Hi Newrites
Don't worry about it, you did an excellent job explaining your situation. Us children of BPD parents only need half a word to understand each other
My struggles have morphed over the years. I think most of it boils down to something you could group as social anxiety. Until around the age of 30, I had terrible problems with losing control and 'raging' at boyfriends and then my husband. After having my own child, and after doing some cognitive behavior therapy with a good counselor, I got MUCH better.
You've already done a lot of work to heal yourself
Many children of BPD parents find themselves struggling with certain problematic behaviors in their adult lives. Often the behaviors are a result of the trauma we've been through, learned or copied behaviors from our disordered parents and/or coping mechanisms we developed to deal with the dysfunction but which might not serve us so well anymore in our adult lives.
In that 8 month period you describe, you've experienced some very significant live events and changes. These things alone can be quite triggering and when a history with a disordered parent is added to it, I understand why you had a hard time.
The overriding mantra in my brain became: "I THOUGHT I had overcome my childhood, but now I see it was all a ruse, and in fact there's no recovery from this. I am exhausted from trying so hard for so long, and I just don't have it in me anymore keep smiling and pretending I'm okay."
When I consider my healing process I consider it a form of management. Just the other day I posted something to another member that you too might find helpful:
The way I view my healing process is that it's the management of my difficult thoughts and emotions. I view it as maintenance, it is not per se that the difficult thoughts and emotions totally go away, but more that I am now better able to manage them. This management does require continual work and maintenance though, it's an ongoing process. When I consider the work of Dr. David Burns, I also see him describing an approach aimed at managing ourselves. By being aware of our automatic negative thoughts, being able to identify the cognitive distortions in them and applying the tools to untwist our thinking, we are able to better manage our difficult thoughts and emotions. To thrive can perhaps be seen as the ability to better manage ourselves allowing us to unlock new dimensions of living.
... .
When I consider Pete Walker's work it strikes me that he too talks about management. He doesn't talk about healing or curing emotional flashbacks, but he does talk about managing them and how this can lead their intensity, duration and frequency to decrease.
"Real recovery is a gradually progressive process (often two steps forward, one step back), not an attained salvation fantasy." -- Pete Walker
So it doesn't all sound so woe-is-me, I should mention that during that time, I met and married a wonderful man and have been parenting a wonderful kid.
Great that you have a wonderful husband and kid
