Category Archives: Dissociation

Jul 20

Protected: On the Inside : DBT and Talk Therapy

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Jul 19

Protected: On the Inside : Life After Abuse

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Jul 19

Protected: Impatient Inpatient

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Jul 19

Protected: Taking a Fall

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Jul 5

The Unreality

How I hate staring at this empty box.  How I hate to feel as if any creation that is spawned from my mind in these moments is an unreality.  Is it not real if we believe that it is real?  Or does a consensual reality have to exist among the majority to term it as such?

I might start using terms that I have either overheard and paired my own functional definition with, or terms that I invented myself to describe some kind of phenomenon that currently has no solid description.

I know I exist in a parareality today.  Time is not syncing up correctly.  In the slower moments, I am alone in a room with myself.  I am caged in this prison, running wildly around the barred perimeter, thrashing desperately and angrily.  Those are moments where The Voice is not my friend.

The Voice, I forgot to mention in my last post, had stated at one time in the recent past that we are no longer at odds, because the greater enemy was outside of myself.  We could no longer be internally warring for control.  Personally, I considered it to be another trick and dismissed it.  But, as if right on cue, there was The Voice, sharing subconscious insight to help me navigate my troubled waters.

Listen to me.  Work with me.  I see things that you do not.

It has dawned on me.  The Voice is naturally residing in my extraconscious, the bridge between the conscious and the subconscious.  It is the only place where parareality and personas can co-exist with the exterior reality.  Truly, the exterior reality doesn’t change much.  But, the interior reality is a different story entirely.  The Voice is the voice of my deepest fears and darkest secrets conceptualized and personified.  And, we are at odds for a reason.  The Voice announces things coming from my subconscious that I do not want to be true.

However, my states of consciousness are distorted.  My conscious mind is having perceptual dysfunctions.  These distortions pass through a short-term memory and are interpreted by The Voice and others of the same nature residing in the extraconscious.  The short-term memory releases the memory into the subconscious to be stored in the long-term bank and paired with another event or emotion.  Unfortunately, that usually generalizes the emotion paired to the events with similar events and vice versa.

When things are pulled back through the extraconscious, The Voice feeds back many judgmental opinions, hardly based in any conceivable fact.  Even when there are facts, they are subjective and distorted, creating complex delusions from the word GO.  In times past, I was usually able to rely on information coming in correctly, but hardly ever information going out.  However, the information coming in does not seem characteristic of everyday stimuli.

Hallucinations and delusions, walking just a millisecond out of sync with the reality that surrounds me.

I am unsure as to whether this is considered a hallucination.  Since I was small, I could feel an emotional climate around me.  Just as some animals can sense the weather changing, I sense an emotional climate that has shifted, even slightly.  I can anticipate emotional storms, mine and others.  But, it was always perceived as just a feeling in my solar plexus and my crown, and faint words and phrases from the detuned radio in my head.  Yes, there is a lot of noise in there, mostly static.  Today, there are words I am grabbing at.

I can physically feel it as an internal sensation, just as if it were an organ.

When I am in motion, I can jar this sensation out of my hypervigilant scope.  Or, I can choose to find a way to render myself unconscious and just sleep it off.  I like the former, because of several reasons.  Firstly, medication that is supposed to put me under is ineffective right now.  And second, I am clinging to any kind of reality that I can.  Losing any of it is worse than not being able to process it correctly.  Correctly?  No, there isn’t a right or wrong.  Ummm, I’m at a loss for words at the moment.

I need to shake this before it rocks me.

Related articles
Jul 3

I’m Going To Give All My Secrets Away

Foreword:  Trigger Warning!  The following topics include very sensitive subjects.  If you suspect that you may have a trigger contained within, please refrain from reading.  Reader discretion advised.

Blink.  Blink.  Blinking away.  The cursor sits at a standstill while I stare ahead, poised, awaiting the words to flow out of my mind, through my arms, and out of my fingertips.  Nifty title for some heavy stuff.  And though there is plenty of content, I have no clue how to provide an introduction.  A part of me flinches, and I find my fingers stiffening in hesitation.

No, you’re going to do this today.

