you being here. You may think that what you think is the truth whereas other people simply have beliefs.

It doesn't necessarily believe that you think of yourself above others or that you think you deserve more than anyone else.

· Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people

This is not necessarily as classist or elitist as it sounds. You may be able to associate with everyone but maybe you don't want to get close ties with people who you feel bring nothing to your life.

 · Requires excessive admiration

You may simply seek recognition, not necessarily admiration. 

· Is exploitative of others, e.g., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

This one particularly scared me quite a lot. I don't feel like I exploit people, I am respectful of others and try to never harm them purposefully. However, if you prefer associating with people who bring something to your life, that could be understood as socially exploitative, especially if once you get bored or get from them what you wanted, you leave them (even if it is done in an unconscious way).

So this doesn't necessarily mean that you seek to exploit others. You are not necessarily a bad person even if you do have this trait.

So, as I've tried to highlight, these supposedly negative traits are not really so negative. As it is also the case with many other issues in mental health, there is a lack of knowledge and a lot of misconceptions about narcissism and it is many times seen as something negative, that makes you 'a bad person' when that's not always the case. You obviously need to work on those traits with your therapist, especially if they're interfering in your life and/or interpersonal relationships. But if you have NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) or you have some narcissistic traits, it doesn't mean that you are a bad person. Our actions define us, not labels. Don't let the label define who you are. However, I am pro-labels in the sense that it does help people understand what they're going through and why and that they're not alone. However, don't let labels define you.

My first VLOG! (mental health at school or uni)

Here is my first VLOG ever. In it, I give advice on having mental health issues at school or university from my own experience. It complements the post on Being at school or university with depression and anxiety, giving some new tips. Make sure to check out the blog post for other information as well.

So.... here it goes!

A poem about BPD

This is a poem that I wrote last October, based on how I was feeling and that yesterday I decided to share on tumblr. I hope that it isn't triggering even though it has references to self-harm and suicidal thoughts. If you are feeling suicidal please check the section 'Need urgent help?' and make sure you get the appropriate help.

I must say things have got better since.

She had her monsters, she knew them well

They were called anger, pain and despair

Most people knew them but in her case

She couldn't tell them to go away

So she buried them deep

Where no one would find them

And she laughed for a year

Thinking she'd left them behind her

So when she opened a door and they all just snook through

She just didn't know what she was going to do

They said she felt too deeply

She said she felt nothing at all

They said she had to be in control

She said she was just empty

It was either everything or nothing at all

Nothing in between, no halfway to go

She cut her skin, they fed her pills

Trying to get the monsters to let go

She thought there was no way out

The emptiness inside made it easy for the monsters to control her

And there she was after a blackout

The white walls of the hospital all way too bright around her

They called it BPD

You just feel way too deeply

You can't control your feelings

Depression, anxiety

“How long will it be?”

“I don't want them here

I want them to go

I don't want this emptiness

being in control”

There are monsters in my head that want me dead

And I'm afraid they will succeed, you see

And I'm scared people will realize

That I don't know what's in my mind half of the time

I guess there's something beautiful out there

So I am glad that I'm still here

But just don't let go of my hand

I'm scared I'll drown with so much air

How can they breathe so easily?

How can they smile so brightly?

How are their eyes so troubleless?

What, are their minds not behind them?

So why me? Here, have another pill, maybe it'll calm you down

Against your sadness, against your impulsivity

It'll make you happier

It'll make you calmer

It'll make you sleepy

It'll make you easier to handle

Don't read the secondary effects, you'll get scared

No one wants that, you're already scared enough

Why do they care so much?

Why do they care at all?

When will it be time to be a beautiful beloved corpse?

She cuts her skin, they feed her pills

When she cuts deeper increase the dose

And if suicide ever invades your thoughts

You didn't get a damn thing, kid

Things will get better, it will improve

They say “you see? There's a bright future ahead of you”

But she's screaming silently, emptiness fills her eyes

It's too late for me, I am dead inside

Misconceptions about self harm

As with many other issues related to mental health, there are a lot of misconceptions about self harm. There is a lot of stigma around self harm and unfortunately this means that people are unlikely to talk about it and therefore misconceptions are perpetuated. This post aims to shed some light on self harm and to bring down some common myths around it.

I am NOT trying to promote self-harm and I strongly encourage anyone who has considered it to not do it, and anyone who self harms to seek help. 

If you know someone who self harms, I hope this post helps you understand it better and not judge them. Offer them your help, not your judgment. Self harm is a very serious issue.

