Content Warning: Mental Health Update
I’ve said before that I experience all the interior symptomatology of Cluster B personality disorders, and so I want to explain what that is like for a little bit today. I also want to show what I mean when I say that the “storm” inside is made of tangled threads, and untangling those threads so they can cool off from the storm is how I defuse my trauma triggers. Over time, the more of these threads I defuse, the more it all adds up to “healing” in the sense of “moving forward to a state that integrates the pre-wounded/wounded/healed selves, not going back to a pre-traumatized self” and also in the sense of “feeling the way you felt before, without choosing the same way you chose before.”
So here’s the Cluster B breakdown of Deedee.
First off, Clusters A and C, for any who don’t know: Cluster A is your odd/eccentrics, so your paranoids, schizoids, and schizotypals; and Cluster C is the anxious/inhibited crowd, so the dependents, avoidants, and obsessive-compulsives. You can look those up if you want but they’re not relevant to what I’m talking about now. Just so we’re on the same page of what I’m *not* dealing with.
Cluster B personality disorders are the dramatic/erratic, and they include antisocial, emotionally unstable (FKA Borderline), histrionic, and narcissistic. I “am not” any one of those, because I am not clinically diagnosable with any of them (I don’t display the behaviors to the extent that they disorder my life, I have degrees and I’m gainfully employed like 95% of the time and I pay bills and I maintain relationships). But I have a fairly comprehensive understanding of “what it feels like to be” all of them, and I’ve engaged in every single one of those classes of behaviors at least twice, but we’re talking over like forty years total and mostly in my childhood & adolescence, with a lot of confounding variables and a really well-hidden period of decades in the middle. So like, it’s a bumpy ride, but please just buckle in & trust me, and we’ll get there.
Antisocial first. These are your sociopaths and psychopaths, depending on your frame of reference. Basically anyone who knows me will say, “Oh Deedee’s not a sociopath, she’s got too much empathy.” And that’s true! But the thing is, I can turn that empathy off, as easy as snapping my fingers Thanos-style. Go ahead and try that right now, or imagine it: striking the posture, saying I Am Inevitable, raising your Infinity Gauntlet-clad hand, and snapping your fingers. You might take a do-over and so might I, but that’s the level of effort I’m talking about here. It’s an act of will, and a thing that can be rehearsed. And then there are no feelings, there is only The Mission and Winning.
In that antisocial state, I’m all cold rationality and instrumental bodily awareness. As with flying “instruments-only” in low-visibility conditions, I have a video game-style awareness of physical sensations that is completely disconnected from emotional impact because I’ve turned off all my emotions. In that state, I have clawed off someone’s face on a schoolyard ballcourt, silently endured third-degree chemical burns on purpose, and given my own mother a public beating. This is legit psychopathic shit (even tho everyone in my family agrees that said beating was most righteously deserved, it nevertheless took full-blown psychopathic rage for me to do such a thing at age eleven to my own mother), and I haven’t “snapped my fingers” in years, but it’s still technically always an option on the table. I’m not always violent in that state, but I have no compunction whatsoever *about* violence in that state.
Borderline next, now known as Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD). Of all the Cluster Bs, I’d say I genuinely identify as emotionally unstable the most. But like all the rest, I experience the interiority while exerting rigid behavioral control over the externals. This is where you get your Splitting, which is how when my parents said they wanted to stay out of a conflict between my partner and me, I flipped from seeing them as Very Safe to Very Unsafe because I way-too-intensely felt that they weren’t willing to “hear me out” (for clarity: right there and then, on the dynamic nuances of a years-long relationship, right before Christmas, over something that we all really needed to just chill out about anyway - I was being extremely impatient here, I want to emphasize my self-awareness of that).
In that borderline state, non-linear distortions like Splitting dominate my emotional world: nothing is merely here and now, everything takes on cosmic-level significance. I can shut this down by dissociating, doing the Thanos snap, but that puts me in an antisocial state, which as I’ve said is its own can of bees. I get all the other distortions too, the catastrophizing and emotional reasoning and blah blah blah, you can look them up if you want but I’m trying to be comprehensive without being exhaustive here. EUPD is special because it’s the most present to me, in the pathological kinda way. The others are more like “options” that are always there for me to lean into, but don’t really take over nearly as frequently or as intensely as EUPD does.
Histrionic is probably the most complex to assess, because of my lifestyle as an orgy-going safe sex slut. I’ll just say outright that I discuss my deeds openly with my therapist on an ongoing basis, in a facts-not-acts kinda way, because I want to make sure that I’m doing this stuff in a non-disordered way that doesn’t disrupt my life. I disrupt my life in plenty of other ways, I don’t need my Big City Dyke lifestyle to be a negative influence when it’s actually a really important source of joy and fulfillment for me. And when I say that, I mean stuff like how teaching strap topping class taps into my entire broad-based skillset, and I love it for well-rounded reasons; and also I enjoy chilling out at orgies even when I’m not getting any, it makes me feel calm and centered; and I’ll just leave it at that for now. The bottom line is, “having less sex” can’t possibly heal me any faster.
