BPD?

I returned from the psychiatrist’s appointment yesterday afternoon and watched my friend Summer’s Border Personality Disorder vlog again and I must have cried for thirty minutes, every image, every line, check, check, check, check.  Then I went to Google images and Pinterest looking at even more images and lines and traits, check, check, check, check, check…… at one point I couldn’t read or see the images because of the tears pouring from my eyes.  I had recently taken several online assessments that indicated a strong likelihood. of BPD. Bottom line, I think I found me!  I will have more answers next week after I see my therapist Wednesday afternoon. After all this time and all this pain and confusion I believe I have finally found myself and,  it hurts.  And it is scary. I am so triggered right now. I am so screwed up.  To see it there, in black and white and color, is hard to take, to wrap my head around but it explains things. It makes sense.  That being said I am not a mental health professional. Several nights ago I was explaining BPD to M and showing her Summer’s vlog and she just started bobbing her head as I read off a bunch of the traits murmuring  “Oh, Yea!”over and over again. I trust her judgement a lot more than mine.  And then there is this:

Low Affection and Harsh Parenting.  Bingo!  The pieces are falling together.  So now what? The medication is going to take much longer than I expected.  I gave a urine sample for a drug screen and I have to contact my Nephrologist and Cardiologist to get their clearance for the medications the Psychiatrist is considering prescribing.  Another month.  The good news is that the med for Attention Deficit Disorder, Strattera is also effective in treating depression in some folks so Barney might get a Twofer!  Yaay!  Hope so, the last thing I need is more meds. 

 

At least I may be on my way to some answers, in any event the only thing I know to do is to lean on my Hope and Faith. No one ever promised me this journey would be easy.

 

 

 

I love You, I do!

 

I love you, I do

Words that haunt me

Regret to my core

I failed in my vows

To love, honor and cherish

My chosen wife

Recently pondering

The failures in my life

I wondered

Do I know how?

Am I capable?

Of loving my wife?

With God’s help

I can

If I learn to live in my heart

Not in my head

I Love you my Beautiful

I Really Do!

 

For M, just a little early for Valentine’s’ Day but I couldn’t hold it in!

XOXO Barney

 

Leaking

Two weeks ago at my last at my last therapy appointment I shared with Frank (my therapist) that I found myself crying all the time. He asked me to start journaling the details whenever it occurred to help understand what is triggering it. I am a terrible at journaling. This is as close as I get to journaling and I don’t post here anywhere near as often as I think about doing so. However I did start paying more attention to the crying jags when they occurred and that is when I realized that I just simply leak emotion (in the form of tears) when presented with any type of emotional situation, happy, sad, real or contrived through TV etc.  My response to the tiniest emotional situation is to start crying and I don’t mean a tear or two, it’s a flood in most cases.

Now, intellectually, I’m guessing it’s just decades of emotion that I tamped down that is now starting to surface because I have to some degree become OK with it. And I believe some of  it is grief. Grieving all the mistakes I’ve made, the hurt and shame that I have piled on my wife M and myself but especially her. Some of it is coming to grips with my mental illness. Man that sounds weird, awful even. Admitting you have a mental illness to yourself is difficult, admitting it to others is even more difficult.  One of my Blogger Buddies recently told me that she thought I was exhibiting some traits of Borderline Personality Disorder.  Today after watching her vlog on BPD which you can find here I overdosed on BPD videos on YouTube. I think she is on to something.  Although I don’t exhibit the extremes traits I do identify with so so many of them. Some of them I don’t have now but I did when I was younger and they were the traits I would consider more extreme, risk taking. etc.  I’m guessing that as I have gotten older I have learned coping strategies that have helped me live this long.  Yea, suicidal ideation has never completely gone away, an ever-present whisper that I have learned to ignore. Is there such a thing as borderline Borderline Personality Disorder?

