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0 By Angie Billings
Hello, my name is Angie and I would like to share my story with you. In 2012 I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. I am now in treatment in order to save my life and so, one day, have what we all deserve: ‘A Life Worth Living’.
My beginning
I started out my life as an ‘accident’ that ‘should have never happened’. That is what I was always told anyway.
From the time I can remember, I was moved around from one house to the next. I was never in one place more than a few months. Feeling like no one wanted me, or ‘just a burden’, was part of my normal life.
The molestation started when I was five. I guess I should have considered myself ‘fortunate’ at the time that the occasions were few. By the time I was ten, I was being molested every morning.
As a ten year old, I should have been thinking about sleepovers with my friends and playing with Barbies. Instead, I thought about how, if I lay there still enough, maybe he would ‘hurry’ and ‘get done’. I spent my waking hours getting rid of household items that could be used on me in his fantasies. I still can’t bear the sight of candlesticks.
Going to church
At the age of 12, a pastor from The Nazarene Southport church knocked on our door. My family wanted nothing to do with him. However, I was excited with the invitation to attend church. Not to be going to worship a God I had never heard of, but to escape the hell I was living in at that house.
It was arranged (by the church) for me to be picked up every Sunday morning. I can still remember the pastor standing in my living room that first time. He thought, I assume, that he was leading someone to Christ. Little did he know that he was saving me from my hell on this earth. Not only did he help to save my soul, he saved my life, literally. For one day out of the week, I was able to get out of the house very early. I didn’t have to lie in bed watching the door, just waiting for the ‘monster’ to come in and slide under my covers.
As a child, I was not scared of the monsters under my bed, I was scared of the one in it. For one day a week, and four days a month, I was able to see the beauty and peace that I didn’t know existed. The church showed me what ‘good’ was and that not all was evil. They were my only source of light in a life of fear and darkness. The church members became my other family. At 15 I was saved, with my church family all around me. Sadly, I never told anyone there about my ‘secrets’. I was afraid they would think I was bad. And I could not risk losing them. They were all I had.
My teenage years
My body was nothing more than a shell. I lived in complete misery with my thoughts and fears. I could not take the pain anymore. At the age of 17, I wanted to kill myself. I felt my only escape was death. I waited until I had the house to myself and I took a bottle of pain medicine. After waiting some time to assure my death wish would be complete, I called my boyfriend (future husband) to say goodbye. I did not want anyone to pump my stomach, I did not want to be ‘saved’.
God had other plans for me… My boyfriend called 911 and within a few minutes I was on my way to the hospital to be ‘saved’.
I remember lying in the emergency room, drinking charcoal to absorb the medication I had just taken. I watched the hospital staff do their job for the day of making sure I didn’t die. They were so happy that they ‘saved’ me – but they didn’t ‘save me’. What was wrong on the inside could not be fixed. And what I learned from that experience was that I truly had no escape at all. I go to sleep each night begging God to take me home and wake up angry that I am still here. Sleep is no escape as I am haunted even in my dreams.
The cutting begins
Eventually, the cutting began. Not with a razor blade. With my fingernails. I found that if I tore into my flesh, as the blood leaked out, so did all the pressure and agony that was built up inside me. It was the only control I had, in a world I had zero control over.
This was my adult life before my diagnosis of BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder).
For the next 25 years I struggled with numerous symptoms of an illness that had not yet been diagnosed. I destroyed relationships with the people I love the most. I was married to a man that gave me everything I could have ever dreamt of. With all that my adult life was blessed with, I still felt hopelessness and helplessness and, most days, complete despair. I lived as an adult in complete fear that my loved ones would leave me (abandon me) as they did in my childhood. As if my brain did not have the ability to know I was not that little girl any more and that I was okay.
I spent most of my days in a new crisis that my mind manufactured in an attempt to protect myself from the life-consuming fear of abandonment. My despair transformed itself into anger and rage.
