Unacknowledged grief will keep you stuck in the active throes of Borderline Personality Disorder. If you are borderline and you are stuck, blocked, feeling unable to change you really need to know one thing - you are continuing to make a choice to stay stuck. That's right it's your choice. Even if you aren't making any choice - that's still a choice to stay stuck. You have responsibility in how your life and relationships are going. If you are suffering, in pain, not getting along with others, being self-destructive, acting out, and so forth, the source of your angst and your fear and your pain is the unacknowledge and most often avoided grief that goes all the way back to your original core wound of abandonment. © A.J. Mahari - added November 2007

Unacknowledged Grief Can Keep You Stuck

In the Throes of BPD

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An examination of the role that acknowledging and grieving loss and pain plays in recovering from BPD.

By A.J. Mahari © 2005-2007

"It's an awful risky thing to live." --Carl Rogers

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Unacknowledged Grief Can Keep You Stuck

Grief is intense emotional suffering caused by loss. It is a deep sadness and or an acute sorrow. For many people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) loss is all-too-familiar. Loss results when a child's basic needs are not met. Loss results when one is abused physically, emotionally, verbally, and even more so -- sexually. Loss results when one is or when one feels neglected and or not cared about. Loss results from a wide-variety of experiences. Loss, in life, is inevitable. Learning to cope appropriately with loss is a major part of recovery.

For many people with BPD the losses just continue to compile until at some point they have become so overwhelming (whether one is aware of them as the source of their grief or not) that they become the embodiment of the fear and the avoidance that have attached to initial trauma in such a way as to fuel the development of defense mechanisms, walls and denial that keep a borderline dissociated from their grief. If you are dissociated from your grief many of life's average situations and interactions will set off pain and distress inside of you. You may or may not understand and be aware of the connections. Refusing to acknowledge your pain and to grieve that pain will keep you stuck in the active throes of BPD.

Remaining dissociated from your grief serves to increase your pain because so much of the behaviour and the resulting distorted thoughts govern the patterns that emerge from these efforts to protect and avoid the pain of your loss or losses. Unacknowleged loss hightens the tide of the borderlines' ocean of pain, constantly adding to an ever-swelling sea of suffering which remains submerged and results in yet more and more grief. This grief, if it is perceived at all, consciously by the borderline, then takes the shape and has the depth of a maelstrom of whirlwind proportions that is experienced as being outside of self rather than being correctly perceived pain that is a part of oneself. You are alienated from yourself because you have chosen not to "live" with all of your truth -- the good and the bad, the happy and the sad. The threat to trying to face your pain at this stage is that you have lost your self to the externalization of it. You have built it up into some big foreign monster that has the power to annhilate you.

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Nothing could be further from the truth. Your loss, your pain, and your grief are all yours. They are a part of who you are. They are a part of the "you" that you continue to avoid. Your grief is a part of the "you" that you have ABANDONED. They are not bigger than you or more powerful than you. The day that you turn to face your pain and your grief is the day that you will begin to re-claim your lost "self" and it is also the day that you will begin to reel the "monster" in and to slowly understand that you are in control of that pain and grief and not visa versa. The ominous monster of pain that you have built up outside of yourself is a illusionary distortion. The reality is that the losses that you need to grieve belong to you and as such they are not bigger than you or outside of you. Those losses are a part of your life experience that you've chosen not to deal with or to integrate.

Your "borderline" behaviour and its subsequent defenses that you use to try to cope are designed to keep your grief at bay.

When you deny and or avoid your pain, in effect, you abandon and re-abandon your inner-child just as you may have been or felt (perceived) that you were abandoned again and again as a child. Tapping into this pain is vital if you are to move forward and continue to develop (mature) emotionally.

The loss was something taken away; grief is the reclamation of the validity of that which was denied and or lost in the first place. Sometimes being just hurts. Grief hurts; grief is the storm before the calm. After the pain of grief has been worked through there is such a profound peace that lavishes upon you safety and security, comfort and the knowledge that you are okay as you are where you are because you -- ARE! -- (A.J.)

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Many people hold onto grief for various reasons. Somtimes it just feels safer to stick with what you know -- no matter how much it hurts -- than it feels to work toward change. There is risk inherent in everything in life. I believe the consequences of unresolved grief are much more painful than wading through the grief. You do not have to choose to be unhappy. You can free yourself. Yes it will hurt -- but you can survive that hurt. I have waded through a lion-share of loss in my life and I have not only survived it but it has been the backbone of my thriving emotionally. Change cannot take place until the pain of holding on becomes greater than the fear of letting go.