I have been stewing in all of these thoughts and a myriad of others today because tomorrow I finally get to see a psychiatrist for a medication evaluation. I have my fingers crossed.  Barney doesn’t know what it feels like to be on an even keel. Life is an emotional roller coaster and since I have embarked on this attempt to salvage my marriage and deal with my addiction it has become a Mega-Coaster.  Wish me well.

 

 

Overwhelmed, Decisions to make

Well, sadly, I have come to the crossroads that all bloggers seem to come to at some point. Picking and choosing who to continue to follow.  I detest this, I really do, but my blogosphere experience has become overwhelming.  If anyone one has noticed that Barney has been a little quiet this last week or so it’s because I have become overwhelmed. At the present time I follow sixty-three blogs. Not surprisingly I can’t keep up! And I feel bad when I can’t even give a post a quick once over and click on like.  That’s not how Barney rolls.  I read and reread, mull it over a bit and then take some time to think about a comment before I push post. It is too much and too hard because I like reading what all sixty-three of you have to say.  I started following each and every one of you because something you said resonated in my core. So for my own well being I have decided that I have to thin out my following list and this will not be easy.  In my head I’m thinking I need to get it down to thirty but I don’t know.  Some of you are prolific and others not so much, that just makes it more difficult.  All this to say:

This hurts, it really does, it has just become too unmanageable. If you see that I have disappeared from your follow list please don’t take it personal.  I will probably be dropping in from time to time to see whats’up!

Blessings, Barney

 

 

 

>less than<

(Trigger Warning)

It was an extremely emotional time for me last night at my recovery group meeting. The topic was “Facing the Mother wound.”But before I go any further let me stop and start here.  All of my life from my earliest memories, which are not very early,  I have felt, for the lack of a better term, “less than.” I struggle to think of a time when I ever felt that I fit in, that I was truly a member of the gang, one of the guys, that I had found my tribe.  I always felt less than, like I didn’t measure up, that I didn’t belong.  Even today with forty-four plus years in the adult world I still struggle with finding my place, feeling that I am worth anything, that I matter to anyone.  It is a horrible, horrible painful existence that I share with pretty much no one.  This is about as much as I have ever talked about this with anyone other than my therapist and I gotta say the tears are flowing like a river.

It takes so much energy to get up every day and act like everything’s normal, Ok.  It is not OK and I have no idea what normal really is? I’m on a roller coaster, either on the summit or in a dip ,a low from which I am never sure I will ever climb out.  The transitions are all too short and nothing that I could categorize as normal, I’m not sure I would recognize it if I saw it.  And with all of this going on in my head I still served honorably in the Navy and retired from twenty-five years in law enforcement with numerous decorations and a Life Saving Citation of which, I think I am most proud.  I wonder what that young man did with his life after we took the knife off of him.

I struggle a lot, always in my head where no one can see. Rejection is my enemy and HSP me sees it everywhere.  Over the years the “You can’t do anything right” that I learned from my father evolved into you won’t do anything right, you won’t be successful, you are not supposed to be happy, you don’t deserve anything and finally to Life Sucks and then you Die. And even though as a christian I know in my head that it is a lie straight from the pits of hell, that message has yet to get to my heart. Today I am trying to wrap my head around and accept the fact that I have mental health diseases called depression and anxiety.  It would be more acceptable and easier to explain if I had Leprosy.  The fact that I still manage to function and hide it so well probably doesn’t help.  And then there is that whole Christianity thing that says christians are supposed to be above mental illness, what a crock of @#&%!  Jesus Suffered!  What more do I need to say! Oh, how about this, Jesus Wept!

