Musing at NPD, BPD & Cluster B Experts in General

We are inundated with so many ‘experts’ in NPD & BPD right now, often usually mostly coming from ‘mind first’ schools of traditional psychiatry & psychology, mostly with extremely damning views & visions of most of the personality disorders & their likely trajectory though a persons lifetime.

I’m going to take a less usual stance to the mainstream opinion about the terminability of the Cluster B personality disorders of which I draw ideas from right across the wider smorgasbord of thought & indeed modalities of healing to draw a more positive picture for sufferers.

When you factor in the intrinsic reality that the 4 Cluster B personality disorders: ASPD, BPD, HPD & NPD, are basically groupings of behaviours & symptoms that have been partitioned fairly arbitrarily with the agreed general acceptance that for instance, BPD is up to 40% co-morbid, or shall we say intermingled symptom & behaviour wise with its cousin NPD. I’m not going to ferret around getting data on the commonality of the others in cluster b groupings as this is the particular data point that I’m going to centre my thoughts around because I have hands on personal experience of it.

What’s coming up for me is that the sheer wall of negativity that is facing pwNPD & BPD when dealing with this huge mass of material put out by ‘experts’ atm, yes it may be necessary to shock locked in harmful Narcs & Borderlines to seek some kind of change to their inner & outer machinations but but but it’s absolutely lending no hope, no escape to pwNPD even as a possibility & i, as a person with BPD actually in remission, stand vividly against this info onslaught that is occurring. 

It’s also occurring against pwBPD of course but because there are now, quite newly, significant numbers of remissions known to be occurring both with & without any kind of therapy, within this group, as I’ve said before, often times the map plus some genuine support has shown itself to be enough to halt & retreat the urge to destructive behaviour.

My point is, & it’s directed to all the highly qualified Drs that are seen as valid sources knowing it all on these subjects, these PDs, is that your uniform prediction of the high likely failure in Cluster B people in recovery is erroneously based on therapy models that place the separate mind & conscious reasoning as the access point to change, when, coming from a wholistic stance, i don’t find that much can change from interventions at that level alone. 

Also this negative position stands in stark contrast to the fact that simultaneously at this time the immensity of new psychological ground being won by millions of us through the ‘body first’ schools of healing; poly-vagal, somatic, EMDR, fascia release, low cortisol exercise, neurofeedback, nutraceuticals, Classical Chinese medicine & Ayurveda to highlight the most well know & well documented examples of body first healing modalities that have the capacity to assist in the transformation of the nervous system & by this the psychology of a person.

 

So, have hope Cluster B, have hope & yet take action. You’ve got a whole new sense of self to win, to build & I’m not saying it will be easy, I’m just saying that they, the so called experts, literally are just talking heads with their archaic talk therapy that EMDR alone, with or without a therapist has the capacity to undercut time required to experience positive change by 10x. 

10 times as fast = one session of EMDR with its direct line to the nervous system is worth 10 expensive sessions talking round & round your monkey mind, slipping & sliding around in the lonesome yet genuinely endless mental realms & often completely detached from the very body-mind you were born with, that is the real you, those that were detached from each other literally by trauma, not by thought, it was pre-thought every time with all Cluster B so we must absolutely endeavour to treat the trauma first.

I’m going to reproduce my last blog piece from my old blogger on here because while it was perfect as the last words on sonjaconscious.blogspot.com it explains very simply the lightness of true self hood & how attainable that is, with a willingness to be embodied & to just become aware of when you are not. It’s that simple. It need’s resolve, it needs deep genuine desire that you might have to conjure with your imagination at first - Cluster B are imaginative adepts - but the pay offs are immense.

We are too often after a rather convoluted sense of ourselves in order to exist in the world when it’s really not necessary. We were gestated with & then born with fabulous interactive multi system sensitivity & redoubtable self healing capacity & when allowed to re-gestate sufficiently in a conducive enough external environment, with the right inputs, i believe everything is healable at least until the soul/higher self is done with this lifetime.

We all need regular access to positive role models & healthy elders & we need reliable psychological supporters of this I am convinced. And we all need to be held & touched by someone who feels safe enough if that’s possible —— sans that pets count, pets completely count I can totally testify for pets. ✋👊✊

On Colour

 Again transposed from Instagram because it’s really about mental health, I’ve painted a rather exotic picture about what was really an incredibly desperate & desolate period of my life with transient Anorexia - from about 1998/9 until 2008/9 due to the impossibility of being well with pretty constant undx bipolar episodes & now what I know was reactive BPD basically permanently - I had this knowledge, this knowing that I was being incredibly resilient but also was very disassociative a lot of the time & only partly in reality, which I wasn’t wholly aware of.