In a histrionic state, I feel pathetic, and I don’t want to be there. I’m real good at getting out of that state, with all my legendary deeds from my youth and adolescence. That foundation has gotten shakier as I stop dissociating all the goddamn time and start actually healing my trauma, but the healing is replacing that false foundation with a real one in tandem. Sometimes there’s a mismatch in those speeds, and when that happens, I have a relapse of some kind: either too much containment, or not enough containment. I had not enough containment for a bit this past holiday season, and cut off my parents and one of my brothers for a couple days while I privately fumed at them - and when I had isolated myself enough to only have the “If you won’t hear me out then I won’t hear you out” feelings echoing over and over in my head, then I finally felt pathetic enough to pull out of the spiral instead of going deeper in. Not by dissociating, but by giving up and letting myself feel pathetic until I got sick of it.
I fkn hate giving up. Like pathologically.
Narcissists also hate giving up. I have a lot of narcissistic tendencies, not only from fleas I picked up from the Dragon Queen, but also from my legendary upbringing. I have piles of both anecdotes and statistical evidence that I “just know better” than most people, about most things, most of the time. This is a fact that’s been confirmed over and over, and I try not to let it go to my head - which is kind of easy, because it’s completely undercut by the critical flaw that I’ve always got about a 5% chance of fucking up any single momentary decision or action, cuz I lack common sense. I’m a probabilistic polymath. I’m not consistently trustworthy, because despite my 95% calibration on basically everything, that one-in-twenty chance of critical failure is *just not reliable enough* for anything on a professional level. I compensate for this by double- and triple-checking myself on every thought, word, and deed; I’m able to do this under everyday circumstances because I have a six-track mind and they all work in parallel, so I almost always catch my mistakes before they have any impact and self-correct.
When I’m in a narcissistic state, I forget about that 5%, I throw caution to the wind and lean into the manic psychosis that’s always there at the fringes of my awareness. But importantly, it’s not bipolar mania, it’s narcissistic grandiosity, which is why it’s always triggered by things going so well - I think I’ve “finally cracked this whole Life On Earth thing” and now it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to take over the world. And I don’t second-guess that thought. So instead of constraining my boundless psychotic energy to the task at hand, I instead set my cosmic-level awareness to EVERY TASK. I operationalize all the steps it would take to enlighten the world and unshackle ourselves from the yoke of our whatever whatever, it’s all so clear and I just need people to LISTEN TO ME. Like if you’d JUST LISTEN, then you would UNDERSTAND, and then once you properly UNDERSTOOD then you’d JUST KNOW what NEEDS TO BE DONE and you get the idea I bet. The problem isn’t that I have a misunderstanding of how the world works; the problem is that I have a distorted view of my ability to impact the workings of the entire world.
It’s still a break from reality, but it’s because I have trauma and fleas from seeing the Dragon Queen’s bullshit *work,* over and over again: when I feel cornered, I resort to her dirty tricks, and I know I’m doing it in an autistically-honest way, but I can’t stop myself, because it feels so necessary for my own safety. It’s not from an imbalance of the chemicals in my tank, it’s from the way my earliest experiences wired me. I am re-wiring myself with professional assistance; but medication can only change the chemicals in my tank, it can’t re-wire me. That’s why therapy works for me and medication doesn’t: I had a hormonal imbalance corrected by HRT, and now I’m re-wiring by working on my wounds in therapy.
I’m able to keep this all in balance because I have a six-track mind: the interior experience of my consciousness always has six things going on, and sometimes they’re clustered together and sometimes they’re all over the place, and sometimes they’re mostly focused on what’s happening right now but sometimes they’re not. It’s a bit chaotic, and when the chaos ramps up beyond my ability to maintain balance, then I have a spiral on my hands and it may lead to a pathological behavior. But we’re past the pathology now, and into solutions, so I’ll refrain from describing a spiral from the inside and simply proceed to the analysis:
Spirals are when the tangled storm of trauma inside me breaches containment. That tangle is made out of “hot threads,” somewhere in the hundreds to thousands. I know there’s more than 200, but I think it’s less than 2,000. There might be three or four thousand tho, I’m really not sure. Each hot thread is a memory of an event that happened at a specific place and time, but which somehow reinscribes one of the various personality-stunting traumas the Dragon Queen put me thru. Those mother wounds are the core of my trauma tangle, but they connect with electrical directness and white-hot heat to every single event I can remember that resembles them in a dynamic or thematic way.
I can’t help this. This is not a choice. This is just what happens when unhealed mother wounds (broken toes) get unintentionally reactivated by others (stepped on) over and over again (everyday triggers) because they don’t know they’re there (invisible wounds). You get your toes stepped on from time to time, it’s a fact of life - but if your toes are always broken, then everyday life becomes a lot more painful than it ought to be. My only option was to bury it all as deep as I could, because that worked in the moment, and it gave me superpowers in the bargain: I could push myself further than other people in a lot of ways. One of my brothers once said, “Dee could do anything she wants, if she’d only put her mind to it.” That’s a fact, I just couldn’t sustain the effort of putting my mind to anything for much longer than it took me to blaze thru the honeymoon phase of New Skill Mastery and hit the work phase and its attendant progress slump. That’s when I’d lose all enthusiasm and get absorbed in something else. Everything I could possibly learn was all just different flavors of Mitch Hedberg’s pancakes: “Start off all exciting, but by the end you’re fuckin’ sick of ‘em.” And that's just one serving.
