Category: Mental Health

Caution: Do Not Open This Attachment

Attachment is a bit of a touchy subject for anyone with a BPD label. Whether or not we have attachment issues stemming from childhood, we will probably develop an unhealthy attitude towards attachment during our so called “BPD recovery journey”. This looks different for different people. I have friends that will openly admit and claim attachment to just about anything – including professionals. I know others who have been let down and hurt so many times in their lives that they won’t let themselves form any attachments to anyone, or anything. Then there are others, like me, who are so scared of being labelled as “attached” or “dependent” and the connotations that brings with it within services that they will go to great lengths to force themselves not to feel any attachment to any aspect of their care or interactions with services, or if they do – they won’t admit it.

I’m used to comings and goings. I’m well rehearsed at goodbyes. I’ve lead quite a transient life for the past two decades, across more than one continent. I grew into an adult in the Middle East – where the countries of the Arabian Gulf have a constant ebb and flow of international expats. I’ve been to uni, I’ve travelled, I’ve been in many different jobs, friendship groups and lived in different places. I’ve been in and out of units, hospitals and day programmes – each time with a different population, even if it is the same place. I’ve had more than 8 care co-ordinators in half as many years. I’m used to moving on, I do it well even though I struggle with changes. Everything comes to an end at some point and I accept that and am OK with it.

I’ve also had plenty of constants in my life. My parents live in the same house I grew up in, I still live in the city I was born in (albeit a very different Sheffield!). I have friends who I have known for years. I don’t think I have unhealthy attachments.

So why am I so paranoid at this label? This judgement that just one part of my life puts upon me? In services, showing signs of attachment is bad. But in the rest of my life I am praised for my ability to make appropriate connections and maintain them (though it doesn’t come easily – I have to work hard at this). Even in my work – in the same organisation I receive care from – I am praised for networking, building connections and nurturing them. Log onto supervision records and I’m someone who works well with others. Log into the patient records system and it is a very different story. Suddenly I’m this clinging gremlin who needs to be shook off. Overly dependent. Must be cut off. Must not do anything to build up too much of a rapport because the dreaded “attachment” might occur.

So I don’t let myself do it. I presume I should not show any emotion or feeling when things suddenly chop and change. I wait on edge – preparing myself for when it is pulled away. If someone asks me how I feel about it I will automatically say “I’m fine, it doesn’t bother me”. I am a robot. Robots don’t have personalities. So their personalities can’t get disordered. Robots are not sentient beings, they don’t need anyone else, they don’t need attachments. I have to prove I have no attachment to any aspect of services. Because that is what people want of us. I had one clinician last year tell me “Oh I never tell “PD patients” if I’m leaving because it just causes me problems before I go.” Incredibly sorry for your inconvenience – we’re just trying to navigate this minefield!

I am the same person who goes to work, as I am the one who walks into an appointment. But suddenly what is good becomes bad and what is bad becomes good. Right becomes wrong and wrong becomes right. How am I supposed to know what is right in the world? Yes, maybe some of us do have difficulties knowing how to form appropriate attachments – but put yourself in the shoes of someone who is constantly being given conflicting messages about what is “healthy”. Is the behaviour you’re “observing” the result of a personality defect or is it simply because the person is confused and doesn’t want to get hurt and either clings or pushes away in a desperate act of self-preservation.

I hear many clinicians say “Oh its so hard to work with BPD patients, because we don’t want to run the risk of forming attachments” Replace the word “attachments” with “a healthy, trusting, reliable and working relationship” and suddenly that sentence sounds completely bizarre doesn’t it? By running the risk of creating an “attachment” you are also running the risk of providing a safe space for someone to explore themselves, nurture and grow – and ultimately fly the nest when they are ready. Because that’s how a healthy attachment starts and ends – naturally.

You are a human being. The best way to care for someone is to use your skills as a human being and not go against them.

Sharing the story

So the title of this post is probably a bit misleading – I’m not going to be sharing the whole of my story – for starters you would need 31 years and 51 weeks to understand it fully and I also don’t want to be that person who walks into a party and starts up a conversation going into mega detail about the pain in their leg they’ve been having for a couple of weeks. I’ve had a pain in my head for pretty much a whole lifetime but it’s not the only aspect of me – so this blog will talk about other life experiences as well as those related to my mental health. I am lucky to have had a very varied and wide range of experiences in my life – some hilarious, some traumatic, some close to home, some thousands of miles away- and they all shape who I am today. But I’m more going to be talking about the process behind sharing my story.

