More about me
I was born on January 6th in 1966. I hated turning thirty in '96, since my youth was over without me ever being youthful, enjoying life and trying all kinds of things. Instead I lived in pain, anxiety and not knowing who I was and what I wanted with myself and my life. I saw other people living and making choices and I always wondered how they managed.
My life has always been very empty. I tried desperately to fill it with all kinds of things, people mainly, but somehow I wasn't able to keep these people in my life, somehow they started to wriggle out of it sooner or later. And I didn't understand it, couldn't see what I did wrong that made them act like that.
In 1985 my first boyfriend ended the relationship with saying that I was going crazy and that I'd have to get someone to look at it. I was unhappy but not crazy, at least, that was what I thought. But since I was working on making other people happy with me and he was giving me a clue as to how I could manage this, I started therapy and right after that I even went into a centre for psychotherapy, the Viersprong, which was for night and day. I was so glad that I found something that made other people happy. Except my father of course, he claimed he didn't understand why I needed therapy. He still does by the way, luckily I am never around to hear these things, since I broke contact with him in 1990. Anyhow, that's how I started therapy, trying to learn better ways to make other people happy with me, since I failed at it on my own. And I think they found me very eager to learn, very willing to work on myself, really trying to get better. But in fact I was only trying to get better in being what others wanted me to be, and they never saw me doing it. I managed to fool everyone. They gave me the diagnosis 'theatrical personality', describing my behaviour with this. But where they thought to look at theatrical behaviour in fact they were looking at someone desperately trying to make clear that life was hell. It was just that I didn't have any clue as to how to show this without exaggerating, without the black-and-white look I had. Yes, I fooled everyone, including myself. I really thought I was getting better, that I was doing my best. But I wasn't getting better, I was only learning other ways of dealing with people and situations
The first two therapies ended in 1987. For the first year after that I really thought that I had reached a higher state, that I had 'improved'. But soon it became clear to me that this wasn't the case. I started therapy with a psychiatrist. He gave me the diagnosis borderline but he didn't really explain it to me and frankly, I didn't give a damn at the moment. He said that he couldn't help me, because I was too good at changing the rules the moment he'd think he'd understood them at last. Besides the fact that he sent me away, he also learned me something: that there's something positive to the things I do. Of course many things I did were negative for me, or for others. But there was another side of it, something to admire, something to be proud of even. Being able to fool everyone around you is conceived as very negative. On the other hand, how much pain has been averted by this mechanism? A LOT, I can tell you that. And this mechanism was MINE, I was the one who had made this wall, I was the one who kept it up, and although it became a nuisance now, it used to have a function and it worked very good. Such an important moment with this psychiatrist!
After this I was therapy free for about three years. I knew it was still there, the unhappiness never really left, but somehow it lied dormant for a long time. In these years I moved into one house with my husband, whom I had met in 1986, and after a very difficult first year we decided we wanted children and I became pregnant. Life looked good and it felt OK, although behind that I still could feel .... well, something, just as vague as it had ever been. And it lasted for such a long time that I had almost forgotten it completely. But then I had a conflict at work and somehow this brought it all back to me, all failures, all things I still didn't understand, all the things I tried and failed in and I got depressed. And what finished it was a transfer to another settlement, while I had never had such a nice boss and colleagues. So that did it, everything collapsed and I got depressed as I have never been before and I sure hope I'll never get there again. I was pregnant with my second child but I couldn't enjoy it, I sat on the couch, staring around. I couldn't read, I couldn't watch television for more than three seconds, so I sat there either looking around aimlessly or watching tv each channel showing just three seconds. Lucky for me my husband was unemployed at the time, so he could take care of the house and my oldest son, and me of course. And I decided that I had had it. I was going to find myself a therapy and it was: the system goes out or I do. I won't accept this for a life. So, I started looking.