Oh, but all that stuffing down of the unpleasant feelings? Precursor to the “snap” of disconnecting my emotions completely as an act of will? That created the trauma tangle, and so now what I have to do, is more or less to symbolically undo everything that was done to me by untangling those hot threads one by one so they can cool off. They cool off by me proving to myself that it’s OK and they don’t need to be so goddamned hot any more. That’s not something I can just intellectually understand, it’s something I need to be able to demonstrate to myself from lived experience. I have to *have the experience* of it going differently, in order to be able to believe it will ever be different *for me.* I’m proving that the thing that hurt me, isn’t what happens all the time to me. Thing by thing, hurt by hurt.
It’s exposure therapy, in a way. It’s exposure surgery, in that when I do it right, I can nail it in one. But to do that, the hot thread needs to be isolated from the rest of the tangle. And to do *that,* I need to be able to tug it free, and prove that this thread is both not the same thing as the mother wound I connected it to, and also not the way things always or even usually go. I can then trust myself with the example to separate them, and then it can cool off for a bit. This is challenging tho, because each thread is tangled up with a bunch of other threads, and if too many of them start to come loose from the tangle at once - like, literally more than six of them, which is not a lot when there are hundreds to thousands down in there - then I start a spiral, and if I can’t pull out of that spiral, then I have a behavioral episode.
But if I can free that hot thread from the tangle, and get it by itself, and give it the time and space it needs to cool off? Then it just cools off. And then that one little thread doesn’t hurt any more, and the trauma tangle is a tiny bit smaller.
If I don’t do this work, then the ongoing burden of the tangle becomes a symptom called “injustice collecting,” where every stupid thing that ever hurt you becomes an eternal mood derailleur, leading to a cycle of ever-more-restrictive “pseudo-boundaries” that culminate in a series of mood episodes such as a narcissistic collapse. I was headed for that kind of collapse due to bodily failure, I physically can’t keep containment like I used to, and trying was literally killing me, which is the only reason I’m even trying to heal in the first place instead of just keeping up containment until I die: it’s the only option left, besides slowly unraveling until I completely lose control. (And please keep in mind, “containment” involved an ENORMOUS amount of drinking, like 3-5 handles of liquor a WEEK.) So to avoid that outcome, I have to do this work, and the tangle gets smaller and it hurts less overall as I do, and over time I can get down to those mother wounds and heal them too - and they’ll be much less red fkn hot as the rest of the tangle clears away.
This is already borne out in my experience: as I re-experience things in different ways than I experienced before, and connect those experiences deeper and deeper to unlearn the now-maladaptive lessons driving my now-maladaptive behaviors, I have to spend less fkn effort keeping those behaviors in check because the triggers are less triggering. I’ve said before that as I heal, joy becomes more joyful and pain becomes more painful, because I’m feeling my feelings more fully. And at the same time, triggers become *less* triggering, because the tangle is smaller than it used to be. I’m experiencing this firsthand, I’m just also paradoxically experiencing more breaches in containment because this multiphase cyclical healing bullshit sometimes doesn’t go perfectly smoothly. Fuck me, right?
Thank the stars my family has the good sense to stand firm when I freak out for no real good reason, and the loving kindness to welcome me back with open arms when I come to my senses and apologize for my harmful behaviors. I’ve said before that being the black sheep in my family, is better than being the golden child in any family I can think of. This sort of grace is exactly why I say that.
And every time I receive that grace, I pray I never need it again. So I keep working, to forestall the next one as long as possible, by healing as much as I possibly can in the meantime.
This is what I do, instead of taking pills every day. This is the work I decided to undertake, rather than seek a medical solution that might further compromise my capacities (as such solutions have done in the past) and still leave me miserable anyway.
That’s about enough for now outta me.
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PS - I’d like to point out that, as much as I complain about my family (as anyone might), the fact is that they make mistakes from time to time and so does fuckin’ everyone. OK? No matter who I have for a family, they’ll sometimes step on my toes, cuz that’s something that just happens from time to time when you’re walking around other people. I just have broken toes that have never had time to properly heal and blah blah blah. That’s not their fault, it’s the Dragon Queen’s fault, and invisible wounds are invisible - especially when nobody knew back then that the trauma started when I was 3yo. I got SUPER unlucky and the world conspired against me to put me in a wonderfully loving family with invisible wounds that I couldn’t adequately describe and which professionals consistently misconstrued. None of that is the fault of the family and teachers who still all did their best, despite me having wounds beyond their understanding. I am describing the painful circumstances of my cosmicly bad luck, not blaming my family for my chronically bad feelings.
