What BPD feels like...

Sorry I've not been around as much as usual.  I had a bit of a hiccup and couldn't to manage to write.  However, someone gave me this link which, if tending towards being cheesy is nevertheless a helpful insight.  I related to most of it anyway! Please watch it.

What BPD feels like

A Safe Place

As part of the DBT I am being encouraged to develop a personal safety plan.  This a list of strategies, things and people that are tried and tested sources of relief if I’m very distressed and likely to self-harm.  It sounds like it should be something useful to do, but I don’t like it.

It’s very existence makes me feel more of a loser than I already am.  I hate it.  I can’t imagine I will ever use it, and yet I have dutifully started to fill it in.  One of the group facilitators told us that we should stick it in a prominent place like the fridge or cupboard with the tea and coffee.  I think I managed to maintain an impassive expression at that suggestion while inside I was yelling “No Way” and imagining the sort of place I wanted to “stick it” instead!  Imagine the shame I would feel having such a window to my weaknesses and failings on public display.  What sort of questions might Jenny ask when she saw it?  No, the safety plan is not for me.

However, I am trying to fill it in.  The first part is to write down my safe place.  An imaginary or real place where I am totally and utterly, 100% safe.  This was my first point of failure!  I cannot think of or imagine a place where 100%, total safety is possible (excluding the grave that is).

In the end I remembered a picture I had drawn for something else on the theme of hope.  I can’t put it here as it is a self-portrait, but it shows me resting in a cloud of things that engender hope, like love and faith.  At the same time there are bricks of all the bad stuff such as abuse, anger and hate hurtling down towards me on the cloud.  The point being, that whatever comes my way, hope remains even if I can’t see or feel it,  and that is as safe as it gets in this life.

I showed this to Joy when she asked if I’d started my safety plan.  She basically said I had to change that picture because it wasn’t safe enough.  I told her I don’t believe a safer place exists.  We discussed it for a while before she closed the conversation with,

“We’ll bang out heads together on that one another time!”  

 What fun!  I shall look forward to that.  In the meantime I have deleted the picture from the document, and filed the picture less safety plan in the back of my DBT folder where as far as I’m concerned, it can stay..