·"People who self-harm are trying to kill themselves" 

Self harm doesn't equal attempted suicide. Most people who self harm are not trying to kill themselved but instead use self harm as a coping mechanism

·"People who self harm are suicidal" 

This is not always true. It may be in some cases but a lot of those who self harm don't have any sort of suicidal ideation in mind. They could be self harming for a lot of different reasons and you should be concerned. If they are self harming they're probably having mental health problems and could be dealing with depression, anxiety or some other issues. Even if they are not currently suicidal, if they don't get help, the problem leading to self harm could get worse and the shame and guilt that usually accompany self harm could make the situation worse, potentially making them have suicidal thoughts in the future

·"People who self harm are trying to get attention" 

Most people who self harm actually hide their wounds and don't show them to anyone. If a person recurs to self harm for whatever reason, they should get help and you shouldn't try to judge or analyse their motives.

·"You don't have to worry about someone's self harm unless it's serious injuries" 

You have to worry about someone's self harm no matter how serious, deep or shallow their injuries are. If they are self harming they need help. Of course, if the injuries are more serious there is a risk of parasuicide, the person could accidentally die even if it's not their intention from the seriousness of the wounds. However, someone whose injuries seem less serious could potentially have more suicidal thoughts than people whose self harm is deeper. There are many different reasons why someone would choose to inflict less serious wounds but that doesn't mean that the problem is less serious.

·"Self harm = cutting" 

There are many more ways in which someone can harm themselves and they are all equally serious. I'm not going to name any so that I don't give any ideas to people who self harm but anything that someone does to their body with the intention of harming themselves can be considered self harm.

·"Scratching doesn't count as self harm" 

Look at my previous point. Scratching can be self harm and does not have to be overlooked.

·"Showing your scars means that you're seeking attention" 

I'm sorry but no. I'll post something about this in the future but showing your scars doesn't mean that you want attention. Not even showing your wounds has to mean this. But with scars there's not even controversy around it. You should feel comfortable in your own body and if you do have scars and you show them, that means courage, that means that you're getting comfortable with your body as it is. Do not be ashamed of your scars. And do not shame people about their scars. Scars, even if they're not self-inflicted can be a tough thing to get used to showing. Feel comfortable in your own skin.

·"You can stop self harming any time you want" 

Unfortunately this is completely false. Yes, you can take steps towards stopping your self harm and I'm not saying that you'll never be able to stop: you will. But it's not an easy thing to do. There is a physical and a psychological explanation for this. The physical one is that pain and pleasure are separated by a very thin line. By self harming you release endorphins and your brain actually becomes addicted to this. The psychological reason is that if you're feeling bad for some reason and you recur to self  harm and it makes you feel better (for whatever reason) and you have trouble dealing with those problematic feelings, then when you feel them again you know that self harm once made you feel better and you'll recur to it more easily. What starts being whenever something huge happens ends up becoming your go-to mechanism any time you're not feeling particularly well. That's why quitting self harm is so difficult.Relapses are normal in the process to recovery and you mustn't let them bring your hopes down. It is possible to stop self harming.

·"People who self harm are just emo/flaunting their cuts"

Let's stop right there. Flaunting their cuts? I have indeed met some people who were proud of their wounds and would show them around as if it were something to be proud of, and I've always felt a certain disgust towards this behavior. I personally was extremely ashamed of my self harm that I was always particularly careful to hide it. Like me, so many people hide their wounds. There are so many people ashamed, embarrassed who won't show their wounds. A lot more than of those who show them.

·"People self harm because they want to" 

Riiiiiight. Not really. I mean, you're sort of right but not really. Because of what I have explained earlier about it becoming sort of addictive, a lot of the times people don't really want to stop self harming because it actually makes them feel better so they think: why stop? I keep seeing it as a drug. A drug user might want to stop doing drugs but then again a part of themselves might not really want to. I don't know anyone who likes to self harm. Most people experience feelings of shame, self-hatred, embarrassment or guilt after self harming. However a part of them doesn't want to stop doing the only thing they have found so far that helps them feel better. That's why it is so important to get professional help. Don't try to deal with someone's self harm all by yourself. They need help and they need treatment.

Update on my life (and its morals)

Well this is sort of embarrassing... I've spent too long without posting here. A month? Oh dear. I must apologize by saying that this last month has been extremely busy and full of great (and not so great) stuff. I have also been absent from all social networks and I am extremely sorry for that, I won't let it happen again.

I've finally decided that I'm going to start vlogging. Some great vloggers have encouraged me to do it and I've been wanting to for a long time.

I was meant to go back to university this January but things turned out a bit differently. Going back to university was causing me a lot of stress. Every time I had visited my uni town last semester (from September 2014) I had had suicidal thoughts and a lot of impulsivity partly brought in by the anxiety that being there caused me (and I was only visiting!).