Awhile ago, The Voice emerged from the jumbled noise in my head and spoke to me again.  The Voice was back at feeding my paranoia and preying on my fears.  I cannot understand how this conflicting persona came to be, though I tried to make sense of it in a theoretical psychology essay entitled, “Conscious, Subconscious, and Extraconscious”.  I can only recall the emergence in my early teens, probably nearly coinciding with the onset of symptoms.

The Voice had never become external to myself.  Until late April, mentioned in Lulu-Lunacy.  Moments in time started happening where The Voice had taken on a complete audio hallucination.  It had gone beyond paranoid delusion into a complete distortion of my reality.  I would have believed that The Voice was a real external entity.  It sounded as real as someone sitting next to me on the bus, whispering in my ear.  The words were loud, crisp, and clear.  But, there was no body to go with it.

I knew it wasn’t real, because I had been hearing it for as long as I could remember.  However, I’ve always been able to identify it as a part of my conscious mind.  This was detached.  The words coming out were not words that came out of a deep, dark place.  I had never considered going off of my medication.  I had always regarded them as something that made me better.  Instead, The Voice was telling me that the medication made me dumb, like cattle, so I could be led around by the neck.

That was my first experience with solid psychosis.

I started to believe that some kind of external source was putting The Voice in my head, and had been doing so for years.  I just couldn’t hear it, because I was purposefully not listening.  This reason The Voice was always one step ahead of me was because that external source had been monitoring me for years.  I was chosen.  And it was at this point that they wanted me to finally step up to take back my life from others who were trying to steal it for their own gain.

Yes, it was that real.  Do I still think that?  I have no idea.

Here’s the truth.  I am not one solid person, as I began to mention in Conscious, Subconscious, and Extraconscious.  I have a post drafted about my various personas and how some differ greatly from others.  Really, it’s more of a spectrum.  It’s almost dissociative, but not quite.  A part of me is still present as a spectator while other personas take the wheel.  But, I am almost in a disembodied kind of state.  Sometimes, it feels like I am in a third person kind of state completely outside of myself.  Other times, I don’t feel like I am present at all, and clearly I wasn’t.  Chunks of time go missing and events get hazy.

Sometimes I feel like I am struggling for control of my own consciousness.

Then, there are the pararealities.  I describe them in many of my more lucid, vague sounding posts.  Most of the time, I feel like I am a time traveler.  Except, I am not really akin to Doctor Who or Marty McFly or other time travelers.  I don’t really go from this time period to other time periods.  I live in pararealities.  These pararealities run alongside and often overlap the linear continuum most people reside in.  Here’s a visual representation of reality and pararealities:

To put it in words, I do not experience life and time in a linear way, though I do experience it in the same direction as others.  Time speeds up and slows down.  Some moments last forever, and sometimes days go by with a blink.

The parareality is a reality that is similar to our own, but doesn’t quite operate in the same way.  It’s like living life a millisecond off of everyone else, either faster or slower.  Sometimes, the parareality is a little more detached, like in the farther regions of the red and blue zones.  But, they are adjacent realities overlapping in areas.  More than two pararealities cannot be experienced at once, and although a spectrum may exist, it’s not like a theory of parallel dimensions where there could be dozens totally different from one another.  They are much the same, but it’s often like putting a different lens on a pair of goggles.

I realize that what I am saying is complete insanity.  It’s the realization alone that prompted me to stop writing and start dodging.  Silence fell over me, because nothing I was thinking or feeling really made any sense when propped up against facts.  And then The Voice says, “Or maybe it does.”

It’s a rabbit hole situation.  I am Neo, and I’m opting for the red pill, though I am not entirely sure whether it is going to lead me to the real reality, or deeper into the delusions and hallucinations.  It just feels like I’ve been taking the blue pills too long.  Everything feels so forced.  Life shouldn’t be forced, right?

Now, we get to the sick parts.

I have been keeping secrets.  Apparently, it is what I do the best of all.  I am so skilled at illusion that I can deceive myself without even knowing it to begin with.

Enough with the pomp and circumstance.  Get on with it.

