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Aun Ali, MBBS's avatar

God, I wrote a whole response that I accidentally deleted! Long story short, the differential diagnosis of PTSD was withheld from my knowledge and in place of that priority was given to BPD, such that when I complained about ongoing abuse, I was disbelieved, and my family were even told that I was in the wrong in seeking help at all, further weakening me and allowing more abuse to take place. Things eventually got bad enough that I did attempt to do myself serious harm with intent to do myself in. Then I got hospitalized but I was so averse to the thought of “treatment” that the interventions were counter productive. Dare I say, they gave me new trauma!

There was a great push towards insisting I “had it in me all along” to heal or just get over things. I was told I need too much validation by a therapist who believed borderlines require incessant validation as a character flaw rather than amnesia. A big problem was that there was hardly any time to tell a 33 year long story, made more difficult with the disorganized thinking and speech from discussing the overwhelming events of my life. It was as though I had to fight for the label where I believe that if I had been voluntarily hospitalized when I was most ill and fully cooperative the misdiagnoses and mistreatments wouldn’t have survived constant observation. The suspicions wasted years of my life, made me reluctant to get treatment at all, requiring me to provide evidences of my ill health in the form of videos, tons of time wasted on phase 1 of the treatment, workbooks that I could have taught better myself.

In essence I was victim blamed and my life was in danger at home. I was aghast because I thought the stories of victims being blamed were outlying data but the way I was approached as a dangerous and wild animal was extremely dehumanizing and dare I say has crippled me further if not for life, especially financially. The explanations I was given by the BPD specialist therapist lacked any sort of depth aside from repeatedly asserting that I was borderline. As if that explanation would satisfy me or anyone. I’m certainly in very good hands now, and I had no sooner touched them and gotten a chance to tell my story that I actually started to see improvements.

I was reading the wrong books, like “I hate you, don’t leave me” and yet others like “understanding the borderline mother” which insisted that all male children of borderlines turn out to be sociopaths. I hope to be one of those that does tell a story of salvation. A DID specialist existed in the province I’m living in, just the one such, but was held out of reach of me despite my eventual insistences to see some one more trauma competent. I feel like I was left hanging for longer than was necessary, giving access to further abuse at home. The hilarious thing is, the abuse has stopped since I have started making these efforts, here, just as I did at home, from just educating my family. It’s a bittersweet but happier ending than I thought it would be! Sorry this is not shorter.

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