On a logical level, I know that everyone feels pain. Everyone suffers. Is my pain really that much greater, or am I just weaker? Where is the line between normal and abnormal emotion suffering?
I come across ‘The Pain of Being Borderline,’ an article written by another famous BPD clinician, Dr. Zanarini. It says that in comparison to people with other personality disorders, borderlines experience greater levels of worthlessness, anger, abandonment, and hopelessness–that more than others, we feel like bad, damaged children, shunned by the world, and better off dead.
This is my second encounter with the idea that our internal experience can be characterized by a defining emotion, not just ‘instability.’ As Marsha Linehan says, we’re like emotional burn victims.
Dr. Zanarini views this specific kind of pain as a characteristic of the disorder itself: borderline pain. We’re emotional epileptics, thrown from one fit of horrible suffering to another. Poisoned by what’s inside us, and vulnerable to anything outside us.
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