I am still taking my medication, though I do not want to.  I don’t want to drink alcohol anymore, not because alcohol is bad for me and it makes me feel bad.  (It is and it does).  Alcohol is distorting a reality that my mind is already challenging as being real.  That’s all good right?

No, I have ulterior motives.

I am continuing to take my medication and to stop drinking alcohol for a very disturbing reason.  These are all efforts to continue to sustain an obvious mania that has been going on for – since at least late March, but it was a component of a mixed episode at that point.  It didn’t become clear mania until late May.

I am also doing these things to keep my weight down.  Did you know that Wellbutrin has been known to exacerbate symptoms of eating disorders?

Wait, Lulu.  You don’t have an eating disorder.

It’s probably pretty clear to those that have ED.  The restrictive diet, the compulsive exercise, talk of negative body image.  It’s never been something I wanted to admit.  First, I didn’t think that it was a problem.  It’s not, not physically anyway.  Second, even if it was a problem, I didn’t want anyone to catch on to the behavior.  First, because I so fear obesity.  I didn’t want anyone to stop me.  And second, because I didn’t want anyone to look down on me anymore than they already do.  It’s bad enough that I hate me most of the time.  (Unless, I’m manic when I love me).

I binge sometimes when I’m sad.  I purge it when I’m disgusted.  I purge when I’m nervous.  I purge when I feel self-destructive.  I purge when the scale is giving me an unacceptable number.  I restrict when I’m very sad and self-loathing.  I run to run away from all of this, to run away from myself.  I run to see that number plunge.  I restrict to spite myself.  I restrict to self-destruct.

I have an eating disorder(s).

Finally, I am still in the grips of self-injury.


Serious trigger warning ahead.  Pictures.

This one is old. An example of how some wounds just never really heal.

The newest in the collection.

This is the result of what I described in Notes, Vicodin, and Wounds

And I’ve found new ways that don’t involve scarring. I don’t recommend it. It didn’t achieve it’s purpose anyway.

I didn’t leave out the other side either.

I am not proud. I am not showing off. I am not crying out for help, because at this point, I don’t even think I really want help. I am being honest, because my dishonesty was killing me. I’m supposed to be discussing mental health topics. And here we are. The very start of everything. Honesty in the face of the monster.

Jun 1

Conscious, Subconscious, and Extraconscious

I began the original discussion of my theory of multiple consciousness in a response to An Open Letter of Apology.  To summarize, the theory of multiple consciousness stems from the existence of a conscious, thinking brain, a subconscious brain working in the background, and a third “extraconsciousness” that works somewhere in between.

This is not to be confused with the idea of paraconsciousness, or a consciousness that can be external to the person.  It’s not dissociative in the way the way that a person becomes detached from themselves, as in depersonalization.  Rather, this is a theory of the co-existant “personas” that perform different functions within the operations of conscious, subconscious, and extraconscious.

First, we’ll start with defining the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, and the third mind, which I refer to as the extraconscious mind.  The conscious mind is the thinking brain, the one that interfaces with the world in a real-time way, and processes immediate information.  This is the mind that takes in sensory information, begins the process of storing memories, uses cognition, and is the immediate persona, meaning set of behaviors and emotional responses based on external stimuli.

The subconscious mind is a mind that we aren’t immediately aware of.  The information that is taken in by the conscious mind is usually stored temporarily in the subconscious mind.  The subconscious mind then works at making sense of all of this information, and stores it where it belongs.  In other instances, the information needs to be worked out for a solution, and instead of being stored, it is continually being worked on.  These are operations that we aren’t aware of, until solutions and thoughts come out of nowhere.  That is when our subconscious mind has paired with other operations of the brain (cognition, memory) and then passed it over to the thinking brain, even while the brain isn’t active in that function.

The third operation is a new concept.  For me, anyway.  It is the extraconscious mind, meaning the mind outside of the defined states of consciousness.  This mind exists somewhere between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.  Sometimes, it operates as a bridge between the subconscious and the conscious minds, relaying information between the two.  For instance, a person can feel vaguely aware of something, but not be fully aware.  That information is retained in the extraconscious mind.  Other times, it acts as a storage unit for the conscious mind and subconscious mind alike, until the information can be processed and passed back over.  And in some cases, the extraconscious mind acts as a place where semi-dormant things exist, that would ordinarily exist in the subconscious mind.

