Looking Back to Claim Hope, the BPD diagnosis

Thirty two years ago, I left home at age 18. I was able to persevere, and not run away, because that "small still voice" inside of me at 15, told me that most of the craziness would be resolved if I bade my time, loved myself and my brother (9 years younger than I), spoke the truth and left as soon as I was legally able. Easier said, than done for sure!

Once I left, I saw our common home just three times; two of those times was after they moved. The times I have stayed overnight with my family in their current home can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In the process of doing my own healing, I have come to many places of peace with my mom over the past years. And it probably was because of my own hard work. My attachment to "having" parents, probably had me crediting my mom with making progress too. My mom is 75 now and my dad is 83.

Sometime this past fall, I came to realize I will not have the closure on my parent's lives, that I had always hoped for. You know, having them live in my home instead of in residential care; taking care of them as they decline. All that would be very unrealistic and even harmful to my husband and son, resilient as they are.

Today, I tell myself it must be a blessing that my parents live all the way across the continent from me here in the U.S.

If I am really really honest with myself, one of the main reasons I stay in contact is that I STILL want a relationship with my dad! I think I survived my childhood because of his wisdom. On the other hand, I can easily have anger at him for not making an effort to call me himself, be available to talk... etc. He never answers the phone since he retired some 17 years ago. My mom is the one who makes all the calls to me, too. If I allowed it, she would make my talking to him conditional on my "good behavior" in how I interact with her. Well, I pretty much say what I damn well please and hang up as soon as I catch a whiff of her trying to treat me like a garbage can. Net result, I almost never get to talk to my dad.

It took a lot: my brother's near crisis last fall ( financially) for me to confront that my mom would never be normal. After "witnessing" my mother's craziness with my brother through speakerphone (thanks to a coincidence and my brother's quick thinking) I was able for the first time to LISTEN to my mom do to SOMEONE else, what she has always tried to do to me over the years. I haven' t let her get away with it, and I realize now the freedom of having no financial ties to her.

(As I told my mom as all this crap was going down, "Mom, I thank God for all the money you never gave me!" For, unlike my brother, I have not received significant money from my parents in 32 years, except for the occasional generous gifts they have given their grandson (my only) this past nine years. I feel absolutely no obligations for those gifts, they are an opportunity for my son to expres gratitude and to write wonderful thank you notes.)

Because I am diagnosis-aversive, I do not like putting people in boxes. At all. So, over the years I have seen this diagnosis called borderline personality disorder. I had no interest in learning anything about it. Oh, I had one almost friend who told me she had it. Did I ask her ANY questions about it? NOoooooo. (Well, largely it was because I had my own issues to focus on, myself, in recovery. I have been given a number of diagnoses myself, because of the unfortunate way in which I respond to external--and internal-- stress. Thankfully, the 12-step approach, of healing in community, has helped me re-program myself for better self-nurturing.)

I also do not believe in Evil, I won't give it power in my life! I believe in program tenets: that there are choice always. But after this awful saga my brother went through over THREE months.... I was ready to admit my mom IS forever EVIL (and she can't make good choices when challenged). I was ready to surrender control from a whole new vantage point. Some of us get very playful in "program"; not only does admitting that we are powerless over our emotions (POME) help, but for me personally, I like this acronym: POOP. I am also healthier when I admit I am POOPed. Powerless over other people. After all, three thousand miles of distance makes me especially powerless....

But before the humor, I was reeling from the Evil. And ready at last to tell my therapist I was giving up on my mom and dad. Screw them both. That was the morning the book on BPD, "Stop Walking on Eggshells", written for the person in relationship with BPD, leaped off the shelf at me while I was waiting in my therapist's office.

Looking quickly at the checklist back cover, I saw my mom through the experience my brother had shared with me. This was the mom I THOUGHT I had left behind at `18, the mom I thought I was "transforming" through my good hard work, NOT. BPD is about an order of magnitude MORE power-zapping than dealing with narcissism.

Oh, the book had been there before, but not for me. In my mind, it was bad enough that my mom was narcissistic. That alone gave me family of origin (FOO) homework for the rest of my natural life. Up til that morning, I had refused to do any more homework.

I took Stop Walking on Eggshells (SWOE) home with me, and found myself completely at home and validated by everything that had happened in the past 32 years. A lot of what was in the book, I had learned by trial and error already!

Without the book, I doubt I would have identified how the worst of my mom's BPD had become reinvigorated by the fact that her son needed something from her. (For my mom, folks really needing her actually brings out her worst. She becomes sadistic and she projects evil on the person who needs here. I had forgotten that, because in 32 years, I had only gone to her twice in need. And had been protected in both cases, because I had good people in my life who met my need when she showed her inadequacies.)

My new admission of Powerlessness (times ten) transformed my brother's and my relationship. Now I am not in denial, and he is not trying to convince me our mom has schizophrenia! The perspective of SWOE has helped me to put ME first. I finally set boundaries, openly, with my mom on the phone four weeks ago, using the newest SWOE workbook. I put MOM on speakerphone in order to get perspective and do what I needed to do, without anger.

She has not called back in that entire four week, at least from what I can tell on my caller id. I have answered all the private caller phone calls that have come in, and none of them have been her.

Our relationship, or mine with myself, has changed. I hope it is not too late. BUT I WOULD like to know my father's story, before he dies.
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Doing Recovery Slightly Out of Step

I am revisiting a "share" from April of 2007 today. It was written at at time when it became clear that I needed to be completely honest about my own haphazard recovery path from "emotional difficulties" some 16 years before. It came at a time when I was ready to "rock the boat" with old timers in my recovery community.