 My Bipolar episodes, both poles of which leave brain damage, had been relentless & extreme by this time. I would have 9 month untreated depressions where I could barely leave the house & short manic bursts which I suppressed with vast amounts of that popular Central Nervous System depressant, Alcohol. There was less & less periods of ‘normal’ functioning in between & I think I developed an eating disorder out of absolute disgust & disillusionment at my fate as my life wasted away despite quite obviously being somewhat intelligent, creative & kind. Also the financial struggle of this period was relentless.

Again being missed dx every time I visited a GP which was every other year as I remember it, not every year as it was completely demoralising being told there was nothing wrong with me by complete idiots. I finally got a sick note towards the end of this time around 2008 which actually said Anorexia, I had finally manifested something they would give me some sickness benefits for but no no no mental health diagnoses whatsoever until 2016. The extra money enabled me to eat properly tbh.

Here’s the piece from Instagram 

I get an enormous amount of pleasure playing with colour about my person - I always have - I will never forget an incident one summer, I think 2004 - so i was 37 - I was struggling with eating disorder stuff, I basically just drank real coffee, drank lots of water & smoked a lot of roll-ups for a few yrs there - & lived on sunshine, sunbathed naked at home & if I could get to the beach I’d do it there.

Anyway, I was very unwell, nervous system/mentally & id gone to the beach on my own knowing it’d be quiet, put on a bikini & 2 brightly coloured pieces of fabric that I wore all the time that summer - people said I used to dressed as if I was at a festival all the time, that’s fairly accurate - anyway I was floating down the beach completely deranged but so colourful like a burst busted dayglo painting & this elderly couple as I approached asked to take my photo because he said, I looked like the cover of a magazine 💪😘😂 

Sadly, that’s what you get for anorexia unfortunately- more positive attention instead of psychological support - anyway it was rather lovely, out in the actual heat of summer Uk despite the crazyheat of the madness in my head.

We are not alone

 Not in the least.

As many as (quick facts) 46% of us will meet the criteria for a diagnosable mental health condition at some point in our lives, so nearly half of us in the biggest picture overview of global mental health & yet out of those of us with longer lasting or lifelong Severe Mental Health diagnoses 88% say that discrimination against mental illness is widespread.

Us with the longer lasting possibly lifelong diagnoses account for 10.7% of the global population with a 11.9% female & 9.3% male split.

Approximately 10% population has ADHD, 2-3% has Autism.

Between 40-70% of Autists have ADHD & 20-50% of pwADHD have Autism.

Checking in more deeply with the Neurodiverse world of ADHD & Autism the discussion around including the severe mental illnesses cropped up & i admit I fall in the separatist category for the simple reason that one group is aiming to be rid of their symptoms as soon as possible & the other is wanting to find ways to live with & celebrate their traits rather than hide them. I saw the comment that lumping them all in together does both camps a disservice & im with that for the time being. I may be new to the ND conversation but I’m highly knowledgeable on severe mental health conditions & nobody wants to keep them, not ever.

In terms of overlap of the 2 camps I was disappointed that I could not find many statistics except 40% of Autists have severe enough anxiety to call it an additional disorder. I was left wondering if those stats are evasive due to the confusion of so many ND folk having been wrongly diagnosed in the first place only to eventually find that they had ADHD or Autism, both or with one of the others (I know Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Dyscalculia & Tourette’s also under the ND umbrella) 

I’ve just seen a discussion of OCD being ND but admitting that it’s a mental illness 🤷‍♀️ I still think my criteria is superior - if you want to get rid of it & it’s essentially rooted in healable trauma it’s mental illness & if you want to learn to live with it & expand on its gifts it’s ND.

I know, i know my own personal theory that intrauterine stress/trauma instigates genetic ND adaptation destroys the whole conversation 😂 so if that was absolutely proven to be correct then we are right back with a huge ND umbrella but with healing trauma a top aim for all, which is as it should be.

Beware pwBipolar who have swallowed the hyperbole that the High can be tamed into creativity imao this is dangerous nonsense for the simple fact that both extremes leave you with brain damage, the more extreme the episode the worse the brain damage & the longer time it takes to recover & talking from my own experience, it takes years!

BPD Note

 I saw my CMHT support worker on Friday & described my ‘Was I Misdiagnosed’ post a bit to her & she pointed out that my getting my BPD in remission method, that of eschewing social interaction almost without exception for best part of a decade was a rather extreme measure that many, possibly most with BPD would not easily find benefit from. The fact it worked for me, to the degree that it did, really just reflects my slightly introverted & Astrologically 12th house Sun type mediative loner predisposition. But sadly it also reflects the fact that I was extremely traumatised for decades by my missed diagnoses, being misunderstood & unable to make anything work in the real world.

