CAPTAIN'S BLOG
In my last post, I described in detail the causes and effects that having a neurological disorder brings.
For the less detail oriented out there - for the people in crisis, or who are just now discovering that their partner or parent has a Cluster B disorder that is strong enough to negatively impact their relationships, the why is probably less important than the "What to do". So what ought one do if they are close to someone who is hurting them emotionally because of their inability to control their behaviour? Obviously this depends on lots of variables, and everyone needs to make the choice that feels right to them. In general, I recommend that people follow their heart. After my ex was diagnosed with BPD after a bad reaction to antidepressants, I read all about BPD and what to do about it. If you're here, you're probably in the middle of this process. And there's really not a lot of good news. It takes years of hard work to control, in the meantime practically anything can happen, as I experienced with my ex, and overall their inability to control their emotions and actions makes life harder, either through actual emotional abuse to those around them through outbursts, arguments, fights, and conflict, the fear of which creates the "Walking on Eggshells" effect that so many talk about. Despite all of this bad news, I decided to stay with my ex because, unfortunately, I loved her a great deal. I say unfortunately here because I fell in love with someone different than the person who woke up after taking their new antidepressant for the first time. That's not a common scenario - most people meet someone who has had BPD for their entire life. My ex definitely had some anger and emotional control issues before, but nothing like what happened after the Mirtazapine. And there's a long waitlist for help. She didn't do any self-help as recommended by her doctor. Over time, she got worse, not better. Then one day, she "split" me - the technique of splitting is common with people with BPD, and it occurs when people decide between someone being entirely trustworthy or entirely untrustworthy. There is no middle ground for people with influential BPD, as you may have noticed. This is a dangerous component of people with Cluster B disorders - one day there's nothing to fear, the next day everything of hers and much (or all) of your things are gone. The vindictiveness that comes from splitting is a truly powerful force, and it must be respected and protected against no matter your relationship status. Know where your valuables - both monetarily and emotionally - are, and check on them. My ex even threatened to steal my dispensary card and tried to revoke my membership. "Just to deprive you of it" she said. And this was long before she split me. There's lots of advice for what to do if you decide to stay with someone who has BPD or a similar neurological disorder. This post contains some. I also recommend the /r/bpdlovedones subreddit. But the only "good" advice is just to follow your heart. I just couldn't bring myself to abandon that wonderful woman I met one summer after she sent me a "Hey, what's up?" on OKCupid, even though that person died the moment the Mirtazapine hit her brain. It took me a year to convince me that the woman I loved was truly gone. Following your heart doesn't mean staying with someone who makes you unhappy - it means be honest with yourself and do what you can to be happy. There is lots of love in my heart and I'm happy to share it with people who need more understanding than your average person. But I do have my boundaries, and you do too, dear reader, and when those boundaries are crossed, you need to demand that they be respected. I let my boundaries relax because of how deeply I was in love with my ex. I was in love with another woman as well, who my ex and I met together, but they didn't get along like Marion and I do, so they broke up. I tried my hardest to get them to be at least friends, but my ex's BPD made it nearly impossible to maintain any kind of healthy polyamorous relationship, which was a violation of my boundaries. I tried to get some distance while staying together, to give her space to grow and heal, but she either didn't understand or didn't want that, but she sure made her choice clear. Well, this was supposed to be a tl;dr that is now on its 3rd or 4th page, so I'll make a tldr for my tldr: Tl;dr: Follow your heart. Set and keep boundaries. Don't be lax with your boundaries. And most importantly, be honest with yourself. Stay if you want to stay, leave if you want to leave. As a great man once said: "Above all else, to thine own self, be true."
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I have loved many people with neurological personality orders in my life, and I've been close to many more, including myself. Perhaps there is an as-yet undiagnosed personality disorder rattling around in my head - or maybe my ADHD is as disruptive in my interpersonal life as it is with my work life, making an additional disorder unnecessary.
I know what it is like both to struggle with impulses, thoughts, and feelings that are hard or impossible to control. To be so overwhelmed with emotional intensity as to have no other recourse but to relieve it directly, regardless of the consequences. I've been an angry teenage boy punching holes in the walls, and a heartbroken teenage girl experiencing terrible emotional pain crying for hours for weeks at a time. Trying to make people love me - and trying to hurt people any way I can. Trying to seek help any way I can - and trying to protect myself anyway I can. Sacrificing too much to get too little, while the people without disorders look on in confusion. It can be hard for onlookers to understand the nature and impact of someone's disorder on their behaviour. It can be even harder to figure out what to do about it - oftentimes the person seems locked into behaving a certain way. No matter the input, the output remains the same. Rage, sadness, or anxiety of a level that your average person has never experienced. The way that these emotions twist the behaviours of people in the moment, and over time, is what is often misunderstood, and what is wanted to be understood by people like me and the people I've loved. Read More for my thoughts on what people ought to know about the people in their lives with a personality disorder of one sort or another. How should we treat our friends, family, and loved ones who have the type of disorders that make it hard to love them? How should we feel when we decide someone isn't in the right place for us to stay near them? Millions of people across the world are faced with this very decision - whether that behavioural disorder is among the Cluster B personality disorders, one of the other categories, or comes with the falsely legitimizing label of "Religion". Is there an illusion of choice? Is this question any different from asking about the illusion of free will?