"Some fun tools sprang forth, or grew, out of the groundwork laid by the early Alcoholics Anonymous community.

It occurs to me that the word "God" was so important to the early founders, who were dealing with a desperate situation. There was little hope for the illness called Alcoholism, and they needed a path to recovery that was spiritual, but would withstand their OWN cultural conflicts. Early AA'ers knew the only path was unity, for it to be OK for practicing and lapsed Catholics and Protestants to sit at the same table and heal.

Over the years, I suspect folks got creative and even came up with acronyms for God, to make the word less charged, for those who would never again be Christians. One of us has mentioned "Good Orderly Direction".

Orderly. An interesting word.

Alas, for me, I was corrupted in my order, even as I started my work with program. I never was able to believe that even doing the 12-steps in exact order was a requirement to get well. Believe me I tried. But I cannot help my own family legacy, whose religious tradition was based on questioning. Questioning came first. Is a healing process in nature really orderly?

Today I want to speak up for others who may be struggling with program, its wording, its apparent order, even the language. "Defects of character". "Searching and fearless moral inventory." And more.

In my first 12-step group, AA members were closely consulted in that group's creation and involved in that group's early life. Many folks still in our group when I began, did rely on the AA book. I once had a copy of that AA Bible given to me, but the language, the culture didn' t speak to me. It was hard to feel OK about me when I read it, but I could feel the urgency of recovery prevent me from becoming distracted by arguing.

Even the EA book, the first generation when I began program, barely did it for me and this was 1991 I think. I am a big reader and our Big Book was like stepping into one of my early Soil Science textbooks, but without the science.
(Please forgive, I don't mean to insult.)

I now CAN accept that I am a Doubting Thomas. Even a Skeptic.

In the AA book, every page I looked at seemed to focus on the negative and I could not afford that at the time. No, I likely did not look at every page, but the language rankled too. And I could sense it had a disparaging, stereotypical view of women. Yikes!

So, naturally what would happen to a doubting thomas, who is wondering early on in the program, "Can I do this honestly if I do not agree with the structure we are operating in?" I was scared, because my psychiatric diagnosis could have been binding, if I couldn't find hope outside of anti-psychotic drugs. I knew I was in the "court of last resorts". When the answers were NOT in my meeting, I searched out things in my world to help me answer them.

I find a church and enter. The sermon is what I am here to understand. It was on the Dark Night of the Soul. What did the minister say, to this wounded broken person that I was... who was so afraid that she couldn't even do EA right, at a time when our group still stood in the shadow of the Giants of AA?

He said, that the recovery process weaves in and out, it takes the steps out of order. It is messy, but we get through because we are willing and we learn faith only by practicing to the best of our ability. His words were a bit as if he had given me a little
flashlight, and said, do the best you can, and use whatever tools you have. "You don't even need to use the pieces in order."

That is when I knew that EA's purpose for me was that I simply was not alone with my own flashlight. I could share my story, my discoveries, my questions. I could do the steps out of order. I could share in my meetings on any step, even if I was not officially working it yet. I had permission to do it my way.

Fortunately, in my early program work, I was also blessed with a sponsor that also thought outside the box.

An atheist, she was the only woman able and willing to sponsor when I joined my first group. We got so much larger in the years I belonged to that group, and I suspect it was because our group was inclusive, and allowed folks to be honest about where they REALLY were and allowed folks to feel welcome who were not being orderly.

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By the time I got my new edition of Emotions Anonymous' Big Book in 1995, I had become a founding member of an EA group in my new home town. With a full-time job, there was time for only had one meeting a week, and it was the one I started. That new generation of our own EA big book was a Godsend to me. You should see how marked up that first copy of my book is!

Some folks in program never want to see literature change from the version that "saved" them. Maybe they are just a little like people who swear by the King James version of the Bible and no other.

But when I compared the new and old EA books, I realized where I had been shut out. It was too much like AA's big book for me to really get much out of it. Likely, it may be that it was too charted for me, and sounded too much like "do this or be punished" messages I got as a child. I ditched the old edition, because the new one felt more inclusive and promised that the program would become accessible to more people like me. Today we have a book with even more open-hearted language, the book "It Works if You Work It".

As for me, I want to shout this from the rooftops to set my people free: I do the steps out of order. I suspect I must do them so, in order to reach some of the folks I find coming to me as a sponsor. Especially the young folks who have a low threshold for boredom and have problems with authority figures.

Tell me I am being politically correct (or incorrect). That is fine by me. Doesn't change the fact that those folks will have problems if I don't find an easy effective way to reach them. My suspicion, and I could be wrong... Young folks won't stick around if they don't see some creativity in the picture, a place for themselves to speak and not be condescended to. And for them to be allowed the peace to recognize their own vomit.

Some of you who feel successful in program don't realize how advantaged you are. Your spouses are in EA and AA. They have brought the work home for you, translated the parts that you found objectionable. For these kids it is not so. They have peers that will counter our programs, and these young ones come equipped with dogma-detectors.

The words in each step are a struggle for them. Some of them don't ask questions, but when they do, there can be a lot of anger in it. Anger that they may not feel comfortable sharing in face-to-face meetings. Anger that may keep them from coming back. Or that may fracture the unity in our meetings. I need to know how to deal with this anger, so I will occasionally practice being devil's advocate here.

I am not being stubborn, just earnest, and as open-hearted as I can possibly be. I welcome all helpful input, because I learn so much from each of you.

Blessings, Zena

PS: speaking of dance. I thought of a new acronym for my own
understanding of GOD:

Good, Old-Fashioned Dance