Why the third consciousness?  Why does a extraconscious mind exist?  I’m not saying that it exists in all individuals, though it probably does to some degree whether it is recognized or not.  The extraconsciousness exists for a number of reasons.  First, to bridge the gap between the conscious mind the the subconscious mind.  Second, in instances where there is repression of memories, thoughts, emotions, etc, the conscious mind is unable or unwilling to process that information and make sense of it.  The subconscious mind cannot store it indefinitely, because the conscious mind is already aware that it exists.  So, it becomes a part of the extraconscious mind.  And lastly, the extraconscious mind exists to house semi-dormant constructs and concepts.

Now, this ties directly into my still developing theory of multiple personas as a part of splitting and dissociation.  It is similar to Depersonalization Disorder, in that a person feels as if they are watching themselves from a place outside of the conscious mind.  However, the feeling is not completely external from the body and mind.  It is a vague awareness that the primary persona is not currently active or in control.

It is also similar to Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is that there are multiple “personalities”.  However, in DID, full blown personalities are completely separate from one another and aren’t aware of the other.  It produces states of complete amnesia.  The theory of multiple personas residing in the extraconsciousness is slightly different.

First, the personas are not full-blown personalities.  They are variations on the primary persona based on their function, which defines the predominant characteristics of the persona.  A person may be, at least, vaguely aware of the existence of these personas, as they make themselves known through the extraconscious to the conscious mind..  They may even be aware when a different persona switches into the conscious mind, where the primary persona is forced back into the extraconscious mind, as a helpless bystander during the event.  Typically, there is only a vague awareness of the events that took place during a dissociative state, where another persona resided in the conscious mind.  It doesn’t produce complete amnesia, but there may be some haziness to smaller events, while larger events aren’t quite as detailed.

As the same with DID, the theory of multiple personas allows for an indefinite number of personas.  Many of these personas take different stations within different consciousnesses.  For instance, one or more may reside in the extraconscious mind, making the primary persona residing in the conscious mind vaguely aware of their presence.  The awareness comes from subthreshold auditory hallucinations.  Since the hallucinations aren’t external, then it is not considered a complete hallucination.  However, the internal voices are still separate from the conscious mind, though not always active.  Multiple personas often reside in the subconscious mind, almost completely inactive, save for performing functions related to processing information.  This is how delusional thinking may begin, as misinterpreted information in the subconscious mind, colored by the multiple personas. However, it is uncommon that multiple personas exist in the conscious mind.

Sometimes, the extraconsciousness may be completely devoid.multiple personas.  This is preferable.  It means that the symptoms are largely inactive, since there is no persona to interfere with the conscious mind, and the information coming from the subconscious mind is less distorted.

However, in other times, the conscious mind may be completely devoid of personas, making a person largely catatonic.  This usually means that the primary consciousness has receded into the extraconsciousness.  Sometimes, this is to prevent psychic harm.  Other times, it may be a struggle to see which persona prevails in the consciousness.

In the next segment, I will define the multiple consciousnesses, describe how they came to be, define their functions, and detail how they operate between the consciousnesses.

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May 18

Sorting It Out

I have always felt like I had a “base mood”, which is the state I’m in. Depressive, hypomanic, stable. I noticed that there was kind of an “atmospheric mood”, which was a wispy, temporary mood state that would come through. I’ve always characterized this as weather.

This emotional weather is just about as predictable as meteorological weather. Forecasts can go out based on current information and predictable outcomes. But, things can change quickly, and suddenly, storms crop up. Unfortunately, they don’t make an emotional barometer. There are no external instruments to sound an alarm on the emotional accuweather forecast.

I considered the weather to be just regular “moods”. I know one thing that is difficult for all people who have bipolar disorder is to draw the line between typical and symptomatic. It becomes a nearly impossible task when a person is actually symptomatic. That’s why it’s considered a disorder.