So, back to the group last night.  When I was reading the homework assignment I was a bit confused, after all, my issues are with my father.  The reading was basically about early childhood development, concerning the first three years of life and especially the first year when most of the mother/child bonding takes place and the infant developes its’ “sense of being.” I got along fine with my mom, no memories of abuse, neglect etc. Then my eyes were opened with some slides that the group leader had us read out loud at the beginning of the meeting.  The last slide really spoke to me on two points, the first being that women are rarely mentally/emotionally healthy and capable of really bonding with their child and imparting a healthy “sense of being” when they are married to a spouse who is not mentally /emotionally healthy themselves. And secondly that broken people marry broken people (with exceptions of course).  My eyes were opened  Then I remembered when my therapist asked me if my mother was very affectionate? Whoa! Not so Much!  I mean she wasn’t mean or any of those other things but I can’t say that in those first fourteen years of my life that my needs for love and acceptance were really met.  And that reminds me of how I didn’t receive any therapeutic help after my suicide attempt at age sixteen,  I don’t blame my mom, I know she loved me but she had her hands full, a single mother with four kids who lost her husband while serving overseas in a foreign country. The man she married shortly before I made the suicide attempt turned out to be an alcoholic.  Yea, she had it rough, all of us did. All of this should be enough to remind me that we live in a lost and broken world.

As we wrapped up for the evening we broke up into groups to pray for each other. I requested prayer for revelation concerning my mother but my small group leader, pointing to and tapping on the note I had written in the margin of the homework, “less than!” said he felt led to pray over this. I lost it, I sobbed and shuddered for ten minutes while he and other laid hands on me and prayed for me. I am sobbing and shuddering even now, last night all over again, as I type these words. Why is it so hard for me to open my heart to receive the love that my Father in Heaven has for me?  I don’t know but his I do know, when the tears are gone it feels good, at the very least a little bit of the weight, the pain and suffering is gone. I have come to realize this is a process and it will take some time so I want to leave you with this, the inspiration for my blog name:

Psalm 40:1-3  The Living Bible 

40 I waited patiently for God to help me; then he listened and heard my cry. ² He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out from the bog and the mire, and set my feet on a hard, firm path, and steadied me as I walked along. ³ He has given me a new song to sing, of praises to our God. Now many will hear of the glorious things he did for me, and stand in awe before the Lord, and put their trust in him. 

 

Boston Strong

Last night my wife and I watched “Patriots Day” at a local cinema and I am still filled with pride and emotion.  If you don’t know or perhaps just missed the trailers playing every couple of hours on the tube, “Patriot Day” is the story of the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15th of 2013. It is a very accurate chronological depiction (almost documentarian in nature) of the events of that day and the four and half days after that ended with the capture of the last surviving bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The other suspect,  Dzhokhar’s older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed hours earlier in a massive shoot-out with the Watertown police in a residential neighborhood approximately seven miles from the bombing site at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

I was filled  with emotion throughout the movie. I was born in Boston in February of 1954 at the Chelsea Naval Hospital and I am a retired Law Enforcement Officer as well as a U.S. Navy Veteran. After leaving the Boston area and traveling around the globe with my Navy family we settled in southern Maine two hours north of Boston where I finished out school and then took the enlistment myself. Patriotism kinda runs in my blood. What touched me most about the film was the indomitable spirit of all of those involved, not the least of which were the victims who showed such grit and courage in their long recovery process.   The actions of the bystanders, victims and first responders during those events is awe-inspiring. The tenacity of both the federal and local law enforcement agencies made me proud.

I am not a fan of gratuitous graphic violence and gore in the movies but having said that the movie does have two scenes that are shocking in their realistic recreations of both the pressure cookers explosions at the finish line and the shoot-out in Watertown and rightfully so. I can only imagine how much worse the reality of those events really was.

As the movie ended my wife and I sat, still stunned by this recreation of such a tragic event and watched the credits roll.  I couldn’t help but overhear the young man seated to my right asking his lady friend if she had cried. She responded “No,” and then I piped up “I did.” She then asked if I was from Boston and I told her I was born in Chelsea. In the short conversation that followed I learned that both she and her male friend were from Boston and that her friend has a buddy who is a Lieutenant on BPD. I had to ask him if the shootout in Watertown was as accurate or violent as depicted  and he told me that according to his friend it certainly was. I shake my head in amazement at the heroic and selfless acts of these officers who ran towards, not away from, these monsters. I will not give away any more of the movie or even say that this one scene is reason to see the movie because that would denigrate the work of all of the other heroes who worked so diligently to bring the Tsarnaev monsters to justice.  Just see the movie!

