👋🏼Hello Friends!👋🏼

When you hear the term gaslighter, you think of someone, usually the other person, who is engaging in this behavior, not the one being gaslit. 

What if the gaslighter and the one who is being gaslit are the same person? 

*cue the duh-duh-duhhhhhhhh music* 

This is pretty common. A lot of people tend to gaslight themselves because of self-doubt, previous trauma, self-esteem, etc. 

Unfortunately, I tend to fall into this category. However, my gaslighting is more regarding my BPD and how I react. After receiving the BPD diagnosis in April 2022, I educated myself on the symptoms. Some of the symptoms that pertain to this post are low self-esteem, over-emotional behavior, self-doubt, and mood swings. 

Sometimes, when something happens to me, I react. I tend to overreact (I mostly go from 0 to 100 in a second without any thought), which is something that emotional regulation (1 of the 4 pillars of DBT) is supposed to help with. Well, I'm still working on it. 

📚What's DBT? 

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a type of therapy that was created for individuals with BPD and as time went on, there was a realization that it helps a lot of mental health conditions. There are four pillars that DBT focuses on. Mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and intrapersonal effectiveness.

Want to know more about DBT? Learn more: Dialectical Behavior Therapy: DBT Skills, Worksheets, Videos📚

📚What's Emotional Regulation?

Emotional regulation is, well, you guessed it, the skillset of the body and mind's way of regulating emotions.

I like to explain that with individuals who need assistance with emotional regulation need help with identifying and controlling those emotions because they struggle to do so. The brain and body usually provide the hormones and neurotransmitters to be released but I am still slack-a-lacking in serotonin.

Emotions are really big for individuals, especially with BPD.

Want to know more about emotional regulation? Learn more: Emotional Regulation: 6 Key Skills to Regulate Emotions (positivepsychology.com)📚

For someone who has always had extreme emotions, it is very hard to try and change the habit of thinking about how you react and stop your automatic thoughts. Of course, no one expects me to learn this skill after 1 therapy session. 

(I mean, if one does. Well yikes on you, I guess you like disappointment) 

Skills and habits take time and lots of trial and error to formulate a routine. 

Just like it takes time to adopt a new habit, it's also a lot of work to unlearn a bad habit. 

One of my bad habits, I tend to always think I overreact every time I have a big negative relationship (big fight, breakup, etc). This causes me to tell myself, "Jade, stop. You're overreacting. It's not that big of a deal, stop making it a big deal." 

Even worse, I have to go to my best and closest friend, who has been my backbone and rock through all of the BPD diagnosis, episodes, lows, and highs. Through it all when it comes to my mental health and coping. She knows it all, and she knows me very well. 

I tend to go to her when I think I overreact (which is always, especially with relationships) and ask her if I'm overreacting. 

Luckily, she is blunt and tells me how it is. (Well, lucky for most of the time, unluckily when our stubborn personality butt heads😂) She will usually be more clear-minded about the situation and explain to me why she thinks so to help me understand things. 

To me, it's the fact that I'm so caught up in my BPD symptoms that I know I always struggled with that I always feel and think I'm in the wrong.

One thing leads to another. 

I'm overreacting -> No one cares about me -> I'm such a hassle -> I'm a burden to everyone around me with all of my issues and emotions -> Everyone is better off if I didn't exist...

You get the picture... 

Until next time friends! 

-Jade💖

👋🏽Hello Friends!👋🏽

In August 2023, I was talking with someone that I care for very deeply about photography. He mentioned how he wanted to travel the world and take photographs to make his own calendar. For some reason, I thought that was so awesome, and I wanted to do that too. He had a hummingbird feeder, and while we sat on the swinging bench, we saw a little hummingbird.

I realized that I also wanted to try photography at that moment but didn't have much of a drive to do so. Fall and winter were coming up, and I was starting to get busy. I hate the cold, so I wasn't going to want to be out in the cold, and I'm not much of an outdoorsy person.

After losing an important relationship in January 2024 (we kind of still talk, but it's complicated and not the point of this post), I lost control of myself and just didn't know how to cope.

