Story To Recovery

I first heard the words Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) muttered around me by nurses when they were bandaging up my self-inflicted wounds in the back room of a doctors surgery. I was 21 years old and lived in a blur of drug addiction, disconnection, confusion and terror.

When I was 25, I was in hospital yet again. This time I was lucky to literally walk out. I had sliced my upper leg open all the way down to the muscle. I required 18 suture stitches to put it back together. I had cut through nerves, which resulted in loss of feeling in half of my upper leg. This was one of many traumatic experiences that resulted from my untreated condition.

This experience led me to begin my search for recovery. I sat with a psychiatrist in the hospital and he asked me if I had heard of BPD. I said that I had and that I had done research and thought that I related more with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). I now understand BPD to be a subset of C-PTSD. The psychiatrist nodded in agreement and kindly explained to me that there was a program run through the hospital for free, for people like me called Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT).

I participated in that program for 9 months as an outpatient. It was not the gold standard version of DBT, it was the group skills alone. However, it still had a huge impact on improving my life and opened me up to a whole new world of recovery. From there I got clean from drugs. I put myself through university (a psychology degree), I met my partner and had my beautiful daughter. But along the way I have struggled a lot, and so have those closest to me. I have seen so many therapists since then in the search for help. 

Two years ago my relationship with my partner was at a breaking point. So once again I began a search to find a therapist that could work with me and maybe help me. I began seeing a doctor who is trained in the Conversational Model of Psychotherapy. This is a long term treatment designed specifically to treat chronic psychiatric conditions that are typically difficult to treat, particularly BPD, C-PTSD, dissociative disorders and treatment resistant depression.

About six months ago, I began to notice what I can best describe in an abstract way; I noticed cracks opening up within me and inside of those cracks was a light, and that light was a new, healthy way of being in the world.

For the first time in 22 years (I was 14 when my symptoms began) I could feel glimpses of recovery. Not managing symptoms, but actually seeing and experiencing the world in a new way. A new way that meant my symptoms and behaviours weren’t needed. I think I am in the early stages of what I hope to be my recovery from a chronic and debilitating mental illness. And I owe it to my great privilege of being able to attend psychotherapy sessions, twice a week (three times when I am in crisis) for the last two years and continuing into the future.

This privilege is only available to a very small percentage of people. Either, to people who are wealthy, or, to someone fortunate like myself who stumbled across a doctor who has undertaken extensive training in psychotherapy. This combination of a doctor and a psychotherapist allows me to receive treatment under the extended Medicare safety for an unlimited number of sessions for as long as I need it. 

It was to my therapist, at the end of a session whom I first put words to these cracks of recovery that had begun opening up to me. He responded by saying that he had also noticed something and had had similar thoughts about my improvements. This confirmation from him was actually quite earth shaking for me. When our session ended (we were doing a telli health appointment), I was alone in my home and I oscillated between the following three intense feeling states.

The first state was exhilarating excitement, joy and hope. The second state was grief involving flashbacks to that young, broken person sitting in the doctors’ rooms being bandaged up. I have lived a life with so much pain and in that moment, I experienced deep grief for my struggle. This struggle seemed so much more pronounced and sadder in the light of the recognition that there could be a life beyond that pain. The third state I experienced was deep grief for my mother.

My mother has been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD); this is often co-morbid with C-PTSD (which I believe she also lives with). When my mother has been to hospital for self-harm and suicide attempts, she has been told that her depression is life long and that she would never be able to come off her medication. She wasn’t referred to any therapy to support her recovery, instead she was given a life sentence. My mum is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. My mum is 61 years old and has never been offered to participate in any long term, evidence-based treatment for her trauma. Instead, she has been given a couple of mental health care plans, with 10 sessions to see a general psychologist. The thoughts that pulled up deep grief from inside of me, in that moment, when I was confronting the possibility of my own recovery were; why do I get this opportunity for recovery? Why not my mother? My mother has been through more than anyone I know, she deserves this the most. Why me? What about everyone else who has suffered traumatic experiences and is still suffering? I hope that we can make a recovery more accessible to everyone.