Over the last three years, I’ve become pretty familiar with episodic behavior. I cannot always identify it straight away. But, eventually, I tease it out. What I encountered in January was genuine symptoms, starting with an ultradian cycle I wasn’t even aware of until I reviewed my logs.

What I started to experience toward the end of that depressive episode was uncharacteristic. I hadn’t experienced those types of symptoms in some time. It didn’t look as if it was a coincidence that my mood chart started jumping at the same time my marriage got thrown on the rocks. And now, two months later, I’ve seem to hit some semblance of a period of stability coinciding with the start of my husband’s admissions and treatment.

He broke the silence. Now, I’m breaking it too.

Criteria 1: Fear of abandonment:
My fear of abandonment isn’t typically characterized, because of the keen awareness of the consequences. My fear is very real. The frantic efforts are a little unusual. It’s not outwardly frantic, because I know that behavior actually drives people away. Instead, I take huge strides to make myself more appealing. That feeds into the destabilization of self-image.

There’s a hidden switch, though. At some point, when I’m overloaded with anxiety, I shut down. I will shut down on a person, and it will be over. It will be difficult for me to feel anything for them until they have been out of my life for awhile, or they take a big leap of faith to me.

This disrupts my ability to make friends. I keep everyone at a distance, because I know that I will drive them away. I know that I am intense and strange. And I know that most people are passing ships in my life.

Criteria 2: Unstable Relationships and intense relationships:
I’ve been in a serious relationship with two different psychopaths, one diagnosed (Avi, the abusive one), and I’m now in a marriage with a man with MI. I always swore that these men found me. I think it was a little bit of both.

But, the catch about my marriage is however intense it is, it is stable. Go outside my romantic relationships. Looking at the intense dysfunction between my parents and me tells the tale.

Those people hurt me. And yet, I still love them. I hate them for everything, but I still vacillate between pandering for their affections and shutting them out. I know that they had their hand in this. And still, I blame it exclusively on myself.

Criteria 3: Identity Disturbance:
I used to dye my hair everytime I had a serious mood shift. When my first ex and I broke up, it shattered my whole world. And I said “F*ck the world.” At that point, I let go of everything. It was at that point in time that I started partying my life away.

That wasn’t me. I was a control freak. I always wanted control of my reality. I wanted control of the direction of my life and was always goal oriented.

My ex, Avi, was the worst agitation. I let him tell me who I was, what I should and shouldn’t be doing, and how I should live my life. I let him victimize me, because he told me I was a victim.

C.S. helped me find my way back to me. The me that I liked and was used to. The me that read, wrote, played music, and enjoyed artistic expression, not mindless video games. He helped me find my way back to goal-orientation and showed me that he could love me. That was the only reason I could even be me. Because that’s what he loved.

Criteria 4: Impulsivity:
After I had experienced sexual assault for the first time, I had come to the conclusion that I was a slut. So, I started to act like a slut by having sex with any man who looked at me sideways. I wanted to convince myself that I was at least good for something.

I have alcoholism. It is mostly controlled now. That’s no secret.

Now, here’s the big secret. I likely have an eating disorder. In times of serious distress, I deny myself food. I don’t deserve to eat. I’m a fatass. No one loves a fatass.

I have pindged and purged. It’s not often. In times of depression and self-depreciating behavior, I will binge to feel good. And then I’ll purge, because I worry about my weight. But worse than that. I’ll purge, because getting rid of that overstuffed feeling feels good. There is no better feeling than an empty belly.

I would excessively spend. But, you can’t spend without money in the bank. As a teen, I used to shoplift. And I got caught and got in the worst trouble of my life with my parents. I get the impulse now and again, but the fear and embarrassment is enough to keep me from doing it.

Criteria 5: Recurrent Suicidal / Self-Injurious Behavior:
Admittedly, as a teen, I was more satisfied with cutting with a steak knife than a razor. A razor was too easy, and the cuts were always thin, sleek, and healed without incident. The serrated knife left jagged cuts that never healed right.

I used to pick at the scabs. I only recently started scraping them with a luffa.

I take scalding showers for two reasons. First, there is the whole germ part. But, secondly, sensitive skin burns easily. Scrub it with a luffa, and it flakes and peels. It hurts so nicely, I can’t think about anything else.