I am so blessed to have been born in the United States of America.  I am proud to be an American, to be connected in any way with the city of Boston and her people and to have served with some of the finest men and women this country has to offer in both Law Enforcement and the U.S. Military. I would be remiss if I didn’t also give a shout-out to the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox!

 I am not Roger Ebert but Barney gives “Patriots Day” Two Thumbs Up!

 

In Remembrance…

Post script:  In addition to the three fatal victims of the bombing and Officer Collier who was shot to death in cold blood at MIT Boston.Com reported that 264 others reported to local hospitals for treatment.  Also,  Google Images has some photos of the bombing aftermath.  Viewers beware! They are extremely graphic!

“Clinging to Hope and Faith”

This is something altogether new for me, actually two new things, writing a blog post in response to the daily prompt and writing when I am relatively happy.  See there! I had to qualify happy because claiming I am happy would be unlike me, the eternal optimistic pessimist, whatever that means.  Not even sure how to link this but I’m going to charge ahead anyhoo! 

Normally when I see the daily prompt pop up in the reader I dismiss it but today’s really resonated with me.  I am known to sign emails and sometimes even comments with Hope and Faith.  More often than not I am hanging on to Hope and Faith by my fingernails or with a white-knuckled death grip. Often believing simply that if I live long enough or if just enough time passes by that things, and by that I mean, my depression and anxiety, my ADD, my relationship with my wife or my sexless marriage or even my porn addiction will take a turn for the better.  Sometimes all I have and I mean, ALL I have, is Hope and Faith and not much of that.

Now when I started this blog I did not want it to be a Quote/Unquote Christian Blog.  Some of the ones I had seen were too Pie in the Sky, Peachy Keen for me.  More often than not life is not a bed of roses and pain-free, even if there are those who profess the contrary.  My life has been filled with pain and suffering, debilitating depression and constant thoughts of suicide. I wanted my writing to be real, honest and when I think necessary,  terribly blunt but more than that I wanted it to be real. I have issues, flaws, I have made some terrible mistakes in my life and to be frank, I don’t want to end that way. I have decided that I want to finish strong. I want to get back on my feet and get in the race.

So that means taking on real life; a failing relationship, a sexless marriage, like I mean no Whoopee! for twenty years, yea I know, time passes quickly when you are not having fun, an addiction to porn and compulsive masturbation, Major Depressive Disorder and General Anxiety Disorder, shall I go on?  No? Ok, let’s just say I am a mess.  Only recently I have become Ok with that and by that I mean I can accept it.  Rome wasn’t built in a day, my addictions aren’t simply going to disappear overnight without  a lot of struggle and work on my part, I certainly won’t have the perfect marriage by next week and my wife isn’t going to suddenly strip off while dragging me into the bedroom while yelling “I need you Baby, Now!”  But one can certainly dream! Oh Yea!  One can dream, or would that be a fantasy?!

In any event I am going to cling to my Hope and Faith, finger-tip, white-knuckled death grip and all. As for being a Christian Blog.  I am a Believer, a sinner saved by Grace, and I will not deny my God and the fact that He is at work in my life, working a miracle in my heart if  you will. You can take that any way you want but I do want to leave you with this.

So now how do I link this, is that to the daily prompt in the reader? I have no clue, I’m not sure but I will give that a shot, if I am wrong and you do want to comment please do so through my email at outofthebogandthemire@gmail.com   Daily prompt link

 

Spike in Alcohol Consumption

Haha! Just got back from Wally World  to stock up on a few items to weather the storm. Did I say storm?  How about Blizzard?  Lots of snow and 40 knot winds on the coast. First time I’ve heard that term since the storm in March of 1980, yea, I have a little bit of mileage on me. Here in the mid-atlantic they are talking 12-15 inches, maybe 18 inches in some places but then again I can change the channel and get something different.

