Thursday, January 8, 2015

Self Diagnosed High Functioning Female Borderline Sociopath - The Inside Story

Just over a year ago, I posted my first ever anonymous confession online located at the URL below: 

"Self Diagnosed High Functioning Female Borderline Sociopath":  http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Have-Borderline-Personality-Disorder/3687950

It all came about at random but it was entirely cathartic. I had spent so many months trying to understand what I was going through and I finally found a place where I could share my internal experience(s) with others who wouldn't know me or judge me and might possibly be experiencing the same or similar feelings and (life) outcomes.

The next several entries in my blog will be an autobiographical, factual narrative of the last three decades of my life to the best of my knowledge and memory. If it feels like a roller-coaster ride of thoughts, feelings, passion, experience, emotion, love, hurt and pain to you, then I ask to you take a moment and try not only to sympathize with and identify with me by tying to understand, but also empathize with what ups and downs I have experienced to date.

"Empathy" will be a keyword to anyone who is diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) or now commonly referred to as "Emotional Regulation Disorder" or possess many of the traits associated with the condition. Similarly, Sociopathy, Psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) which are commonly used interchangeably, also focus an exorbitant amount of attention to "empathy" or the lack of it in addition to a lack of conscience, guilt and remorse as well.

Although I have never been formally diagnosed with (female) Borderline Personality Disorder or Sociopathy, I have concluded that I am a Female Borderline Sociopath possessing many traits only as opposed to having the full-blown disorder of both. My self-diagnoses came about after countless years of careful internal reflection, analysis of past positive and negative life experiences, University courses in Abnormal Psychology, limitless hours of online research from web pages to scholarly articles published in scientific journals along with thousands of hours of watching documentaries and reading documented case studies.

More recently, I encountered a male love interest whom I met after a gut-wrenching breakup from a long-term live-in boyfriend. It was this life situation that opened the door to all this deep analytical soul-searching and personal reflection and required research when I serendipitously learned my new love interests’ secret. He was a Borderline Personality Disordered male and had it not been for him, I would've been highly unlikely to uncover repressed self-comprehension of my actions and my behaviors; both past and present. In searching for answers on him and trying to understand his curious actions, lack of actions and behaviors, I only came to learn, know and understand myself differently and so much better.

But once I saw and felt things I didn’t know or feel or understand before, there was never any going back. The layers of the onion had been peeled back and now I was deeper engrained in my own mind, body, heart and spirt. It was like being blind your entire life and then being reborn and given new sense of sight; or better yet, “insight”. It was both a gift and a curse and now I feel like a third degree burn victim with flesh showing and no way to heal the wounds. Even if the skin does grow back, the scars will always be there and now they’re continuously grazed with every movement I make and yet they still burn the same way they did when I did have the protection of old layer of skin to shield me.

I have changed for what I believe to be for the better but with pleasure, come pain. To date, it has been bittersweet to say the least.

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