The week before I left to theoretically move back to my uni town, my anxiety was so extreme that I had physical pains in my chest, and especially my stomach. I wasn't hungry, I could barely eat, I was even sick repeatedly during a whole afternoon when I simply thought about going back.

So I didn't move back. I'm still living home. I only visited to sort out everything that had to do with university and to make possible for me to finish my degree from home. I felt like a failure because I was not going to be able to move back there, but at the same time thinking about it now... Maybe I wasn't ready. I didn't have classes so I would have had a very unstructured day. And this way I can still go to therapy and start to leave the day centre little by little.

I am finishing my degree this year, I'll simply be doing it from home.

What can be concluded from this?

· Things don't always turn out the way you want them to. But it's okay, you need to adapt and maybe even look at things in a different way.

· Maybe you are setting your expectations too high. And if you fail to accomplish something you had set your mind into, it doesn't mean that you're a failure. Maybe you've just set your bar too high. Reconsider this.

· Progress happens slowly. Don't get frustrated if you feel like you feel like you're not getting better fast enough. You're not going to get better in one day, progress happens at its own pace and it's different for everyone. Things will get better.

· Let your university know about your mental health situation. I can't say this enough. I was scared since my first year to tell my university about my mental health, but I am so glad that I finally did last year. Not only did they help me giving me a leave of absence, but going back now has been made really easy for me too. The teachers have agreed to have skype sessions with me instead of face-to-face ones, and they have all made it very comfortable and easy for me. You may be going through unnecessary difficulties added to your already difficult situation, and just telling your university might help you in ways that you never thought of!

I'll start posting weekly (hopefully more than once a week) from this week again. I hope you found this post useful and helpful!

Why I'm thankful I lived 2014 and my suicide attempt a year ago failed

This post could be triggering (I have tried my best for it not to be), but still.

If you have suicidal thoughts or ideation, please seek urgent help.

Most of you who use Facebook have probably been given the offer to 'see this year' according to Facebook. Well, so have I. And guess what? There were very few pictures, I think it's the year there have been the fewest pictures since I opened my account. Why was that? One could think this was a year not worth remembering, maybe I think that as well some times. But that is very far from the truth. This year was not the best year of my life. The worst moments and days of my life have taken place in 2014. And still, I am thankful that I got the chance to live this 2014. That may sound extremely dramatic, but you may not find it so much so when I tell you that exactly a year ago, on the early hours of the 1^st of January 2014, I attempted suicide.

Things had been getting ugly for a long time for me. My depression had come back and it seemed to be here to stay. I was experiencing panic attacks, dissociative episodes, extreme mood swings, I was in the midst of a dependance relationship with my boyfriend back then and I had had suicidal thoughts and ideation for months. I thought that I was losing my mind. I found it impossible to concentrate and had required extensions for my work at university for the first time in my life. I had resorted to parties, sex, food restriction, alcohol and drugs and mild self-harm to keep my feelings at bay, to 'control' my feelings and keep them from spinning out of control. But the truth is that by the end of 2013 not only was I on antidepressants, I was unable to sleep on a room by myself with the lights off unless I had taken a sleeping pill, and I found the idea of fun without alcohol absolutely absurd.

I saw myself as being on the 'peak' of my life and I thought I was going crazy and knew that everything was going to go downhill because I couldn't keep the pace I was on. I thought I was going to break down and that everyone I loved would leave me.

Well, guess what? No one left me when things got as ugly as they did. And I am glad that I was here to see that.

Yes, I lost a couple of friends who didn't understand the extent of my mental health issues and claimed that I was just being lazy and an attention whore. But those people were never worth it in the first place.

But all the others, all the ones who mattered, stayed by me. Even people I did not consider so close, people I never thought would be there in ugly times, showed up to show their support.

This past year has not been the best year of my life. It started with me attempting suicide. As a consequence, I was requested by my therapist and my parents to leave university, my house, my job, my friends and boyfriend, the country where I was studying, to go back home to live with my parents. The first months of 2014 are but a blur in my mind.

But this 2014 I finally got diagnosed with BPD (after having recurring episodes of depression since I was 11 and needing a therapist a few times for an eating disorder, depressive episodes and self-harm since I was 16). I was sent to a day centre to which I attended every day and learnt DBT and other skills to deal with my illness and my life.

I ended up 2013 wishing to end my life, and as 2014 ends, I have hope again, and I want to live my life and find out where all of this is going.

In January I will be moving back to university to finish my degree.

This year has been very hard, but it has been filled with great surprises, great people, great lessons.

I am thankful that I got to live this 2014 and I am looking forward to 2015.

