Author Archive

My Experience With Borderline Personality Disorder (Breyonne)

I am a 33 year old woman. I received a diagnosis about a year and a half ago of Borderline Personality Disorder. At first I didn’t really understand what it was. I thought, Isn’t what I have more serious than that? I was pretty sure I had something else, something more recognizable. Something I’d actually heard of, for instance. Turns out it’s serious enough. On top of the shitstorm of feelings and thoughts I have on a daily basis, professionals are reluctant to treat people with BPD. We’re notorious for being ‘hard to deal with’.

My Experience With Recovery (Breyonne)

Seven years ago I got tired of living my life the way I was. I couldn’t stop drinking, smoking, eating or doing drugs. I was sick constantly. I was living in harmful situations with toxic people, and each and every day was exactly the same. My only respite was to go out and get loaded again.

DBT Skills: Distress Tolerance

I’m in a DBT group right now. It’s comprised of four modules, and I just finished my second, which is distress tolerance. Of all the things I could possibly say about it, the most accurate would be that it’s a lot of work. Think of it this way: it’s a lot of practicing things that are aimed at reducing distress, regardless of what mood or state of mind one might be in. Thankfully my emotions are still pretty distressing on a regular basis, so I was able to more or less have something to compare the results to.

My Experience With Bulimia (Breyonne)

I didn’t become bulimic to lose weight, as most people assume is the case with bulimics who happen to also be fat. I became bulimic because I didn’t want to gain any more weight and I couldn’t stop eating to deal with myself and with the world around me. I became bulimic because ultimately I wanted to feel like I had some kind of control over my rapidly downward-spiraling life.

Common Cognitive Distortions

In the article on the DBT Chain Analysis I mentioned labeling cognitive distortions. To give you a better idea of what I am talking about, and to clarify what the more common ones are, I have listed them below. If you require further clarification, I have also included the source cited. Filtering – filtering out […]

DBT Skills: Chain Analysis

Who doesn’t want freedom from rapidly spiraling and/or out-of-control cognitive and emotional cycles? I know I do. A couple of months ago, after a particularly grueling weekend during which my emotional and cognitive processes completely derailed, leaving me feeling like an empty trainwreck, I spoke with one of my counselors and he suggested we do […]

Sadie

We dance together, she and I. Sadie possesses the power to make everything good. Unlike me. I am the dark child, the tortured soul. She is a luminary, a child of the sun, grace personified. I can’t imagine what the world must look like from her point of view. So free, so unencumbered…she never says anything, never makes me feel bad. It’s part of her charm. But secretly I’m always waiting for her to leave me, to realize she’s too good for me, to get tired of my slow starts and spiraling moods and self-deprecation.

Thou Art Anger

I created these one day after a triggering counseling session. I got home and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t call anyone and vent, nor did I want to. I was in one of those spaces where I mostly just wanted to watch the world burn. So in a moment of clarity I reached for the art supplies and this is what came out of it. Creating something probably saved my life that day.

A Word About Fat Panic

Fat panic. Ever heard of it? I like to think of it as the extreme mindfuck our society is preternaturally preoccupied with. It is one of the systems of oppression men and women find themselves targeted by whether they know it or not. It is the phenomenon that causes people far and wide to become so obsessed with the idea of being thin – or being fat – that they will stop at nothing to expend all possible resources – time, money, energy – to either lose weight, or to ensure they never get fat. Because of course, there is nothing worse in the world than being fat: this is the central theme associated with fat panic.

Homophobia and Other Bullshit

Most of us can recognize homophobia in everyday life in certain situations: derogatory remarks, violence in newspapers, magazines, and headlines, perhaps something that has been done to us personally, like bullying, loss of a job, friends, family, or exile from communities and homes. In a lot of these cases, it is pretty clear what is happening and why. But when some of this stuff happens as a child, or can have another context put to it that makes the lines a little blurry, it’s more difficult to separate fact from fiction, and to identify behaviors and incidents for what they really are.