So much anger
My husband spent most weeks, sometimes daily, trying to save my life as he did that day when I was 17 years old. He struggled to understand how I could one minute be this kind, soft spoken, vulnerable human being, and then within 1/8 of a second transform into someone filled with anger, raging fits and verbal attacks. These episodes continued daily, if not several times a day. And they all ended the same way. With guilt and shame at what I had done or said. With me begging him to help me go home to God so the pain would stop, and not understanding, ‘if he loved me’, why he was ‘not helping me?’
I never could understand why I had so much anger, when I only wanted to love and to be loved. What was so wrong with me that I was so emotionally raw?
I would replay childhood memories over and over as if there was a constant film being played in my mind. The film always played the same scene of being told how ‘useless’ and ‘worthless’ I was. And with the assurance that I would ‘never amount to anything’. As I grew into adulthood my distorted thinking and my insecurities continued to grow. The labels I had been given as a child had transformed into my identity as an adult.
Desperate to know why
I could never understand how as a 25-, 30-year-old adult, I would behave with the same reaction as if I was that five-year-old little girl again. During a trigger, I felt attacked and would react based on that illusion. My intense reaction was a way to try to escape the illusion that I was that little girl. Rage and anger was a way to cope with what was really going on, which was ‘fear’. The little girl that lived in this adult shell had to protect herself.
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Desperate for answers, I spent more than 15 years seeing psychiatrists and psychologists. Reliving every painful event I had to endure as a child. Medications from antidepressants to antipsychotics… but nothing helped. Some of these treatments, so called, actually even magnified and exacerbated my already existing unhealthy emotions, thoughts and behaviors.
My diagnosis/’label’
Society today considers a label one would place on another as a derogatory term or having a negative connotation. But not all labels are bad, and my new label brought me hope. HOPE… And it had a name: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I love these words, ‘I have Borderline Personality Disorder’. I wasn’t a freak, I wasn’t broken, I wasn’t crazy, I have a real illness. Borderline Personality Disorder.
It is a mental health disorder that impacts the way you think and feel about yourself and others, causing problems with functioning in everyday life. It includes a pattern of unstable, intense relationships, distorted self-image, extreme emotions, impulsiveness, chaotic inner turmoil, extremely painful emotions that make you feel as if you’re on fire from the inside out, and yet it’s all invisible.
With borderline personality disorder, you have an intense fear of abandonment or instability, and you may have difficulty tolerating being alone. The brain actually becomes wired to perceive life/experiences this way. Inappropriate anger, impulsiveness and frequent mood swings push others away, even though you want to have loving and lasting relationships. (mayoclinic.org).
My journey to ‘A Life Worth Living’
Now that I have my diagnosis and I understand the scientific reasons behind my behaviors, the childhood trauma of sexual abuse and neglect, it is up to me to fight for what I know I deserve. The first thing I had to do was forgive myself. I had to give myself the compassionate understanding of ‘Why would I behave like this?’: my brain was wired to be scared of everything. Wired to fear everything. Wired to wonder when the next person was going to abandon me. Once I learned to accept this is how I am right now in this moment, then I could start the process of re-wiring and controlling my behaviors.
Controlling my behaviors
It’s not as simple as someone telling me, or even me telling myself, to ‘stop acting that way’, or just to ‘chill’. Telling someone to ‘stop acting that way’ is the same as telling a paraplegic to get up and walk. Or telling a diabetic or heart patient to wake up tomorrow and be completely healthy.
The recommended therapy for individuals diagnosed with BPD is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). DBT was developed by Dr. Marsha Linehan, Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington. Dr. Linehan, along with her team of psychologists, teaches how to rewire the unhealthy behaviors. DBT includes four sets of behavioral skills:
Mindfulness: the practice of being fully aware and present in this one moment
Distress Tolerance: how to tolerate pain in difficult situations, not change it
Interpersonal Effectiveness: how to ask for what you want and to say no, while maintaining self-respect and relationships with others
Emotion Regulation: how to change emotions that you want to change
(https://behavioraltech.org/) (Linehan Institute)
Continuing my search
After my diagnosis in 2012, having had 20 years of unsuccessful treatments with psychiatrists, psychologists and traditional therapists, I found someone that ‘specialized’ in DBT. On my first visit, I was handed a book by Dr. Linehan (founder of DBT). I was given very little instruction and told to follow the steps in the manual. Unfortunately, that was the extent of my therapy. I learned the hard way that getting help from someone that is not effectively and thoroughly DBT-trained is both ineffective and dangerous. It prolongs your suffering as well as your family members’ suffering – those on the receiving end of these unhealthy behaviors.
