The Polarity Project explores mental health diagnoses

Presenter: A new program on KEPW explores mental health diagnoses in discussions among people with lived experience. Recently, The Polarity Project with Echo and Mutiny explored borderline personality disorder, BPD. Here’s Echo:

Echo: This is The Polarity Project. BPD is a diagnosis that’s near and dear to my heart because it was my first diagnosis that I could actually relate to and see myself in, and things started to make sense. And so, that gave me a little more control over my life, ’cause once I could figure out what was going on, I could research how to fix it.

So this is a mental health condition marked by intense emotions, unstable relationships and difficulties with self-image; often develops from a combination of genetic vulnerability, brain differences, and early life trauma or stress. (Interesting.) And it’s treatable with therapy, support, and sometimes medication.

How I describe it to people is: It’s like my volume’s turned up on everything. So I don’t just feel joy, I feel euphoria. I don’t feel sadness, I feel abject grief. And I don’t just feel anger, I feel rage.

Presenter: The Polarity Project’s co-host, Mutiny:

Mutiny: I’ve learned myself that I’ve had BPD as well, but I’ve been doing a lot of steps to mitigate many of the triggers and symptoms and things that control you to feel so insanely.

I definitely understand the anger portion of it, but that makes sense because most men are only taught to do the thing that makes you punch, and anger makes you punch. Crying doesn’t, might make you punch, but isn’t a surefire thing to make you do that. 

Echo: Absolutely. So people with BPD can experience some or all of the following: emotional instability, rapid, intense mood swings that can last hours to days. 

Fear of abandonment. That’s extreme by the way. It drives everything you do.

And they have extreme reactions to real or perceived rejection, ’cause we will bend over and move mountains to not be rejected. And it’s ridiculous.

That segues perfectly into the unstable relationships ’cause your relationship patterns shift quickly between idealization and devaluation—kind of a push-pull pattern and impulsive behavior. 

Mutiny: Yeah, there we go. 

Echo: Risky or self-damaging behaviors like spending sprees, substance use, reckless driving or unsafe sex, and an unstable self-image/identity. So feeling unsure of who you are and rapidly changing goals or values or sense of self.

And then there’s the self-harm or suicidal behavior. Cutting and burning or recurrent suicidal thoughts or gestures is often a coping mechanism for people with BPD.

They have chronic feelings of emptiness, persistent internal void or boredom, kind of a difficulty feeling fulfilled. 

I can say that after all the trauma, what I’m working through now is accepting being fulfilled.

Mutiny: Yeah, that’s kind of a hard thing because you’re just like kind of always expecting the negative thing and now you have to, like, I can’t just focus on the negative thing. I have to allow for good things to happen to me or else I won’t have any good things happen to me.

I’m the kind of autistic that, like my superpower is being able to like, conceptualize things and think of stuff like that. So my super weakness is conceptualizations that are like ouroboroses that eat themselves and there’s no reason for them. 

So, like, something that’s related to planned obsolescence, which is like when they make products in order to break, so you buy more of them.

If I come to a thing where, like, my thing does that and it breaks way earlier than it should have and it’s poor craftsmanship, it starts me in this concept loop of, like, understanding what’s wrong with everything in the entire world and how that ended up with this broken piece of thing. And then it could just make me so incredibly angry.

Well, I’m not like that as much anymore, but it used to make me so incredibly angry that it, like, would just, it’s like that. And people would be like, ‘Dude, you’re getting angry over some stupid little thing.’ And I’m like, ‘But it’s so much.’ 

Echo: I remember those days. And then there’s the stress-related dissociation or paranoia, feeling disconnected from reality or self, or misinterpreting others’ intentions. Oh man, that one’s a hard one…

Presenter: The Polarity Project hosted by Echo and Mutiny discusses mental health diagnoses every Saturday at 5 p.m., right here on KEPW 97.3, Eugene PeaceWorks Community Radio.