I thought that I needed to go out and distract myself, so I decided that I wanted to take photographs of animals. I first started while at a bird-watching group in a state park not too far from me. I got some really great shots of birds that were coming to the birdfeeders. I was also lucky enough to capture both a male and female cardinal in the trees; it's a little blurry, but the photo turned out really great!

I enjoyed being able to just take photos and be able to see how the world looks from the lens of the camera, showing people the beauty of what I see.

This is something that I am looking forward to doing more of, and hey, maybe I'll be able to make my own calendar. I'm happy that the phone cameras on the newer phones take really great photos, and I've used my phone to take a few landscape and flower photos when I needed to! I was able to capture a beautiful photo of the moon, which makes me very happy. My goal is to take a gorgeous cherry blossom, a clear moon, and a clean hummingbird photo.

A quote that works really well with this blog post is the very famous "life is like a camera" quote (which I could not find the author).

"Life is like a Camera

You focus on what is important.

Capture the good times.

develop from the negative

and if things don't work out

take another shot."

-Unknown

Until next time, friends!💝

👋🏽Hello Friends! 👋🏽

While I was driving to work today, the weather was foggy with heavy fog. As I was on my daily commute to work, aka my 30-minute in and out of dissociation, I had a slightly philosophical moment.

As I was driving and seeing how foggy everything was, I could barely see in the distance, like it was this state of being but not knowing since there wasn't any visualization. I also had my "AHA" moment and thought about my dissociation.

This is the perfect way I can describe my disassociation to others.

Dissociation is like heavy fog; it's blank... "foggy," and you know you are physically somewhere, but the question is where. That's how my brain is.

When I dissociate, for the small amount of time that I am dissociating, there is no memory recollection; it's blank.

Being constantly on autopilot means knowing your daily commute (your normal daily tasks) and just going, even if you visually cannot see miles up the road or the landscape in the distance.

Driving to work this morning is how I run most of the time: on autopilot.

I'm happy I have a way to explain this to people; this makes it so much easier to describe my dissociation.

Until next time, friends! 💝

-Jade

👋🏼Hello Friends!👋🏼

A common phrase I commonly hear from my previous romantic relationships is that "when it's good, it's great. But when it's bad... it's bad." 

While this can be true, experiencing BPD episodes can be overwhelming for EVERYONE in the situation. Not just for my partner but for myself too. The overwhelming, the extreme fear of abandonment, the negative thoughts and the rumination of negative thoughts, the mood swings, the physical sickness... you get the picture

📖Don't know what rumination is? It's okay. I had to look it up for this post and I struggled with it 😂 

Rumination is the complete fixation of negative thoughts.

Want to learn more about rumination? Learn more: Rumination: Definition, Signs, Causes, Effects, and How to Cope (verywellmind.com)📖

The idea that it's either really good or really bad fits a narrative that I'm VERY familiar with. 

A great (insert sarcasm here} symptom of BPD is splitting. 

📖Splitting is when an individual sees everything from one extreme to another and nothing in between.

For example, good or bad, best or worst. 

In other words... Black and White thinking

Want to know more about Splitting? Learn more: Splitting in Borderline Personality Disorder (verywellmind.com)📖

50 Shades of Grey doesn't exist for someone who barely sees grey as it is, aka me

This doesn't just affect my romantic life but also my personal life. 

Throughout my life, I've experienced splitting, and it doesn't help when you're already a perfectionist. You can imagine how stressful and overwhelming that would be. 

I had to do well in dance, playing the violin, and school, or I wasn't good enough. 

If I got a B, it wasn't the end of the world, but it wasn't great either

In graduate school, I got my first B+ and was not happy about it. I had 3/4 classes be an A, and I was SO proud of myself for having a 4.0 GPA. 

But as I jokily went to my colleagues when I got my final grades and told them I was "soooooo sad" about my B+,. They just told me that I did amazing and I should be proud. They also started giving me more words of affirmation, which I appreciated so much! 

I'm trying to work on my splitting and my black-and-white thinking. It's been a journey that I've been on for a while, and I still have a while to go. Life is a journey, but you have to enjoy all the moments and lessons you can! 

Until next time, friends! 

-Jade💖