Neurodivergencies

The way it gets used, at its barest bones, is way too close to just being clinical gaslighting.

You have problems? Your problems are actually not the problem, the way you think is. Translated: You can't trust your own perceptions and your distress is an overreaction.

It also just functions on the belief that you can out-think pretty much any problem. And that your problems are stemming from your perceptions and reactions rather than any external force that may be out of your control.

And I hate that! A lot! Many problems are fundamentally not out-thinkable. CBT fails to take into account the gravity of things like severe, repeated, and ongoing trauma, and current factors impacting people's lives.

Are there situations where CBT actually has a place in treatment? Yeah! Sure! But it just absolutely doesn't fucking work well for a lot of people with trauma or severe mental illness, yet therapists keep trying to use it that way.

I think most folks with substantial trauma can still benefit from learning some of the cognitive skills that CBT offers (who with anxiety doesn’t fall into the mind reading trap sometimes?). And so there can still be some benefit from it.

But the problem is when therapists keep pushing this without actually understanding the circumstances of a client’s life, and when clients don’t realize they’re allowed to disagree with their therapist, and they’re allowed to push back if they don’t believe the therapist is getting it.

It does not always happen, but i think the persistence of common scenarios where clinicians decide to take the definition of ‘normal’ and ‘safe’ away from the patient and give them a different, more official definition, while telling them what their boundaries should be and framing their discomfort as something to be overcome, are the most dangerous scenarios for the use of cbt and i think cbt and other things like dbt would be a lot less harmful if this power dynamic did not sometimes accompany its use.

but one of the things my experience with cbt tried to instill in me was distraction. distracting myself from what distressed me. the most common way is the five senses method. which is extremely harmful for me for Sensory Reasons but that isn’t the point.

but something abt autism is that it makes it hard to identify emotions. so what i took from this advice wasn’t “distract yourself from things you can’t change and put your energy towards something positive” but literally just. repressing all my emotions.

There is no victory in skipping dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, or morning coffee, or dessert.

There is no victory in refusing heaters and air conditioners and fans and heated blankets.

There is no victory in denying yourself sleep, or showers, or movement, or water, or a comfortable bed, or taking the elevator vs. the stairs.

There is no victory in refusing pain meds and heating pads and ice packs and medical help.

There is no victory in punishing yourself needlessly, in telling yourself that this pain you feel is because you are bad to the core and deserve it.

There is no victory in choking back your laughter and your tears, to keep an imagined equilibrium of safety that is really just a dry, cracked, empty, endless emotional desert.

You are here. You are in this body, and this body is yours. You deserve good things. You are alive, and that is messy and loud, and messy and loud are okay.

Currently, the title we are planning to use is: “It’s Not All In Your Head: The Impact of Trauma on the Body and Mind”.

This book will be focusing on reading academic articles, books and journals to put the information into more accessible terms. A lot of these articles are hard to understand and may be overwhelming.

Our most surprising finding [of MRI scanning the brains of people with PTSD] was a white spot in the left frontal lobe of the cortex, in a region called Broca’s area. In this case the change in colour meant that there was a significant decrease in that part of the brain. Broca’s area is one of the speech centres of the brain, which is often affected in stroke patients when the blood supply to that region is cut off. Without a functioning Broca’s area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words. Our scans showed that Broca’s area went offline whenever a flashback was triggered. In other words, we had visual proof that the effects of trauma are not necessarily different from – and can overlap with – the effects of physical lesions like strokes.

All trauma is preverbal. Shakespeare captures this state of speechless terror in Macbeth, after the murdered king’s body is discovered: ‘Oh horror! Horror! Horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive or name thee! Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!’ Under extreme conditions people may scream obscenities, call for their mothers, howl in terror, or simply shut down. Victims of assaults and accidents sit mute and frozen in emergency rooms; traumatised children ‘lose their tongues’ and refuse to speak. Photographs of combat soldiers show hollow-eyed men staring mutely into a void.

Even years later traumatised people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperience terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past.

