The 1st anniversary of my current crisis.

[HereSince1628]

By way of acknowledging what I've done to myself...

(I’m schizoid--averse to groups, without many friends--something the public sees as a loner. I male--do you see it coming? Loner male? I have borderline personality and like most borderlines, I find rejection devastating emotional--when I’m intensely upset, I dissociate from reality and feel like a ghost outside my body, often these periods result in amnesia. I have cPTSD and memories of how I got that way are abhorrent to me. The worst thing a person could do to me is to compare me to my father or brother, so much so that being called Mr.****** actually causes me to flip-out. When it’s bad I spend a lot of time in a state of mind where the routine unfairness of life leave me literally day-dreaming my way into a better existence. I'm 57, I've been this way, with no way to put names on any of it for as long as I can remember.)

A year ago, I got fired for complaining to a student who kept bugging me at home in the evening (which was a actually a challenge to my schizoid sensitivity to be alone and apart). Getting fired was emotionally tough. And I said so to a newly-former co-worker, a person I thought was something of a friend. In a reasonable world a person might expect some empathy, if not sympathy, from a co-worker. But it turns out that it was actually unreasonable to share my fears--particularly that my SO would throw me out for having lost another job (I am borderline, rejection fear is always near the surface of my existance, and even a person with wacky reasoning knows that sooner or later partners give up on losers). Three hours after I turned in my keys, the house I live in was surrounded by police and I was arrested as a danger to others.

I didn’t see that coming. I had spent a tearful afternoon making telephone calls to pscyh clinics hoping to find to someone who could do some crisis counseling on a sliding scale I knew this had knocked me for a loop and I was already feeling the emotional storm typical of me in these crises. So when the police rang the doorbell, I didn’t think I had anything to fear from them, indeed when they asked if I was planning on hurting anyone my jaw dropped and I immediately invited them in to take a look around the SO's house. More questioning ensued during which they finally noticed old scars on my arms (I’ve had this disorder for decades and my arms, legs and belly are tattooed from cutting). That was ultimately enough for them. I was cuffed and taken off to involuntary detention. Not because I was threatening to harm myself or anyone else, but really because of the self-induced fear of my former work place (a women’s college) had so escalated with each retelling through it's grapevine that by the time it reached the city police they had decided that for the good of the community they must act with an‘excess of caution.’

Well, that excess of caution turn out to be life shattering. Really, the mess I made of my life! A schizoid with all my avoidant tendencies thrown into a facility crowded with the sorts of truly suicidal, drug withdrawing, puking drunk, and belligerent people no gregarious person wants to have near them. I was herded and questioned by people who clearly had no interest in anything but saving the world from me. It wasn’t hard to immediately split those people into the most dangerous sort of “them” who haunt my borderline world. Of course, recognizing them as ‘THEM’ and interacting accordingly with ‘THEM’ did nothing to convince them that I was just a 56 year old who had BPD and was feeling down because I had lost my job. The charge of $1200 per night for the detention seemed like a steep fine for telling a student she didn't rate preferential treatment and she'd need to wait for her exam results. But that bill was actually small potatoes compared to the mess it's made of my life.

Getting arrested triggered the worst emotional storm I’ve ever had. They assumed I was worse than my own physically abusive family members. I ended up mentally and finally physically broken. Two months of stress and sleepless nights and my heart gave out.

It’s been a slow process of surgery and failed psychological and psychiatric treatments trying to get my body and my head back together. Unfortunately, the hunt for employment requires facing the reality that I’ll never again do the job that the career questionnaires and my education push me toward. And I’ve got to account for the lost months and hide my education Ph.D. etc. Worse, the push into that attempt several times has resulted in my relapsing into emotional turmoil that my my psychologist couldn't help with, so--she washed her hands of me, and then I went thru more self-inflicted injuries and more hospitalization. I can avoid the cop shows on television, but not the news and every time there is a story about an institutional shooting my humiliation with having been detained for fear of that floods over me.

A year is a long time to be broken, it's been 3 months since my last therapy and it seems it'll be 2 maybe 3 months before I come through the waiting list for more. In the meantime I’m hoping I don't lose the pieces that must get put back together.

[EFerrari]

1. I don't think you can really lose those pieces.

You may split them off for a while if they are too much of a burden. But if they become more useful than heavy, they are still there for you.

So, what is the deal with the therapy. Last I remember, you were referred out of the VA system and we talked a little about having someone from the VA system be a bridge for you.