The fact is that not asking for help, not being able or willing to when you need it, when you know damn well that you need help is a well know trauma response in cPTSD & PTSD & common or garden trauma that is the under pinning of almost all mental health/nervous system issues bar only the neuro-developmental, which obv can be acerbated by a burden of unhealed trauma. 

Furthermore it’s still well within the bounds of possibility that intrauterine stress/trauma is the trigger for neuro-developmental adaptations anyway 🤷‍♀️ in which case it’s ***all*** about stress/trauma just impacting at different ages & times of our development/lives - see: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.2003406 also https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-020-00876-5

The fact that I did something stupidly hard for a pwBPD & feel like I saw something that wouldn’t necessarily have been seen/experienced had I not gone the way I did is misleading. There will be many ways to manage the journey of remission of BPD & having support would have definitely made my journey easier & faster & less painful I have no doubt.

What I question though is that pwBPD kind of know that their judgement is really off when it comes to choosing companions/being adopted by others/picked up by abusive people so my choice, given the available options without any diagnoses was hugely sane, logical & kind of the easier option.

When you take that exact propensity to attract & foment interpersonal danger & mayhem & add the inevitably poor executive function, which is literally nobodies fault, is literally the brain structures responding to the relentless perceived inner crisis of unhealed trauma, then without adding in any decent healthy supportive input this dynamic explains exactly why BPD ends up being such a tragic disaster so much of the time. 

Public health money spent supporting pwBPD should be counted as very well spent when you look at the rates of recovery post dx, after some degree of education, self management skills learning & some actual one to one professional support. We are a group that responds so well that 80% of us are in remission 8 years of diagnosis (nly 40% after 2 years dx) seemingly spontaneously - I think the map of diagnosis plus the concerned support & self protectiveness a dx comes with is the healing spark the pwBPD need, it certainly sounds like it.

This is a nice article discussing some of what I’ve been saying here

https://www.verywellmind.com/is-there-a-cure-for-borderline-personality-disorder-425468

Have I been misdiagnosed at any point?

 Well the short answer to this is ‘no’ but because there’s so much conjecture on this topic in the Neurodivergent Community I’m going to unravel my own 40 year saga/story/experience a bit & explain why I think not. I fully get that misdiagnosis is really common for folk with ADHD & Autism & I even found a meme on Twitter expressing how similar to Bipolar plus BPD undiagnosed ADHD Autists can be but still I refute the allegation in my own case.

It almost goes without saying that I was repeatedly, extensively & you could almost describe it as determinedly the subject of completely missed diagnoses from the first time I every made it to a GP at 24 explaining that I was awake all night, night after night with intense unbrookable suicidal ideation & then so heavily asleep once there that a herd of trampolining wilderbeast would have failed to stir me for most of the next day. This was apparently not a concern as it was certainly due to my ‘not having a job’ according to most GPs despite the fact that often I had been putting in 60 plus hours a week into (usually somewhat improbable) self employment ideas that I had been having ‘sooooo many’ of just before the low mood set in….. 🙄🤷‍♀️ 

I want to take care here because I get resentful looking back at all the times GPs patronised my depressions as a young single mother as being negligible & exaggerated & probably hysterical in some way & well, if I wasn’t interested in SSRIs with their potential side affect of worsened suicidal ideation &/or violence towards others & thereby possible death to self or others then it could not be that serious now could it.

What they didn’t understand is that even then, pre-internet, I knew where the library was & was insistently informing myself. I also certainly mentioned the word Bipolar at 24 to the GP because I’d been saying it since 19 to my own friends having read about it. I wondered at my own tenacity & wilfulness as I read about Spike Milligan unable to leave the house, sedating himself to withstand ‘the absolute horrors’ being his phrase for a Bipolar 1 depression.

The problems with psychiatric medicine as an entire field built largely on conjecture & meds for Bipolar being so disabling long term led me to research entirely away from the mainstream thought bubble. It was 1991 & I had rejected most ‘normal’ mainstream media already as it seemed to affect me really negatively & still does, this made me more capable of dodging the profit friendly push to medicate that was becoming ubiquitous.

I’m really proud to have been MSM intolerant for 40 years, I was like a canary in the coalmine of the fully existent reality of soft brainwashing of the population by framing & omission, gaslighting & straight faced lies that is becoming widely recognised & understood right now.

I don’t need to prove to anyone that I’ve had classic Bipolar type 1 since around age 18, I know it for myself, symptomologically, I have detailed recollection of crashes from highs & depressions that were self propelled, ever getting longer as the years progressed, the hardest thing to remember is the highs because I was invariably, as time went on getting drunk/binge drinking to somewhat control that highly stressful, 99% unconscious, deeply irresponsible, immensely painful state leading inexorably to the crash & the brain damage & the abject confusion, anxiety & low mood that would follow.