This doesn’t mean that people can’t talk about a tragedy that has befallen then. Sooner or later most survivors…come up with what many of them call their ‘cover story’ that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behaviour for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organise one’s traumatic experiences into a coherent account – a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

ANP stands for “apparently normal part.” These are host parts, academic parts, parts that look after and take care of others, and so on. They handle daily life. They usually don’t remember the trauma and are highly avoidant of it. They may have a limited emotional range. Their job is to be as high functioning and “normal” as possible.

EP stands for “emotional part.” These are the memory holders, protectors, persecutors, and highly reactionary parts. They handle trauma and other strong emotional situations. They may be caught in flashbacks or have trouble adjusting to daily life. They may be highly emotional or have one or two emotions in particular that they seem unable to move beyond. Their job is to take what the ANP can’t.

Individuals with PTSD have primary structural dissociation of the self. They have one ANP, their self, and one EP, the dissociated trauma materials. For them, EP manifest mostly as flashbacks, nightmares, or strong emotional reactions.

Individuals with C-PTSD, BPD, and OSDD-1 have secondary structural dissociation of the self. They have one ANP and multiple EP. For individuals with C-PTSD and BPD, their ANP is their main self, and different EP handle different aspects of trauma, different attachment needs, or different strong emotions. For them, EP can manifest as flashbacks, nightmares, strong emotional reactions, the need to avoid attachment, the need to attach, or feeling very young and vulnerable.

OSDD-1 is where the EP start looking a little more distinct. In OSDD-1, the EP can present as actual alters. They might have their own names, ages, preferences, and skills. Some individuals with OSDD-1 also have multiple ANP-like parts.

DID is where the most distinction between parts is seen. Individuals with DID have tertiary structural dissociation of the self, and they have both multiple EP and (usually) multiple ANP. They may have a main ANP, but they have other parts that help with daily life as well, and at least some of their parts are highly distinct. Alters with their own names, ages, genders, sexualities, preferences, skills, and even neurophysiological reactions are common. Individuals with DID also have more simple EP that are just collections of traumatic materials, but their alters go beyond this. Some alters may have traits of both ANP and EP.

I have more detailed information about ANP and EP here.

I hope that this helps,

1. Make sure you go outside, or change your environment at least once a day.

2. Text, snapchat and message your friends. Make sure you don’t isolate yourself.

3. Budget for small treats and indulgences.

4. Decide to say “no” to people-pleasing tendencies. Be secure in who you are and in what you want for “you”.

5. Invest in hobbies which your genuinely enjoy, and which tend to leave you feeling good about yourself.

6. Have a favourite playlist which you know will lift your mood.

7. Decorate your space or room in a way that reflects you.

8. Limit how much time you spend with those who drain your energy.

9. Treat yourself the way you’d treat a special person, or good friend.

 Even though I have a blog about BPD, a lot of people have a lot of doubts about it (about the symptoms, terms, etc). So here is a post about BPD and, please, if you are neurotypical don’t comment “wow I have it” just because you read my post.

Borderline Personality Disorder is diagnosed when there is a persistent pattern of unstable interpersonal relationships, mood and self-image, as well as distinct impulsive behaviour, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts. These difficulties are indicated by five (or more) of the following:

frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.

a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterised by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.

identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.

impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g. spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). This does not include suicidal or self-harming behaviour.

recurrent suicidal behaviour, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behaviour.

affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood - intense feelings that can last from a few hours to a few days.

chronic feelings of emptiness.

inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger.

transient, stress-related paranoid ideas or severe dissociative symptoms.

What is FP? 

FP means, for someone who has BPD, favorite person. It is a term that refers to the person you most idealize, usually it is someone you have romantic feelings for, but it can be a friend, fictional character, someone in your family, etc. Not everyone who has BPD has a FP, but it is something common. Having a FP is not something beautiful and shouldn’t be romantized, your mood starts depending on that person, on the way they talk to you, you have a lot of mental breakdowns when they’re gone and it’s something that puts you in risk, because you’re willing to do basically anything for that person.

What is “split”?