I don’t ever threaten. I warn. Because I know certain stressors will set it off.

I used to attempt suicide. I have probably a dozen serious attempts under my belt. I probably have about a dozen more half-assed attempts where I hoped I’d die of alcohol poisoning. Or, if I let an infection go long enough, I’d cause organ failure. (I almost did that with my kidneys that started as a UTI).

I don’t anymore. It’s pointless. I have never come close to succeeding. And I’m convinced that there is a reason for that. Besides, I’m not so cruel as to leave my husband and son like that. Not now. My son is old enough to remember me. My husband might actually go down with me, although he’s never indicated as much.

Criteria 6: Affective Instability
Rage. I’m almost always irritable. I’ve always thought that irritability and reactivity were hallmarks of bipolar disorder. I was wrong.

I have bouts of intense anxiety. Especially when I feel like I’m not in control. It is expressed in OCD-like symptoms when it goes critical. I start hoarding. Or purging items. I check constantly. I do mental checks. I fear contamination.

Dysphoric moods. It’s always been suicidal ideation in the past. It’s only recently that I’ve had homicidal ideation, and it’s enough to scare me. But, I don’t imagine harming loved ones. No, I imagine harming people who are a perceived threat to my family and me.

That emotional weather, that was affective instability. When it produces serious storms, it becomes separate from bipolar disorder completely. Layered moods.

Criteria 7: Chronic Feelings of Emptiness:
Curiously, I don’t have the typical definition of this. Most of the time, I feel too full. I’m full of emotion, turmoil, life. I’m bursting at the seams.

But, if you examine the criteria a little closer, it can be characterized by never feeling good enough. I’m bad. I have never achieved anything noteworthy. No one really loves me. I feel as if I am worthless, rather than empty.

Criteria 8: Inappropriate Anger / Difficulty Controlling Anger
Sometimes, yes. I have a temper. I try to be careful at expressing this anger. It’s usually restricted to times when I am alone. I scream. I break things.

I don’t want to scare my family. I don’t want the shame and guilt I would suffer from such impulsive, inappropriate behavior. I don’t want anyone to leave me, because they fear me. I try so hard to practice restraint. I’m not always very successful.

Criteria 9: Transient, Stress-related paranoid ideation, delusions, or severe dissociation symptoms
This was the key to finally prove the potential for BPD to me. I’ve always had delusions. I’ve always had the berating voice. But, my paranoia has always turned out to be justified in the end.

When C.S. and I were very rocky, I was convinced that a man, who I would never otherwise suspect, was cheating on me. The voice separated into a an auditory hallucination, free of any rational mind, feeding me horrible things. I had my first real break from reality.

But, it was in fits that never lasted longer than a few hours to maybe a few days. And it could be broken by immediate distraction.

I’m nowhere near as volatile as I used to be. Medication has tamed my symptoms, and nearly domesticated me. There are a lot of behaviors that I don’t engage in anymore.

But, I am a far cry from ridding myself of all of them. And if I keep going on this course of alienating people, disabling my supports, and self-sabatoging, I’m going to end up in a very bad place.

So, I made an impulsive move yesterday morning. Finally, a good one. I called and made an appointment to start meeting with a qualified professional with an objective eye. I could’ve gotten in today, but my hours are restricted right now due to work.

So, next Thursday. In one week, I will take my first baby steps back into the world of therapy. Honestly, I don’t have high hopes. Thankfully, I have a number of therapists to choose from. And if it doesn’t work out, at least I gave it a try.

I want to keep trying and not get discouraged. But, I’m so picky about my professionals. I know there has to be some hope for recovery.

May 17

Working Up To It

I have always thought of myself as a pretty open book. I don’t flat out lie. If I am asked a question, I will always try to answer it honestly and to the best of my ability. Any misinformation is either from a miscommunication or an accidental omission.

I have been having symptoms far enough outside of the scope of BP II that it made me start challenging my diagnosis.

A diagnosis is a label. A label is just a label, and it shouldn’t make much of a difference, right? The point is that I’m gulping down pills of every color that should apply to every disorder under the sun.