A mid piece addendum :- I discovered the work of Dr Amen fairly recently & he introduced to me the idea that General Anaesthetic can cause brain injury in susceptible nervous systems. I had 2 miscarriages followed by questionably necessary D&C operations with General Anaesthetic at 18 & 19 & I had my first, what I now recognise as crash from high just after that, it completely fits with Dr Amens brain damage/nervous system damage observations. A double physical trauma triggering the onset of Bipolar I believe. There was an emotional component of course but it was mild compared to the physical insult of the anaesthetic. 

Then you plus BPD.

Ffs.

What was I thinking when I signed up for all this in this lifetime? Yes, let me dig my way out of a massive multi level mental illness sandwich, of which I cannot see the component parts for a very looong time, on my own, oh let me, I pleaded with my own actual self. I genuinely do think that’s what we are like between lives as souls, so concrete in our inhabiting the heart of the collective mind/god/all that is that no game of jeopardy is too great, no exploration of stones unturned too precarious for those so belonging to our ultimate indestructible indivisible ultra Self.

So plus BPD. I remember the childhood Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria of undx auDHD transmuting into BPD at age 14/15, I remember the precise incident, it was like my emotional body catching fire because the irritation of RSD in that particular situation made me sooooo very very angry, I felt so out of control that something, some part of my subtle anatomy for want of a better, transmuted into a flammable gas tank with a serious leak & the trigger was the flame. A flammable gas tank that was to become a huge part of my relationships & even friendships & a backdrop to much social interaction - how not to burst into flames at minutia became a whole way of life trying to work around this freaking dangerous, apparently permanent unstable internal structure. BPD is immensely painful & is accompanied by a sense of being lost & baffled…. add that to not being able to follow a train of thought & forgetting what you are doing constantly.

I gave up relationships at 43 due to increasingly becoming overwhelmed by BPD symptoms & then close friendships also a couple of years later that had become surrogates of that. I was able to wade thru that chin deep pool of early trauma & recover much of that distorted energy by the stealth of growing self reliance & self awareness. I really like the phrase I used before about this; I had a policy of extreme non action socially & thereby sexually for many many years whilst I worked on that stuff, pre dx! Once I got the map, the dx it was so much easier, the disassociation eased up gradually when I read about what it was & that it’s a symptom of trauma especially. I have long worked with material designed to help PTSD, over 20 years looking at it from that angle yet for me the diagnosis as a map has been the most helpful, equally this with auDHD.

I’m disappointed to not just have one or the other out of ADHD or Autism, to miss out on the best bits of each as they are cancelled out by traits of the other is a description that I feel I can concur with at the moment. I can confidently self assess when I have Bipolar+BPD under decent control & when they aren’t & that has been what has enabled me to look at these other traits; the hyper ridgid adherence to routine, social difficulties & differences, the inability to focus most of the time unless I’m in hyperfocus, like right now which is great though the other state is deeply deeply frustrating, it must take me 10 times as long as it should to do most things yet I can play Beethoven on piano for hours & hours & not have a clue how long I’ve sat there.

How I perceive my full line up is kind of visual/feely: Bipolar 1 is like long very loud mood shifts that you can sense coming in & you have time to take various evasive action (see Balancing Brain Chemistry Naturally in the sidebar for more on this) BPD is caused by external things, has specific triggers & the core of it only becomes visible/feelable when you remove those triggers for long enough to feel the generalised dysphoric core which you can then dismantle (it’s trauma, so you feel it/be with it as kindly as possible to heal it - EMDR is absolutely invaluable for BPD)

That leaves my actual self, my well-being self & it’s auDHD facets which, once trauma is minimised as I’ve had to do just to get to feel this true self underneath the emotional & nervous system dysfunction, leaves me with the mental ‘differences’ & the social ‘differences’ so yes maybe there’s some related emotional differences as well - and sure they are more deeply, neuro-developmentally inscribed attributes, like they were the uncomfortable energetic fluctuations that attracted more & more trauma to gather around like scar tissue to protect the innate vulnerability, yet without the trauma they are much more benign & livewithable, I think so anyway. 

Yes it’s hard having mental, emotional, learning & social interaction differences in a society that does not wish to cater for differences, does not want to spare the attention, ironically, or the resources to not traumatise people with different, more sensitive nervous systems & brains but it’s definitely doable. If we treat trauma as the cross society common thread that most needs mending, for all of us from the most neuro-normal to the most neuro-diverse, as Gabor Mate would have it, if we strive to make a trauma aware society we may just be able to survive the myriad challenges that face us as a species.