I remember at the beginning of last year I thought I was never going to feel better, but now I do. Things have improved so much and they will keep improving.

Recovery is not an easy process. I am on medication, I am still in therapy. But I'm getting better and I certainly am much better than I used to be.

So if you are struggling, remember that things do get better (and I am the living example of it - and I'm glad to be!). Please hold on. You are important.

Surviving the holidays - Spending the holiday with family

This is the first post in a series of posts about how to 'survive' these holidays.

Even though the holidays are meant to be a happy time to spend with our loved ones, many of us find them challenging as well. It can bring anxiety and other unwanted emotions, so these blogposts are to ensure that your holidays can pass as smoothly as possible!

This post will be about: 

Spending the holiday with family

Your family may or may not know about your mental health issues. A lot of us spend the holidays with our families, and there are some members of our family that we see less often than others. So questions regarding you, your current situation and possibly your mental health could be asked.

One of the main things that I recommend is to think about it before. If someone asks you what you're currently doing or if something is wrong, you could easily go blank from anxiety and not know what to reply. So something that I have found helpful is to prepare beforehand what you are going to say to people.

You may want to check out the post of 'What to say if you're not ready to tell people', since it contains advice on what to say if you're not ready to talk about your mental health.

Once you know more or less what you want to tell people, it will be a lot easier when they ask you since you will be prepared.

If your family tends to worry about you and you don't want all the attention focused on you (and think that this may be an issue), you can also think beforehand about some topics of conversation to try to change the subject and redirect the conversation towards something else.

The purpose of this series of post is to make them short and easy to read to be as helpful as possible. I will be posting them at least twice a week, so make sure to keep an eye out!

Borderline personality disorder and mood swings

Have you ever been on a roller coaster? That's pretty much how a person with BPD feels most of the time. I mean... not literally.

Okay, let me explain myself. When you suffer BPD, one of its main characteristics is the mood swings.

You may feel happy right now. And then something may happen, something that may be a little upsetting but that other people wouldn't consider 'a big deal', and BAM! suddenly you're sad, you feel like nothing is worth it or even suicidal. What happened? That little event, or there wasn't that little event. Any small trigger or small events can make your mood go from 0 to 10. The same way, someone may tell you that you were late and suddenly you're rage is so high that you feel like screaming at that person or even getting physically violent (or so mad that you feel like interiorising the pain with yourself).

Right, right. I'm not saying that ANYTHING would trigger a BPD person's emotions. But BPD is also referred to as an mood instability disorder, and that's because people who suffer it have a lot of trouble keeping their emotions in line and controlling them. Their feelings generally surpass them.

It doesn't mean that if they feel mad they will automatically get violent, do not get me wrong. But if something makes them mad, it will probably infuriate them. If something hurts them, it may make them sink so down that they may feel hopeless.

These feelings may not last longer than hours, because something else will probably happen and their mood will swing towards something else.

In the same day you can go from feeling happy, to feeling absolutely hopeless, fury and rage and then happy again. I remember when I was 18 it was when I became really self-conscious of these mood-swings and how brutal they were. Maybe one day I was feeling suicidal and then a few hours later I was extremely happy and excited about many different things.

I remember telling my psychiatrist that I thought I was bipolar. I had never heard about borderline personality disorder at this point. And bipolar was what sounded the closest to what I felt. She immediately ruled it out when she asked me what was the longest I was depressed for and I said a day.

But interesting fact: Guess what? Many years ago they used to think that BPD was a milder form of bipolar disorder.

One of the main issues with this roller coaster is that: you are very unstable and therefore as a consequence so are your relationships with people. Besides idealization and devaluation, this emotional instability is one of the major reasons why BPD people have such a hard time building long-lasting stable friendships and romantic relationships. A later post will talk about this more in detail.

But it is possible to become more stable. In my case, medication has helped me get my emotions more stable. I never thought that I'd aspire to be 'stable', but since last year that's all I want to be. Lately my emotions have been all over the place so I guess I need to visit the psychiatrist...

If you are worried about your mood swings, visit a therapist.

Going back to your 'old life'

I am so sorry about how long it has been since my last post! But I do have an excuse. I have spent the last week back at my university city, visiting friends and teachers. This was meant to be a way to see my friends who are back at uni, to talk to my teachers about the work that I have to hand in in January (when my leave of absence is over) and to start to integrate myself again in my old life.

And even though I came back on Sunday, I needed time to think about the experience.

I must admit that I had been very scared about going back. As much as I wanted to see my friends, I had not been at the university campus since March and I was scared about how stressful it was going to be. 