Wrong.

At first, I didn’t want to question it, and I prayed that the extreme symptoms would subside. I had hoped they were circumstantial and as soon as the situation was resolved, the symptoms would resolve. Somehow, I forgot a key element of disorder. It doesn’t resolve when a situation resolves. That’s why it’s termed “disorder” instead of “moodiness”.

C.S’s appointment came and went without change. No relief came for either of us. In fact, we were both more distraught than ever with the news that we would be waiting another five weeks until there was a definitive diagnosis. And even then, that’s just the start a treatment. It could be years before things start to turn around.

In the meantime, I’ve found myself in agony, like a person huddled in a cold cave, waiting out the storm. I have always been in the habit of putting others first, because they rely on me in times of need. I know what it’s like to have the rug pulled out from under me when I’m in the most desperate of need. I’d never leave a person near and dear to me to fend for themselves. Especially when they have explicitly asked for my help.

Things get better. Things get worse. It is rollercoaster of daily twists and turns, ups and downs. And I couldn’t understand why my mood and behavior were so unstable. The medication works when I’m not particularly sensitive to external stressors. The inner turmoil doesn’t exist without it. But once a person has stirred the pot, it puts things in motion.

I started my excavation. I started reading old journals, some as far back as twelve years ago. Certain recurring symptoms emerged, and these were exactly the ones plaguing me now. The ones I find exist somewhere outside of BP II.

I examined my mood chart that I began in the tail end of my most recent depressive episode. Consistently low scores. And then, suddenly, the points were very high one day, and very low the next. I am careful to chart at the same time each day, so that the scores can be considered consistent.

When I noticed the trend as it was happening, I termed it “dysphoric hypomania”. The lows weren’t sadness, it was rage and anxiety. That was, until it went beyond the definition of “hypomania”.

Energetic despair. That’s the only way I can describe it in retrospect. I started running to burn off some energy, anxiety, and emotion. I clung so hard to anger, because I couldn’t cry. And when I did cry, it was in unpredictable bouts. I would start, and everything would come flooding out.

Then, there were the fits of rage. I would find myself beyond irritable – extremely agitated is closer to the term. I became more obsessive than usual. Things had to be a certain way. My anxiety was so far through the roof that I found myself trembling at times. Chunks of memory started to fall away, and I began frequently misplacing important items. It was a recipe for recurring explosions and tantrums.

Then, I began terming what I was seeing as a “mixed episode”. Impossible for BP II, right? So, BP I? It shouldn’t matter.

The question plagued me again. Why has my medicine afforded me shorter episodes and longer stability if I’m “getting worse”? Why all of a sudden?

It didn’t add up. Obsessions and compulsions, as they were happening, were not within the criteria for anything on the BP spectrum. I started having full-blown psychotic episodes in short bursts. But, I still didn’t quite meet the criteria for a full blown “manic” episode, required in a mixed state.

As things became rockier between C.S. and I, old, very painful memories started emerging. I’d feel the pang of the emotional reaction to a situation that was “familiar”, and then I’d have the flashback. But, the flash wasn’t always strong enough for me to pin it down completely. For a millisecond, I was in that moment in my past. Not always long enough to identify it.

But, they were plaguing me at times unprovoked. Times that I allowed my mind to wander. Awful feelings would come out of acts that hardly pinged me in the past. But then again, I had been drunk and numb.

That’s not BP anything. Not even close.

I had been wanting so desperately to solve this on my own. There are so many things I can’t imagine speaking out loud to anyone. Even harboring the flicker of the memory and the attached emotion is hard enough.

I took some inventories online. I started to put labels on things.

OCD – for the obsessions, the thoughts that kept recurring, the compulsive need to check, wash, count, have certain items on my person, etc.

PTSD – for all of the flickers and flashes of things in that dark closet. For all of the things rattling the inside of the Pandora’s box that has been dormant for so long. For all of the hurt, neglect, and abuse I had never spoken a word to any professional about.

BP I – to cover the “mixed” behavior and paranoid delusions, and auditory hallucinations.

Then, there was a label for the jar that shocked me.

Borderline Personality Disorder???? What?