Feeling All Alone – Borderline Personality Disorder | Counselor & Life Coach A.J. Mahari

People diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder often feel all alone. They are often triggered, when relating in various types of relationships and relational dynamics, back to what is their core wound of abandonment. BPD Coach, author, and herself someone who recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder in 1995, A.J. Mahari, talks about how and why people with BPD struggle with feeling all alone – so alone – so often, and what they can do about that. The goal is recovery.

You can become aware of the way to find the road to recovery by being fully present in the moment.

You can become aware of the way to find the road to recovery by being fully present in the moment.The intense and often overwhelmingly sad and empty feeling of loneliness and being alone for those with Borderline Personality Disorder has its roots in a primal disconnect from authentic self.

A self lost to the arrested emotional development that strengthens BPD as one grows up and over those years is giving way, increasingly, to a false self a protective “borderline” false self. People with BPD often have fairly thick layers of defense between themselves and others that are needed to protect them from the emotional battlefield of landmine triggers that are everywhere.

Sadly, for those with BPD, the defense mechanisms that worked in younger years, in childhood, are now more deterimental than helpful. In adulthood they still serve a protective function. However ,they also wall-off the person with BPD from others. They keep the person with BPD stuck inside of what is an empty shell of a lack of self – a rock and a hard place that keeps them stuck the more and the longer they continue to abandon their pain.

Fear of being attached, fear of being connected, fear of abandonment keeps those with BPD walled off, walled in, behind a myriad of defense mechanisms that only perpetuate the false self and widen the gap of disconnection that exists between the borderline and his/her wounded inner-child. The size of that inner-disconnectedness is the measure of one’s outer-disconnectedness which is in direct proportion experienced as feeling alone, being alone, being misunderstood and so forth.

This is the source of feeling so alone, so empty, so unsure of who one is. It is often what drives patterned negative rumination and an out-of-balanced and unhelpful “self-focus. A focus that, in the absence of a known and stable sense of self isn’t connected to the here-and-now. It is a focus that is often perpetuated subconsciously and rather automaticlly serving as a scapegoat, in the absence of being fully connected to your feelings, for what feels like and is perceived (misperceived) as the reason you are alone – why you may believe you aren’t good enough, why you may think and subsequently feel like you are unworthy, helpless, hopeless, and destined to always feel alone in so much pain. This is your abandonment depression and your abandonment fear (Masterson) and the shame of your abandoment pulling you back via triggers, in the here-and-now, to re-experiencing the emotional dysregulation of what I call your unresolved core wound of abandonment. This fear coupled with the actual core wound of abandonment that is what initially required so much defense against, if you have been diagnosed with BPD, still requires incredible defense today unless and until you successfully address this in therapy and/or in working with a BPD Coach like me.

Peeling back the layers of those defense mechanisms, false self defense mechanisms, is necessary, with support, in order to find the road to recovery, get on it, and stay on it. The first step that you can take, right now in this moment, if you haven’t already, is to radically accept where you are right now and all that means for you in your life right now. It is a first step toward accepting yourself as you begin or continue to discover more about who you really are.

Radically accept who you are, where you are right now, with an attitude of gratitude and you will be amazed at how much you can will begin to create much wanted and needed change in how you think and feel in your life. It’s a process. Change is created by increasing your awareness. You can Change Your Thoughts and Change Your Life. Radical acceptance in a mindful way and being present in each unfolding moment is the way to begin to get unstuck.

Feeling All Alone – Borderline Personality Disorder