I listened to the local weather at 6:30 and the anchor signed off by advising everyone to stock up on beer. I had to laugh and then got up and told M I was heading to the grocery store. I’m guessing 5,00o other residents of our fair resort city did the same thing and judging by the lines at Wally World we all went to the same store. Haha! We passed the time trading recipes for cocktails and wine coolers.  I’m guessing some people should be buying condoms because the maternity wards will be busy in nine months and their memory will be real fuzzy.  Which leads me to my purchase, a six pack of Bud Light platinum, and a Seagram’s Peach Fuzzy Navel.  Gonna be a lot of drunken navel exploration going on in the near future.

I’m guessing this is how the navel exploration will be fueled! Beer Pong! Haha! Stay thirsty my friend and warm.

ARRGGHHH, I Could Scream!!!

I am soo pissed off right now. I just got off the phone with the therapist’s office and they have no record of my appointment Saturday afternoon. I made the appointment a month ago to get evaluated for medication so I can get some help with my depression and anxiety.  I have been waiting a month for this. It took me about a month to finally tell my therapist that I thought I needed a medication. I mulled it over way too long because I have heard so many horror stories from other bloggers about negative side effects and having to try med after med to find something that would work. And I thought I was doing the right thing by calling to confirm the appointment.  We are expected to get five inches of snow or more on Saturday and I knew the office would be shut down.  This town shuts down if we get a dusting and don’t get me started about the half-brained drivers. So I called hoping to get a cancellation today or tomorrow. Instead I get  “Sorry, we don’t have any record of your appointment.”

Proper form would probably dictate that I not start a new paragraph here but I really needed to take a deep breath so the space there, that’s just me taking a deep breath. The string of expletives that shot through my mind are not fit to be printed here. Fortunately my mind was in control of the tongue and woman on the other has no idea just how pissed I am!  So after releasing my death grip on kitchen counter where I was standing I decided I needed to vent, Err, blog.  Then searching google images I found Buddha’s quote, so much truth to that.  Plus I’m now munching on a buttered blueberry bagel and sipping on a hot cup of Chocolate Nut Caramel Breakfast Blend from Bean Traders beanroasters and coffeeslingers of Durham, North Carolina.  Yuum.  I love visiting Bean Traders every time we visit my daughter in Durham. So, all that to say Barn is in a better place and all the steam that I released is keeping the coffee warm.  Haha!  🙂

But seriously how do they do that?  All day long they deal with people who have all kinds of mental health issues and they screw up a simple appointment.  Don’t they have a clue the kind of effect it has on the patients?  Oh, they did find room for me early afternoon Monday but that means I miss a day of work and I was told it was a “Fit-in” so they will probably rush me in an out.  Guess I will be asking about Anger Management classes too!

Ironic, I have been dealing with anger in therapy too.  Anger towards myself, my mother and father, and my wife M. My therapist told me that M was enabling my porn addiction, if I was meeting my needs with porn then she wouldn’t have to.  That pissed me off too!  So I’m looking at porn and fantasizing that it is her and she is good with it because she doesn’t have to be with me. Makes me want to cry, more. Maybe this is TMI but when I look at porn it is women my age, amateurs, women whose bodies tell a story, a life story, there is real beauty in that.  What it comes down to is I don’t want these other women I want to make love to my wife!  Porn is a dangerous painkiller and a very poor substitute for a real emotional, physical and yes, a spiritual relationship with your spouse. And now I am sad!

All I have left is my Hope and Faith. I am a sinner saved by Grace and I thank God that His Mercies are new everyday!

