Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is like a cage and those diagnosed with are often stuck in the position of a hamster in a cage. Picture the hamster walking endlessly on the wheel in this cage and getting nowhere. Lots of energy is spent, lots of effort is put forth but around and around in circles goes the borderline, the hamster, anyway. Why? What is it about BPD that cages the borderline like a hamster?

BPD separates the borderline from the world around him/her just as a cage separates a hamster from the larger environment in which it exists.

Whenever there is this separation there is a degree of stuckness that causes isolation and alienation as well as anger and often an attitude of "poor me" that then further pushes others away. It is not easy to even contemplate freedom, let alone to actually attain and maintain it along with the personal responsibility that it entails. Borderline Personality Disorder cages it's sufferers from the average range of emotion and interpretation of many aspects of life.

With or without conscious awareness the borderline tends to continually walk in the same footsteps that they have always walked in. The footsteps of judgment, devaluation, grandiosity, narcissism, anger, cognitively-distorted thoughts, and the wheel continues to turn with the squeakingly-silent and painful reality of a trapped sense of a piece of the big picture known as "collective reality." When the pieces of the collective reality within the big picture are not held or consistently understood this gives the BPD abyss it's circular spin.

One must first step off the wheel in order to begin to journey toward oneself. Merely continuing to drive the wheel of your cage, or the traits of your personality disorder will get you nowhere. There may be a false sense of safety within the confines of your cage, and your false self/selves but you can see from your wheel, and your cage, beyond your angst and pain that there is in fact a world beyond. There is something more.

It is okay to want that something more. That something more is attainable when you are ready to make the choices necessary to free yourself from all of the cages that BPD is.

Stepping off of the wheel, beginning to explore the cage, it's limits and realities is how one can find the door. The door to this cage is not an easy one to open. There is a maze quality to working one's way out of BPD. However, when you choose to get off of the wheel and to open that door there is nothing standing in your way to a life outside of that limiting cage. In order to claim this life and to make those choices and to keep moving forward in learning, growth, responsibility and cognitively sound thinking you must be prepared to face your fears, to work through all of your triggers and to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you want new and different results you must first make new and different choices by refusing to be the hamster in the cage any longer.

Often in the throes of BPD you may not understand or realize that everything you do is your responsibility and that your life is your responsibility no matter what may have happened to you in the past. In the here and now, today, your getting off of that wheel and breaking out of that cage depends upon you.

It depends upon your choosing to find and be who you authentically are.

Life beyond the wheel and the cage of BPD means that you must come to know who you are, to accept who you are and to love yourself for who you are. It is the journey unto the self, the forming of a healthy relationship to your SELF (core authentic self) that is your gateway to the rest of the world and to the freedom from the cage within which you have merely existed for sometime now, if you are borderline. Search honestly for that door. And know that when you open that door you will not want to go back and as you go forward it will be painful, overwhelming (at first) new, scary and also the most exciting and wonderous gift that you could ever claim for yourself in your life.

Opening that door means being real. Opening the door of the BPD cage means abandoning the wheel and leaving behind the circles that you've endlessly ruminated over, traveled and existed within. Opening that door means learning to live and not just being satisfied to exist anymore.

Opening the door of the cage of the personality disorder, of borderline proportions means finally letting go of all of the maladaptive coping skills that you've built up over time to survive. Life is meant to be lived and not merely to be survived.

Are you tired of running that wheel? Are you tired of being confined to the borderline cage of mere existence, agony, angst, pain, and aloneness? Do you want to have healthy, fulfilling relationships? The only way to not be alone is to first face that and learn how to be alone. When you can be alone with yourself you can get off the wheel, stick with the process. Find your way to the door of your cage and set yourself free. You really do have the power. You really do have the way. You really do have the courage. You are worthy and deserving.

Begin to open that door today. You are a world waiting to be born. Actively work to make that re-birth a happening thing.

Borderline Personality Disorder can only remain a cage and hold you in that hamster position as long as you choose to let it. Choose to free yourself. You can and you will if you believe that you can and if you want to. Step out and choose freedom.

© Ms. A.J. Mahari - April 18, 1999