Often getting acquainted with your grief is very difficult for those with BPD. If your grief stems from losses in childhood -- especially dysfunctional primary relationships -- there is a strong tendency to cling to a prolonged idealization of your primary care-giver(s) (usually parents). Beginning to let go of this "connection" can feel like dying. It is a death of sorts. It is the death of a child's magical ideals and the death of the dreams of your inner-child who still stubbornly wants what he/she did not get and more-often-than-not cannot possibly hope to get from those in your past now. It is up to you to learn how to re-parent that scared, screaming inner-child of yours who longs to feel the tears let loose physically. An important part of greiving involves not only letting go of the idealization but also letting go of the accompanying devaluation of yourself. When you learn to think in the black and white and you continue to idealize the person or persons who let you down or abused you (original pain -- source of loss and grief) you "need" to devalue who you are in order for "them" to remain the mythical "good" that you need them to have been in order to deny your pain, loss and grief. To realistically look at them and see that they were not all good threatens the false sense of self that you've lived with so far. Your life is yours -- it's up to you to live it and make the most of it. Let go of "them". Return them to their rightful, truthful place in your history. Free yourself from that idealization. Grieve your losses.

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Another aspect of the compounding of grief, for borderlines, aside from the grief that one grows up having stored deep inside (from the past) is the grief and loss that much of borderline thinking, behaving and relating can amass in your life.

If you are borderline you have likely gone to great lengths to protect yourself from your grief. You may have hurt many people (besides yourself) along the way through your actions and words. This grief can be even more profound than the grief of an abusive childhood. It can add to one's sense of unworthiness and helplessness. Sometimes we are not forgiven for what we have done to others. This adds to the borderline ocean of grief. Whether or not others can forgive you, you need to forgive yourself. If you are still avoiding and denying your losses, your pain and your grief, chances are that the very guilt that you feel over having hurt others is what is fueling so much of your self-hatred, self-harming, suicidal ideation, gestures or attempts. The guilt can be all-encompassing. It can be the motivating factor in why you continue to take on the role of those you have abused you by abusing yourself. You may feel that you are not worth it -- that if you were worth being loved "they" would have loved you. This is an example of idealizing someone. If you feel this way you are letting someone from your past run your life today. When this is the case it often results in borderlines transfering their issues onto people in their lives now.

This leads borderlines to feel as though they deserve to be punished by themselves for actions that have been taken that cannot be taken back. Actions that result from patterns of avoidance of feelings manifest themselves in "borderline behaviour".

Feel your feelings, stop continuing to do what it is that you've done that has so hurt others in your life -- including yourself. If you are still perpetuating this hurtful behaviour or idealizing someone from your past (who hurt you) this is why you likely feel out of control often and or controlled by others. You can take control of yourself back by facing your loss, and pain and by grieving it.

Borderline responses to this grief and guilt often range from denial to self-harm, and or to the punishing further of others if one does not take personal responsibility for his/her own pain and the pain that they have caused others. In order to take responsibility you must feel the consequences of your own actions and admit and accept that you have made choices that you are responsible for. It is possible to learn to value yourself and esteem yourself quite a part from the mistakes that you have made with others. Do not define yourself through others. You are a unique individual who is entitled to be who you are. You have worth. Your pain is valid. It is through the grieving of our pain that we can validate it for ourselves from the inside out.

You can only feel joy by first feeling the pain of your own grief.

What is so key to healing your grief is first acknowledging your losses. If you do not acknowledge your losses and begin to let the pain in and begin to express that pain in healthy ways you are going to continue to add to it all by the way that you treat yourself and others. You do not have to stay in this vicious circle of utter agony. You need to forgive yourself. You need to get in touch with your pain, your loss and your grief. You need to know that whoever you may still hold up as "better than you" or "righter than you" or "more deserving than you" simply is NOT! Grieving your pain is the way to heal. And in order to be able to respect yourself, like yourself, and then learn to love and accept yourself you must first open up and face your pain. Grieving your pain is the way to free yourself from Borderline Personality Disorder.

"We aren't bad people getting good, we're sick people getting well." (anon.)

© Ms. A.J. Mahari - March 19, 2000

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as of January 5, 2002