We know that we are not free in the broad sense because we cannot do that which does not occur to us, and that which does occur to us bubbles up from our subconscious in a way which we cannot control or be held responsible for. But most people's experience carries the feeling of choice. We have options, and we discern between them, and arrive on a conclusion. From what we're doing that day to what hair dye to get to investigating what our level of mental stability is like. Sometimes we're curbing our fights so we don't get into an argument before work - but sometimes, we don't. What is the operating function here? More fascinatingly - what is the chemistry like for someone choosing between two alternatives? There must be an accumulation of two competing chemical reactions. Perhaps different inputs from the brain feed into these reactions, growing or shrinking their chemical potential depending on how the other parts of the brain influence the reaction with neural activity. So you're choosing which park to go to. Maybe you go to the park at the bottom of the hill by the community garden, or maybe you go to the far park with the bench. You size things up: The first park is much more proximate than the other. The parts of my brain that might care about such things feed into the reaction, growing it. Maybe I reconsider how much I care about proximation, and the two chemical reactions equalize somewhat. Still other factors are factored in - I took that pretty redhead to the close park, but the second park is nicer and going there with Marion always feels special. The first park has raspberries right next door. The second park has more people, so that sucks, but today I'm feeling social - you get the idea. So the decision that is made is still composed of physical processes just like our sense of consciousness itself is. Whatever is controlling the brain and its ability to choose, it is based upon the physical structures and principles of the brain. This means that the this choice process is probably at least somewhat local in nature - it may not be a brain structure itself, but maybe a race condition between these two chemicals which are influenced by the regions of the brain invested in that decision. But what is to be made of neurological disorders - why is it that some people seem to have more freedom of choice than others? Would You Leave Your Partner If You Found Someone Who Was A Better Match? Or: Monogamy Vs Polyamory7/10/2016 This is one of the bazillions of questions asked by the OKCupid dating site.
I think it was worded somewhat more precisely like this: "If you met someone who was a better match for while in a dedicated relationship, would you pursue that person?" And my answer was Yes. And I would really expect anyone to do this if the same happened to them. This doesn't mean that I don't believe in commitment or working to make things work. In fact, I believe in them very much - I don't automatically think that the ways in which two people don't get along means it's not worth working at. The nature of gradual change works with this, as people tend to change gradually instead of suddenly, cushioning the shock of when people change for the worse, instead of the better. Often, some reflection can reveal a startling delta between the person one first met and the person they are with now. But here's where polyamoury comes into it, and changes everything, from a heartless and irrational endeavour to a loving and rational one. As some of you may know, CBS recently changed their rules for transwomen who donated blood.
I've previously been denied access to blood donation because of my trans identity, even though I only had one sexual partner at the time. Because - and despite of - the fact that she was a post-op transfemale, they still considered our relationship "Male on Male" and thus denied me access to donation services, as male on male sex is at high risk for transmission of HIV, and the transfemale population apparently has a higher than average HIV infection rate. These sound legitimate reasons to change the way we handle transwomen who want to donate blood, but certainly not at all in the way that CBS has done lately, which appears to be searching for irrelevant information to care about. Now, transpeople are evaluated based on their surgery status, and are once again placed into "Male on Male" or "Male on Female" boxes based on their sexual organs. This reliance on gendered terms, for one thing, is inherently offensive because it is so misleading. The blood donation community should not be so afraid of asking someone if they receive or give unprotected or protected anal sex, vaginal sex, non-penetrative sex, or whatever. I am not certain of the medical veracity of relying on anal sex to be a predictor of HIV - vaginas transmit HIV at about the same likelihood as assholes do. It doesn't make any sense to have unprotected vaginal sex instead of anal sex in an effort to prevent the transmission of HIV. It also doesn't make sense to differentiate between people who have anal sex and those who don't. I'm also very disappointed that the CBS is sticking with their argument that /because/ transwomen are at high risk for HIV they need to be treated fundamentally differently. We are extremely good at detecting infections in harvested blood, so frankly I just don't think the level of concern is entirely worthwhile. All incoming blood must be screened. All outgoing blood also needs to be screened before it's given to anyone. Maybe we should run tests again once it's been in storage for a bit. Given that we test the blood so often, filtering out large numbers of people who seem like they are at risk but aren't - even if 25% of transwomen in Canada have HIV, 75% do not - seems a little unnecessary. At the very least, if we are to deny or restrict transwomen as a class of people from donating blood, it shouldn't have anything to do with our surgical status. Sexual history is a relevant predictor for people with infections, so denying us based on that is allright - but now we're denying 'some person' from donating blood because of their sexual history, not because of their surgical status. These new rules are an embarrassment to Canadian Blood Services, and to Canadians as a whole. We are proud of our inclusiveness and secular reasoning, and the world has recognized us for our friendliness, understanding, and willingness to accommodate. We also have a pretty badass military history. And ended slavery without a war. And legalized gay marriage without much fuss. Now all we need to do is figure out what to do with transpeople (hint: listen to what we say instead of making decisions for and without us) and marijuana (hint: Legalize it, including unregulated home growing for personal use.) and we'll deserve a little bit more of the respect so many in the world have for us. |
AuthorChristina Hitchens is a trans female writer living in BC, Canada. She loves computers, animals, and a good argument. Archives
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