How BPD makes me feel like a child

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By Vicki Petrou

My name is Vicki and I have Borderline Personality Disorder. I was diagnosed 10 years ago. I am 28, and I’ll be 29 in a couple of months. Most people my age would refer to themselves as a woman, and yet whenever I’m referred to as that I have to laugh to myself because most of the time I feel like a child. I have this overwhelming sense that I’m deceiving people into thinking I’m a grown up when most of the time I don’t feel as though I am.

I think in black and white

BPD for me makes very normal situations, like a partner leaving for work, hard. It feels like they’re abandoning me and will never come back. Like a child that can’t grasp when their parent leaves the room, that they aren’t gone, my brain does the same. I think in black and white terms, in a similar way that a child does. If a person doesn’t agree with me, then they must hate me. If someone buys me a gift, then they must love me. It sounds like a such a simple mentality. But when this is applied to adult life, it can become a complicated mess.

People can’t grasp that I can’t just grow up and consider the grey areas like an adult. This can understandably be frustrating for people. However, it is an automatic response, because my brain is wired to see things as either all black or all white. I either love people or hate them. I am either good or I am bad.

Fear of abandonment

The way I respond to fears of abandonment or like I’m losing someone can seem like that of a child. I’ll ‘act out’ or respond in a way that others deem ‘dramatic’, because that’s how I learnt to regulate my emotions and get care when I was a child. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s as if my brain regresses when I’m under stress and I perceive it as threat of abandonment. I don’t want to be this way, it’s exhausting.

Teaching my brain

DBT or Dialectical behavioural Therapy is helping me to try to see the world in all the grey areas in between. Before you berate me for my slow progress and sometimes inability to do this, consider that I am trying so hard to teach my brain this new concept that comes so naturally to others. I don’t want to behave or feel like a child, I want to be taken seriously as an adult. Hopefully by the time I turn 30, I can feel like a grown up.