4th in a 4-part series for Mental Health and Borderline Personality Disorder Months: click links to read part one, part two and part three.
I turned 55 this week and gave some thought to healing, moving on, letting go of negative elements of my life that might bring on BPD symptoms. The thing about a Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) diagnosis is there really isn’t a cure, but it’s critical for us as those dealing with its effects to manage our own mental health to the best of our ability.
One night this week I woke up in the middle of the night and heard what seemed like a voice in my head with a message. I’m not religious, but can be spiritual and feel a sense of connection to ancestors and deceased loved ones and that’s where the message felt like it was coming from. It was simply these words: “The abandonment is the gift.”
It really had me thinking. I spent a lot of time meditating until it began to make sense. Fear of abandonment is a leading symptom of BPD. But why would I be sad, sorry, hurt or upset about people who make a choice to walk out of my life, when the feelings I experienced in those relationships involved stress, exhaustion, disappointment, anxiety, hurt, sadness and fear?
Why would I upset myself over toxic people, often narcissists or energy vampires, essentially broken people, just because I have some unrelenting sense of loyalty? Possibly I’d overgive to broken people as a way of trying to heal some broken part of myself. Not terrible, but co-dependency is a lame job I didn’t know I had. I’m quitting, along with the also-unpaid “savior complex.”
We learn from a young age that letting go is giving up, and to fight. But the truth is that empowerment can sometimes lie in detachment. I’ve often admired others’ ability to do this. It’s simply time, in my double-nickels senior citizen-pancake-discount era, to learn it myself instead
of being ruled by my emotions; not easy in a world where they’ve dominated me for so long. Emotionally: chemotherapy is bad, but cancer is worse.
Attachment is often rooted in fear, and fear is exhausting. We can’t control others, only ourselves and our own reactions, the more we can focus on this truth, the better. In BPD there is a “favorite person” concept but we're really the only ones who can serve in this role, while external people who provide any act of kindness should be treated with gratitude. If we have a handful of people in our lives who render random acts of kindness, we’re blessed.
How people treat you is a reflection of how they treat themselves. In relationships where people “abandoned me, ” I can walk away knowing I gave it all. I wasn’t in it to receive anything back, it isn’t my fault if others aren’t capable of returning love, and I don’t think hurting me was necessarily intentional. It doesn’t make it hurt less, but spending energy on being angry won’t fix anything. In order to heal, moving on is the only option. As a reiki master I can say that holding onto anger and negativity in life creates physical and mental pain and anguish in the body, and I have no interest in giving that amount of energy or power to any other human.
Letting go isn’t giving up, it’s making a choice to energetically shift love in order to water gardens that will actually grow: people, places, things that you want to bloom.