I had decided to try and find a therapist who worked with a non-verbal method. Because talking wasn't a problem, but I could talk so well that I didn't say anything. So no more talking for me, I wouldn't reach my feelings that way. And then I found Mirjam, a therapist who works with a method called Psycho-motoric therapy. And from the start I felt that this was it for me. This method works with exercises. Not push up or that kind of things, but other exercises, to link feeling and body together again. For instance, in the beginning she triggered my imagination by conducted fantasy, I sat with my eyes closed and she started talking about things I could try to imagine, like energy flowing in through my feet through my whole body. After that we did all sorts of exercises. Sometimes I would draw something, once I screamed at a picture I had drawn of my mother, other times we did more physical exercises to experience my own strength and power, like slamming a big stick into cushions, or pushing eachother back to back to see who could move who. One very important exercise started with her question: are you comfortable? This was a question I have never asked myself. When I enter a room I don't want to draw any attention, so I sit somewhere and that I would be able and allowed to like how I am seated has never even crossed my mind. So her question really stunned me. I didn't really understand what she meant. So we made an exercise out of it. I lied down and we started to arrange things so that I would be comfortable. It took an HOUR to make me really comfortable and I was allowed to complain about every little detail in the arrangements, so finally I was comfortable and I could relax and enjoy being comfortable. After that I could allow myself to be critical. Whenever I am going to sit down I allow myself to try and sit as comfortable as I can. Of course there are times when I don't bother or are too tense but that's only normal, at least there are also times when I DO bother!
In the first months of my therapy with Mirjam, I met 'my little girl'. I was very tense and many things were going on inside my head and Mirjam proposed that I could shovel all thoughts I didn't want or need into a big vault. I was doing this, all in the mind of course, when suddenly I heard a little voice saying 'shall I help you'. This was very strange for me. Because I never met her before that moment, but at the same time I instantly knew who she was: my little girl. That's how the second part of my theory came to life.
After half a year of this therapy I also started a psychotherapy, with a therapist who turned out to have MUCH experience with borderliners, Mrs. G. At first she scared me a lot. Because she made me speak out loud what had been unspeakable before. Before I started therapy with Mirjam, many thoughts and actions were ineligible, and with Mirjam I had slowly and carefully found a way of speaking about it. We did an exercise and then we talked about it. It was easier for me to talk after an exercise, because I was more comfortable with her after spending some time and the exercises made it possible for me to see what happened inside. But with my other therapist I had to talk about it all the time. There was no way of mellowing the connection first, no handles like the exercises to guide me within my feelings and thoughts. So she scared me a lot. I didn't really trust her. At least, my little girl didn't, so sometimes it was very hard to yield to it and talk to my therapist.
The funny thing is that these two therapies influenced eachother enormously. My two therapists never spoke with another, but they heard through me how the other therapy was going and what the 'hot item of the moment' was. Because of the fear of Mrs. G. I suddenly trusted Mirjam even more and because of this I could go through many things even faster and it all ended with me trusting Mrs. G. too of course. And oh yes, one other thing I achieved: I got better.
Being better is a strange thing. I used to think that one day I would be better and then life would be wonderful, and I would never feel unhappy again and nothing would ever change again. In my ideas life was something static. You change until you are perfect and that's that. Ah, but there lies the mistake: change until you are perfect. Many of my therapies, even the last ones, were based on this: please learn me to be perfect, please learn me this because only then my parents will love me and only then I can be happy. Even in my motivation with which I started my latest therapies it became clear to me that deep down I still was working on being perfect. Even when I could tell other people that I knew that life wasn't going to be perfect I still was working on this. I now see that this was the last item I had to work through. Because in theory accepting that life isn't perfect is OK, but there's one BIG consequence of it: accepting that YOU'LL never be perfect. In other words: when you are not perfect your parents won't love you. When you stop trying to BE perfect it means that you give up the hope of your parents ever loving you the way you so desperately need them to. And when you look at it this way, it's no wonder we fight so hard to get perfect and why it's so difficult to give up being perfect. But I couldn't have gotten better if I hadn't accepted this, because when I would have continued to depend on getting the love of my parents or not, I never could have been ME.
Now it's 2011 and I've been back for therapy a couple of times. Getting better doesn't only mean that the wrecked basis has to be changed but also that almost all thoughts, feelings and actions that derive from that wrecked basis have to change too. It's not that when the basis changes that the rest automatically changes with it, every step has to be fought as hard as when I changed my basis. During those years life gradually became better and better. And after 3 years I didn't need therapy anymore. It's still wonderful to compare myself with all these years ago when I was suffering from borderline.!
Life IS wonderful. It's not perfect, but it IS wonderful.