Splitting is the action of feeling extremely angry at someone who you usually idealize, for example, your fp (but it doesn’t have to be necessarily your fp). Someone who suffers from BPD usually has black and white thinking or feeling, loving or hating someone, doing something all the time or not at all, basically no harlf term. When someone splits, it means that they were from a extreme to another about their feelings to someone. It can happen for big and important reasons, when someone actually does a serious mistake or it can happen when someone does a “small” mistake and we react extremely, due to BPD hypersensitivity.

What is dissociation?

That’s what Wikipedia says: “In psychology, dissociation is any of a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experience. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality, rather than a loss of reality as in psychosis.”. Dissociation is the match of despersonalization (“Depersonalization can consist of a detachment within the self regarding one’s mind or body, or being a detached observer of oneself. Subjects feel they have changed and that the world has become vague, dreamlike, less real, or lacking in significance. It can be a disturbing experience. Chronic depersonalization refers to depersonalization-derealization disorder, which is classified by the DSM-5 as a dissociative disorder.”) and derealization (“Derealization is an alteration in the perception or experience of the external world so that it seems unreal. Other symptoms include feeling as though one’s environment is lacking in spontaneity, emotional colouring, and depth. It is a dissociative symptom of many conditions.”). Basically, it is feeling like YOU are not real + the WORLD is not real. Okay, I’m not sure about what I’m going to say now, please someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that there a lot of dissociative disorders, but in BPD people usually suffer just from dissociative symptoms.

Self-Harm?

Self-harm is when you intentionally hurt yourself. Okay, but why? Some people self-harm to relief the pain, a lot of people with BPD also relate they self-harm to feel real during dissociative episodes or to feel something when the emptiness sensations are acting out. For some people, self-harm is when you hurt your body tissue, for example, cutting or scratching yourself, but, personally, in my opinion, thre are different ways or expressing self-harm before it becomes something extreme, for example, starving yourself, triggering yourself, doing something you don’t want to just because you “deserve it”, etc.

“People with BPD are always abusive.”

That’s absolutely not true. A lot of websites make articles about BPD and, because of a lack of information, they mention we are abusive and things like that. The truth is that no one is automatically abusive JUST because their mental illnesses. Abuse is something related to someone’s behavior, regardless if they’re mentally ill or not. “Okay, so why a lot of people say BPD makes someone abusive?” Maybe it’s because PDs are not a very discussed topic and people are always afraid of the unkown, so it’s better if they just judge us. Also, maybe because people with BPD are often seen as “attention seekers”, which is not something bad, in my opinion, because everyone should receive enough attention, since they’re not using bad mechanisms to get it.

About some other symptoms

Mood swings happen when someone goes to an emotion to another. For someone who has BPD, it happens a lot of times during the day. For example, if you got a friend and they have BPD they can talk about suicide and how hopeless they feel and a few hours or minutes later they can talk about future plans and how excited they are about things. It impacts our affective instability too, so sometimes we get lost thinking if we like someone or not. We can easily “get tired” of someone and then becoming totally dependent on them after some time. 

Our instability also impacts our sense of self, sometimes it makes us question even if we are real (going back to the dissociation aspect). That’s why is so hard for us to do things like choosing a career, because today I can feel like becoming an actress and then tomorrow I want to be a doctor. Our decisions and moods are constantly changing.

Our fear of abandonment controls our lives, we can do things that we don’t even want to just to have someone by our sides. Also, some people with BPD can get too clingy or too distant to someone they love, clingy to avoid the abandonment and distant because of a “leave them before they leave me” thought. That’s why our relationships are very unstable.

Compulsion and impulsivity is a form of expressing our confused feelings, like if we need something to rely on. We can drink too much, eat too much, waste too much money, etc. It can happens for a lot of reasons, for example, to fill the feelings of emptiness or to avoid a breakdown, specially when someone leaves.

Quiet and explosive borderlines

Explosive borderline is someone who is the “classical” borderline. They will act out, they may yell at people, they may get involved in fights and etc. Someone who is a quiet borderline will act in, holding their pain agaisnt themselves, for example, with the self-harm. They may not usually yell at people or get involved in fights, but, instead, they will do terrible things with themselves. There is not a “worse or better type of borderline”, they’re just different types. We all suffer a lot.