In these months I have developed this anxiety of being around a lot of young people. When I'm in the tram on my way to town and there are a lot of young people who go down at the same station as me, I just avoid the stairs that they are using and I use the other ones (they usually use the escalator, so I use the stairs). So when I arrived to university and it was FULL of young people wherever I went, you can imagine that my level of anxiety went up.

So yes, going back was definitely triggering. But at the same time I do feel like it was a necessary step. I am meant to be going back in January so at some point I had to start to make those small steps.

Something similar may have happened to some of you. Maybe in different contexts. But sometimes when you have had to leave your everyday life to get treatment, the prospect of going back can be very stressful.

As much as on the one hand you may want to retake your normal life again, you may have a certain fear about this. If it is not the case, then that is amazing and I am really glad that that is the case for you and that you have no issues with it.

But if you do feel stressed about the prospect, then I think that what I have done is a good idea. This time I have only gone for a week. I will be going back before January for another week more or less. Even though this may be triggering in a way, at the same time it did show me what scared me the most and what things I have to get ready for and work on.

January may come and I may still not be ready, that could happen. But I think that taking small steps before instead of going all of a sudden in January is a lot better. The shock that came from this visit was a shock that, after all, I spared myself from in January when I move back in.

Have you had any similar experiences?

What has helped you to adapt again to your "old life?

How to reject alcohol in social situations

Alcohol is a drug, but it is a very socially accepted one. So much so, that it is even considered strange not to drink in some social contexts. However, you may not want to drink. If you are struggling with depression or other mental health issues and know that alcohol can lead you to dysfunctional behavior, you want to stay as far away from it as possible. And if you are on antidepressants, you shouldn't be drinking alcohol either, as I explained on my previous post.
However, this doesn't mean that you can't go out, or that you have to avoid any social situation that includes alcohol. Especially if you have isolated yourself in the past, you want to start to attend social events again.
But people can be pushy with the subject of alcohol, and they may not just ask if you want to drink, but try to encourage you to drink. This sucks, I know, especially when you actually kind of want to accept and are only rejecting it because you know that it's bad for you but there is a part of you that wants to say yes.

Here are some tips and tricks not to succumb to peer pressure. It will also be helpful to keep some of this info in mind in order to not get upset.

When people offer you a drink and you refuse, they are likely to keep offering. Don't get annoyed, they are probably not doing it with bad intention even if their insistence makes you feel bad. They may have good intentions and simply be trying to get you to 'have a good time'. It is commonly assumed that that's alcohol's purpose. And most people don't see that for some people alcohol can just be either plain uninteresting or actually pretty damaging.
What you probably want to do when someone insists over and over again is something along these lines:

But that's why I'm writing this post, to offer you other solutions.

Bringing someone along who knows you're not drinking. If you have a mental health issue, having someone at the party/social event who knows about your issues and who knows that you can't drink is a really good idea. That way, if people keep offering you drinks, you will not be on your own rejecting them, you will have someone by your side offering you their strength and maybe even pushing those people away (even if that friend is drinking too).

If you bring a friend who doesn't drink either, then even better, since it will be 2 of you not drinking and things will become much easier because your friend's behavior will encourage yours and the same the other way around!

You can say that you have a New Year's resolution not to drink. People are more likely to stop offering you drinks if that's the case. 

If they have seen you drinking earlier the same year, you can do a version of the previous one which is to say that you have stopped drinking for a while to be healthy. And it is the truth!

I'm not a fan of lies. I actually hate them. But if you're getting stressed out from being pressured to drink, I think that's a fair enough reason to blurt out an innocent lie such as claiming to be on antibiotics. It will not work on a long term basis, but if it is for a one-off that you're going out or once that people are especially annoying, you may just choose to use it.

If your problem is that you actually want to drink but you know that you shouldn't and you don't know whether or not you'll be able to control yourself, you can just take the necessary amount of money for the transport back (or in case you'll need a taxi back or whatever), and leave the rest home. Or give your money to a friend that you trust. I know that when I take more money than I need out, sometimes I think "I may just as well buy alcohol" when I'm caught in the moment. So, lately I tend to take a lot less. Only the amount for a few soft drinks and what a taxi would cost in case I'll be too stressed to drive back or whatever.

If there are some people that when you meet up with them they always get drunk, and they keep insisting on you drinking despite you repeatedly saying no... You might want to reconsider whether it is good to keep hanging out with those people, at least for the moment. I'm not saying, go on and break a friendship just because your friends like to drink. I'm only saying that if your relationship consists solely on meeting up to drink and you can't drink (or shouldn't or don't want to) then maybe they are not the right people for you to hang out with at the moment.