I’ve often been told “you should write a book” “you should write a blog” and everything in between. To put it quite bluntly I’m too busy doing life to sit down and write a book but if someone comes up with a technology where you can just scan your memories into a computer and it’ll write a book for you I’d happily comply. But a blog seems a reasonable compromise. And I’m not sure what it’s purpose is but the more I am learning to share my experiences (and it is literally my job now to do so) the more I’m realising that my story is potentially an important one to tell. I come across a lot of people who “don’t expect those sorts of things to happen to someone like you” or who say “I would never have known you go through all that – you look so normal” (if anyone would like to draw me a picture of what “normal” looks like please feel free to send me mail!) I think what they mean is that I don’t shuffle around muttering to myself, I am capable of eloquent conversation (most of the time), I have done a lot of things in my life, I am willing to engage with treatment (that has not always been the case), I do have have job, I do have hobbies and interests and I’m not locked up in a padded cell – on a good day – apart from some visible scarring, I can show no outward signs of mental illness. Yet every minute of every day I’m battling barriers that would make most people curl up in a ball and never leave their beds. “But it’s ok for you – you’re determined and motivated and strong”or “I couldn’t do what you do – I don’t know how you do it” … kind words and I understand the sentiment – but I think sometimes people think I have some superhuman powers of coping that other people don’t have. That, to be totally blunt, totally belittles the effort I have to put in to keep myself going every day. I’m not special at all and I wake up every single morning, slightly dissociated and confused and when I ground myself I want to die. Because that’s how I’ve always known waking up to feel like…wanting to die. Exhaustion at the idea that I’ve got to battle through yet another day. But the difference now compared to a few years ago is that (usually – and this does wibble slightly) within a couple of minutes I remember the novelty that I do have a life, I do have plans, I do have a job to go for, I do have friends and happiness does exist. So I haul myself out of bed and face that day because positive memories can’t be made lying in bed.

It is possible to live with severe mental illness and lead a fulfilling life – yes it might be rather more complicated, frustrating, less in your control and certainly more effort than your average person “doing life stuff”. But it is possible. I have the odd situation of being a service user (and one of those irritating ones that gets labelled as “complex case” (I’ll talk about my feelings about that in another blog) and is quite stuck in the system) and an employee in the same mental health trust. I am also someone who needs to be in a pretty significant level of 24/7 support but I can also hold down a job. My disability doesn’t define my ability and my ability doesn’t define my disability. People get very narrow minded that because I can work and travel across the world and put my pants on the right way round (though FYI last Wednesday this wasn’t the case) that therefore I must be able to cope with everything else and I spent years trying to get services to understand this. I’m all for a positive spin on things but solely concentrating on the fact that I’ve got a really good set of hobbies and friends and totally ignoring the fact that I’m incapable of entering and moving around a building independently or making a hot meal for myself or sometimes getting myself to the corner shop – isn’t going to help me move forwards in life. It has taken me a long time to accept that “both can be true” (a good old’ DBT dialectic) but I still think a lot of professionals have a long way to come to truly understand that this can be the case for a lot of people.

Hence why it’s important to talk. It took me YEARS to learn to talk. Diagnosed in 2005 with an eating disorder I took years to actually admit to anyone there was a problem (despite not doing well at my A- levels, having to take two gap years and being chucked out of uni and a job because of my illness) – I was an expert in denial and “yeah but” was my favourite response to challenges. I think in 2012 I started to realise maybe something was wrong (by this point I was in day treatment for eating disorders but couldn’t shake off the feeling of being a fraud so wouldn’t really open up to anyone) and then after a pretty disastrous 2013 I finally accepted something wasn’t right and would start to open up in private sessions with professionals. At some point at the tail end of 2014 I made a decision to start to stop hiding my mental illness (by this point I had been in day treatment for eating disorders 3 times, was in an acute psychiatric ward and had been hospitalised several times for overdoses). Prior to this I had always covered my tracks with most people except those that really needed to know. I started to let people know and far from being rejected by all and sundry I found that the response was surprisingly positive. I continued to struggle with actually opening up about what was going on for me but I did speak out arbitrarily about mental illness and didn’t hide that I suffered but it wasn’t until I was admitted to a year long specialist admission in York that I actually learnt to talk about what was happening. And that was a huge turning point. It didn’t miraculously make me recover or improve services but it did help me start to unpick and understand what on earth was going on in that grey matter of mine – and although I am still in a very complex point in my life – this ability to speak and articulate more about what is going on is going to eventually get me closer to where I need to be.

I’m also fortunate enough to have a job role where I don’t have to hide my mental illness…in fact so far from the truth because having experience of mental illness is in the job description for my role. And that’s a complicated dynamic – and one that takes practice and I’m still learning to perfect. But how honoured am I to have the opportunity to be in a position where sharing my experiences can genuinely influence others – people recovering themselves, professionals and how they practice, and maybe…just maybe…even have some influence on how services are run. Speaking out is the most important and scary step I’ve ever taken, but it’s worth it – for myself and for other people.