Barney Returns Part II

One of my blogger besties told me awhile back that there is something to be learned from a relapse or mental health crisis.  Be it a trigger that we were unaware of or a new coping mechanism to deal with the inevitable.  This last month or so I have been totally overwhelmed mentally, emotionally and even spiritually.  I should have seen it coming,  I was warned by the leaders in my recovery group, the reading material and even my therapist.  The magnitude of this latest depressive episode was something I hadn’t experienced in years. I was drowning in a sea of worthlessness, failure and despair.  And being a christian who suffers with depression at Christmas just made it that much worse. All of my “issues” just piled up on top of me and drove me down and down and down. Coming to terms with all of these, Major Depressive Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, a Highly Sensitive Person trait, a sexless marriage and a sex addiction (porn) was just too much.  Thankfully I have been out of work during this period of time.  Sounds weird right? I know, but it was truly for the best.  I was supposed to start a driving job more than a month ago but it kept getting put off for a whole slew of reasons but now I see my God’s hand in it.  Had I started when I was promised I very likely would have lost this job.  God is good!

I always knew I suffered from depression ever since my suicide attempt at age sixteen but I never seriously attempted to deal with it or even learn about it and now I am. It is not easy to admit to myself or others that I have a mental health disease or two or three.  The stigma that it carries is unpleasant at best and my particular cocktail of disorders and traits seem to exacerbate each other, they have a form of synergism that just seems to elevate the negative.  And yet I have to believe that God knew exactly what he was doing when he wired my brain the way he did.  I have always been highly sensitive and have had the ability to put myself in the shoes of another and at times to literally feel their pain, especially emotionally. This has only increased in these last few years.  Recently I discovered that I am a HSP (Highly Sensitive Person). A trait that is found in approximately 15-20% of the population. You can find out more about HSP  and if you may have the trait by going here.

I have learned that being a HSP does have a positive side.  In my church I oversee the Audio/Media Ministry.  I have a passion for sound and in particular mixing Live sound.  I don’t play an instrument so the mixer is my instrument.  Taking all the inputs from the worship team (Contemporary) and creating something beautiful and pleasing to God is just magic.  But that is just a small part of what I do in the sound booth.  When I am seated behind the mixer I become sensitive to absolutely everything in the sanctuary. I have learned over time to deal with absolutely everything and anything that I perceive can be distracting to anyone attending the service.  The last thing I want to happen is for someone to be distracted when the Holy Spirit is attempting to minister to them or teach them.   Because of this I become aware of everything both sonically, visually and even aesthetically.

One other way it has benefited me was when I worked as a Drug Abuse Resistance Education Instructor and School Resource Officer at the Middle School level.  Middle School kids can be crazy.  They are all over the map emotionally, not knowing who they are , why they are or where they are going.  But I loved them. I found I could empathize with them at a very turbulent time in their lives and found myself to be very popular in the counselor’s office both among the students and the counselors.  My nine years in that one middle school will always be regarded as the high point of my career and something I will always be proud of.

During this time when I retreated into my shell I missed two events that to this day I regret.  My church Men’s group christmas dinner, which ironically was my idea and Christmas day and dinner in my own home.  In both instances I just couldn’t bear to be with people, even my own family and especially during a time when everyone was expected to be happy and Hunky-Dory.  I was anything but happy but the pressure to be happy and grateful during Christmas is almost unbearable.

So about those life lessons, I am learning to be still and to listen for that wee small voice in the recesses of my mind.  I got up early listen this morning and went into the kitchen to get some juice while thinking about missing the men’s group dinner when He spoke to me.

“You should have gone.” He said.  “You have everything and everyone you need!”

And then I realized, I did. I should have gone, even in the funk I was in, and told them before dinner began what I was going through and asked for their love and prayers. That would have broken the back of the enemy who was conspiring to keep me down.

I do have everything I need, my blogger buddies, my men’s group and church family, the guys in my recovery group who uniquely know the shame and guilt that are part and parcel of any form of sex addiction, all of whom love me and support me unconditionally.  Finally there is my Father in Heaven and His son Jesus who died for our sin and to set us free.  He alone is the true source of the love that I so desperately need.

As Charles Dickens’ once wrote and gave voice to through Tiny Tim, “God Bless You Everyone!”  And I would like to add, “Thank You!” from the bottom of my heart.