Also, I want to emphasize that I wrote this post because I don't want you to have to stop going out just because you can't drink. You should do the things that you like, because in order to get better from depression, you should do the things that you like to do and do as much of them as you can. But I am not saying either that going out is necessary if that is not your thing. 

I hope this was helpful!

I'll confess: I tried doing a vlog about this but I'm so bad at it... and I was gonna post it anyway but then I found out the sound and the video weren't on sinc... -.- so yes, I'll try next time.

BPD and relationships

Hello! You may have noticed I've been absent for a while. It was due to relationship problems. I wanted to write a post about BPD and relationships since I first started this blog, but now I realize that it is an issue too big to sum it up in a single post, so I will make a section and write different posts about it, and about different types of relationships (love, friendships, family). This post is therefore a very brief introduction of what is to come.

So, as I was saying, there were some major ups and downs in my relationship. And my grandmother passed away on Wednesday night.

Many mental issues bring along some relationship problems, but borderline personality disorder is known for its unstable interpersonal relationships factor. 

This is something I can perfectly relate to, as since I was 11 you can observe in my life a series of unstable relationships both in the love life area and in friendships. Within my family it wasn't so noticeable until I turned 16, but it began to became more and more present from then onwards.

When talking about the phases of those relationships, psychologists always refer to 'idealization' and 'devaluation'. Let me talk a bit about how those feel just to make it clear for the rest of the posts to come. (I guess they appear differently on everyone, but there are probably some common factors).

Whether it's in love or in friendship when you idealize someone, it feels like those people are the best people you have ever met and will ever meet. You feel like you would do anything for them, like you would give them everything. You feel like you can't imagine life without them and sometimes even like you can't live without them (here some dependance factor comes in). At the same time, you expect those people to do the same for you: to do anything and everything for you and to give you everything.

One of the problems in BPD is the constant fear of abandonment which is one of its main symptoms. This, combined with idealization, as you're probably already seeing, doesn't play along too well. If you expect someone to be willing to give you everything but at the same time you're scared as hell that they'll leave you, you're probably sooner or later going to start acting erratically to try and keep them there.

This is also one of the reasons why generally nothing the person does feels like enough. You have idealized them, they seem perfect, ideal, they are some kind of God or Goddess, but they're really not, they are just a human being. So whenever they do something that you don't like, or think it's not good enough (which will probably be very frequently since you expect oh so much from them), you'll feel quite disappointed.

When this happens you might either blame yourself, or you begin to devaluate them.

If you devaluate a person, you fall into the contrary opposite of idealization. You only see the negative aspects of the person. You forget all the good things they ever did, focusing only on the negative, maybe even thinking they tricked you into thinking they were good. Some people treat the other person badly after having devaluated them. When this has happened to me, I've simply lost all interest and stopped talking to them, lost all contact, not wanting to know anything about them anymore, even maybe thinking they were bad people.

People suffering borderline personality disorder are known for their 'black and white' point of view, and it is no different in relationships. It is important to try and realize when the phases of idealization and devaluation are happening. If any of those thoughts appear, like radical thoughts about a person, whether they're good or bad,  you should let your therapist know. You may not get worried if the thoughts are all positive but idealization is not a positive thing either since you may seek to satisfy someone else's needs before yours even if it interferes with your health/mental health as it happened to me in December 2013.

After this has happened it is typical for BPD  to try and search for protecting mechanisms to try and not fall in the same trap again. If they think someone hurt them, they may not want to get close to people in fear of getting hurt again. Pushing people away is very typical in BPD. But that doesn't stop us from getting hurt, it only leaves us alone.

Have you gone through any of these phases?

Please leave a comment.

If you want to talk more privately about it, then feel free to send me an email to newwingstofly@gmail.com

Am I losing my mind?

I remember asking myself this question a lot during the months of November and December of 2013. Early November I even went to the doctor and told her, with these words, that I thought 'I was going crazy'. The fear of going crazy only increased the amount of stress that I was feeling, making the problem even worse, making me experience even more symptoms. This eventually became what seemed like an endless cycle until I reached rock bottom and finally got the therapy, medication and information that I needed.

Information is such an important requirement in order to help reduce stress. To help us and those around us to understand what is going on we need to understand what is going on in our minds.

I am writing this post because I would have liked to find something like this back then. With information about some of the most common stuff that could be going on.

The following problems can lead us to think that we are to losing our minds. However, they can be relatively normal depending on the condition we have and the amount of stress we are under, some even appearing with no need of suffering any mental illness.

I hope this post helps people and provides information. But remember, if you are trying to find out exactly what you have, you should visit a therapist and get a diagnosis.

I am no therapist, I am only talking from personal experience and from the information I have gathered. All these are a lot more common than people generally think. So if you have recently experienced one of them and are worrying, I hope this helps you worry less, just gather information, and talk to a therapist about it.

