Strength in Sensitivity: Becoming a “Borderline” Psychotherapist

I DO, I DON’T, I WILL, I WON’T –

Sept. 22, 2023 – I’m now 49 years of age, and after 22 years of psychoanalysis that is still ongoing, 13 years of which I was heavily medicated on psychotropics, I am now medication free and am learning how to live and work with my personality “disorder” in a reflective, insightful and productive way. I no longer self-destruct through alcohol, pills, food, compulsive spending, or risky sexual behaviors. It is entirely possible to live and thrive as a “borderline personality” in this world. My first psychotherapist diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder in 1998, but I wasn’t fully aware that I had this personality organization until 2010, when I was 36. I was in my twelfth year of psychoanalysis at that time, two years into taking prescription psychotropics/mood stabilizers, and had spent the past 12 years going from different jobs, apartments, friendships and destructive, volatile romantic relationships, still also continuing to act out compulsively with food, exercise, spending, alcohol, and sex.