I continued my search for the next four years. In early 2016, still living in the same despair I had been in since I was 17, I went to the founder of true adherent DBT, Dr. Marsha Linehan, the Linehan Institute’s website.
The Linehan Institute is the only organization in the United States and in the world that offers certifications for clinicians who have proven their ability to provide DBT in a way that is comprehensive and 100% adherent to Dr. Linehan’s model of DBT. The DBT therapists have to complete a rigorous, intensive training process that lasts for many years, prior to Linehan DBT Certification. They are also required to work directly with either Marsha Linehan, Ph.D. herself or with others who were involved directly with her throughout the development of DBT itself.
Linehan Institute
I searched for a Linehan certified therapist near me in my home town of Columbus, Indiana, but I was unable to find one in my state or in any bordering state. That left me with very few options. I had lived 43 years in this ‘shell’ people call Angie and Mom, but yet, trapped inside this adult shell was still that five-year-old little girl that was screaming for help, hope and peace. My hope and peace were so close to me but yet unattainable.
As broken as my insides sometime feel, I have had one thing that has never failed me: my God. Through all the misery of my life, going back to that young girl that walked into the Nazarene church, I knew that the sin of man was based on his own free will. My God has never left my side and He is always the voice that whispers in my ear, ‘You can do this, you are strong’. I wanted ‘A Life Worth Living’ and it was up to me to do everything in my power to recover from an illness that has robbed me of so many years.
After much prayer I made a move back to the state of Florida. It is in Florida that I met, and now work with, one of only two Florida’s Linehan Board of Certification Certified DBT Clinicians. Here DBT is practised and delivered with the preciseness and effectiveness expected of a Linehan Certified DBT Specialist, and this is why I am able to see a future for myself, my marriage and my family, for the first time. Finding a Linehan DBT Certified clinician and working in comprehensive adherent DBT has given me hope for a real life… a Life Worthy of Being Lived and Loved!
Tremendous progress in my recovery
I have been working with my therapist since June of 2016. Both my family and I have seen tremendous progress in my recovery in just these short few months. The process of recovery differs from person to person but for me, I know it will take years. Borderline Personality Disorder isn’t a single problem to overcome, it’s a system of problems caused by biology at birth and subsequent traumas that, together, have created a lifetime of distorted beliefs and fear responses. These have created a myriad of other complex problems involving every single aspect of my life.
Medications are known to be ineffective in the treatment of BPD. So, in DBT, progress is slow but steady, and it’s a process of rewiring the brain and the mind, unlearning all the behaviors that have resulted in the illness itself, and then relearning. This takes time. I have begged God to take me home, I have begged family members to help me die, when the truth is, all I really wanted to do was LIVE… Therefore, I am willing to take all the time I need in the hope of finding peace.
However, I do know now that my life is worth living and my life is worth fighting for, and now I’m fighting for my life in an all new way.
I want my story to be worth it
When it was suggested to me to sit down and write my story, I did not like the idea. Then I sat down and stated writing. All I could think about was how many people do we pass on the street, in a store, and they smile but they’re dying on the inside? I have always made a point to look at the name tag of the checkout person ringing me up at the store. Why? Because, what if I was the only person that noticed them that day. What if that person had woken up that morning and, as they looked into the bathroom mirror, wondered to themselves ‘does anyone even know I exist?’ I was that person for so long. But now I have a new ‘what if question’.
What if… I can save someone else by writing this letter? What if… I can help someone see that there is a God and that He is bigger than any monster under your bed? And what if… I can be living proof that life IS worth living? Then, my story is worth it.
In Christ, Angelia J. Billings
UNITED STATES
UNITED KINGDOM