Panic attack 

A panic attack or an anxiety attack can be characterized by some of these symptoms

• an increased speed of the heart rate; 
• breathing getting very fast;
• feeling like it's hard to breathe;
• feeling nauseous

Read all symptoms here

You might suddenly feel an irrational fear, you may be scared of death or scared of going crazy.

My case in November was the latter. It was not my first panic attack, I had had some created by stressful situations in times of revision. But in this one I was in a 'relaxed' situation. I began hyperventilating and I had to cover my eyes and hide away thinking that there was some real danger. When I managed to stop, the only thing I could think about was 'I am going crazy'.

A few months later, while playing beach volleyball I started to feel pain in my abdomen and I got a panic attack. I told the teacher to please call an ambulance because I was dying. And I was not joking, I seriously thought that I was about to die.

If in a previous similar situation you felt anxious, there is a higher chance that you get a panic attack. Maybe because you have associated that situation to anxiety. Or maybe because you think (without realizing that you're thinking this) that because you got anxious in the past, you will get anxious in the future as well. 

A good example for this is people who suffer from insomnia. When I had this problem I associated the time of going to sleep with stress and anxiety. When the time approached that I was meant to go to bed I began to get anxious and I ended up getting panic attacks and having even more trouble sleeping.

If you have panic attacks, talking to a therapist about it could help you to find methods to cope with them. 

And always try to remind yourself that despite how real your fear of dying or going crazy feels when you are having a panic attack, it is not real.

Hallucinations

Sometimes, people can have hallucinations as they're falling asleep or as they are waking up. It is generally associated to anxiety, but it could appear even without it.

This has only happened to me once, but it was very scary. I woke up and I could hear noises and they were very clear, someone was inside my house (I was alone at home) and they were at the other side of my room and trying to open the door. And it was very clear to me that this was not just something that could be happening, but that it was a very clear noise. But when I tried to reach for my phone just next to my bed, I found out I couldn't move at all. I was absolutely terrified. Some people even see things that seem completely real.

Drugs can lead to hallucinations even if other people take them without facing the same effects. Everyone is different. This can happen even with drugs that are not meant to cause hallucinations. The probability here is increased if you mix drugs.

However, it is important that if you are scared about possible hallucinations you go see the doctor. Especially if such hallucinations ask you to hurt yourself or hurt others.

Dissociative episodes

There are different types of dissociative episodes. The ones I will mention here, since they are the ones I have experienced, are:

• Amnesia
• Depersonalization
• Derealisation

Read more about dissociation

These do usually happen in stressful moments.

Amnesia happens when there are specific incidents you can't remember. (It's considered that if you haven't taken any drugs, because if not it may have been drug-induced)

My example was I was talking and then suddenly I felt like I got back into myself... and the people I was talking to were staring at me, looking worried, asking why I was saying those things. When I asked what we had talked about and for how long, I couldn't remember, for me only a couple of minutes had passed and it had actually been nearly half an hour. I got very freaked out.

Depersonalization happens when you feel like your body changes shape or it becomes unreal, or you have an out-of-body experience.

Derealisation is when the things around you seem unreal.

If you are having dissociative episodes, it may be best if you don't drink or take drugs as these could lead to even worse dissociative episodes. You may want to visit a therapist about it since it could be part of another disorder.

Depression Challenge | Day 2 - Things do get better

(oops I skipped a day... sorry)

Day 2

Today I will tell myself that things do get better.

I guess it's not the best time (or maybe actually this is the best time), since I have been kind of

relapsing these last few weeks... But if someone had told me in late January 2014 that things were going to get better I would have never believed them.

However, I have had other depressive episodes before, this is not the first time that this happens, even though it is the toughest one. And it has always got better. So that is proof that this time it will get better too.

The way I was feeling a month ago: seeing friends, writing, reading loads, having good moments... If someone had told me I was going to feel like that in late January I wouldn't have believed them, and yet I was. I was feeling so much better that I thought was even possible some months back. 

When we are deep down in the hole, it is hard to see the light. But it is there. It is always there waiting for us. Things do get better. We just need time, help and treatment.

It gets better. So just hold on. 

And think that if months ago we couldn't even imagine how well we were a few weeks back, right now we can't even imagine how much better it can get. And somehow that amazes me.

Being at school or university with depression and anxiety

I have mentioned a few times that I had to leave university because of depression last January. I will talk more about that in a later post. However in this post I wanted to talk about my experience in school and university with depression and anxiety and what helped me make things relatively better.

Hopefully those of you who are struggling with work, university or school can find this entry helpful.

I will not lie, this was not the first year that I stressed because of my degree. since a very young age my studies, my parents' expectations and my aim for perfection have made me stress more and more every year. I hadn't yet arrived to uni when exam periods made me so stressed that I would cry for days or even two weeks, claiming that nobody cared about me, they only cared about my grades. The sentence "I am only a number" has become a highly repeated one in my repertoire.

I was aware that there was a school psychologist and looking in retrospective, I think that I should have gone visit her. Talking to a teacher could also have been a good idea. Maybe not just any teacher, but someone that I trusted and who knew me well.

However when I arrived to university something changed. I must clarify that despite my good grades at school I did not feel ready to go to university, I didn't know what I wanted to do. However I succumbed to the pressure around me and I picked a degree. Although I think university is an incredible opportunity for those who can afford it, I do think that if you are unsure about what you want to do, you should feel free to take some time to consider it despite what your family might say at the beginning.

Thankfully I do not regret my choice and I turned out to like it. 

But the pressure at university became completely different. I only had 6 hours of class per week (people in the UK might know there are not many classes, unless studying engineering, I'm not sure of how it is in the US or other countries). So I had to organise my own timetable, my own study hours. I was also living away from home so there was no one supervising me. I had complete freedom yet I had responsibilities no one but me was checking that I was doing. It was a big change. And stress came in a whole other level. In my first year I had a big depressive episode, along with self-harm and my eating disorder reappeared, but I still didn't know all the resources that were available to me at university. 

I found out that there was an Eating Disorders Unit at the University Health Service. I only found out about I guess many universities, if not most will have something similar so try to get advice from a regular doctor or online.

I found out about the service because I went to the doctor because of constant headaches and dizziness. After asking me many questions, I admitted that I was not eating properly and that is when she mentioned the Eating Disorders Unit and she referred me to them.

At the time I did not see leaving university as an option because I thought it would be an enormous disappointment for my parents. I considered the option of suicide more viable than the option of quitting university. Quite extreme, huh?

I ended up seeing a psychiatrist when I returned home in Christmas and taking some medication and things got better.

In my third year, I had learnt to organise my time. And not only that. Thanks to my job as a residential mentor in 2nd and 3rd years I had learnt about quite a lot of the options and resources that the university offered to students with problems. I also knew that depression was not something uncommon at university.

This time my depressive episode had started over the summer. So when the university year began, my anxiety attacks didn't take too long to follow. The last year was not just a lot of uni work, I also had to think about my future and start applying to jobs. And besides my degree I had a job and I was part of the committee of a society. I guess it's not something unusual to do many things during the university time. We want to fill our CV (Curriculum Vitae), have a full experience, learn more things. However, if you are someone who stresses easily and you already suffer from anxiety and/or depression, maybe don't make things so hard for yourself. This doesn't mean that you can't study and work. It doesn't mean that you can't do what you want. It only means that you should try to know and learn to know your limits. In my second year I had no problem with my degree and my job. However, in third year with that same job, I had a bit more uni work and I added the committee. I honestly believe that things would have got out of control even if I didn't have my job or the committee, but those two things certainly did not help and only made things more stressful.

I went to the doctor and later the psychiatrist and got some sleeping pills (besides antidepressants). I found the sleeping pills very helpful especially at the beginning because I was suffering from a really bad case of insomnia. However, (if you choose this as one of your options) I cannot say this clear enough or too many times, do not self-medicate. Only take the amount that your doctor prescribed and the way that they prescribed it.

I talked to my personal tutor. I had only talked to him twice before. Once the first day of 1st year, once the first day of 2nd year. So it's not like I trusted him a lot, or knew him a lot. But the doctor at the University Health Service insisted that it was an essential step in order to facilitate things. And you know what? It was an enormous help! He was really understanding and really helpful. He asked me to email him every once in a while keeping him informed. And he told me that if I brought a medical certificate I could get extensions for all my essay deadlines. I had not expected this at all. And it did really help since I found impossible the simple task of concentrating. Even if I didn't need the extra time in the end (which I ended up needing), my stress and anxiety got relieved knowing that I had more time to do it.

I could have done this in first year, it would have probably helped me relieve some stress. But I didn't do it because I thought he would think I was lazy and I was embarrassed. But honestly, do not hesitate. If you are struggling and are having issues, go talk to your tutor. Even if you don't need more time. They might find some way to help you make things easier and better. And it is all confidential.

Talk to your mentors, to the tutors, look up the resources online. They are all there to help you. I know from experience that I was too scared to talk to my own mentor in first year. But when I became one I wanted to help people and our job was to advise them and keep the information confidential.

There are resources available to you.

You are not alone.

I hope this helped!