it's tragic in a way when people don't get diagnosed early because there are many things that are affected in their life their relationships their work their relationship with their themselves the things that they try to dream about or try to do all that is impacted all that is affected and it is hard to tell people who have tried to reach out and try to find help to try again and try again but that's the way we find it eventually so my name is lisa parker and my diagnosis is borderline personality disorder i've been in and out of the mental health system since about 17 and really trying to find and understand myself and why my life was so stressful and why i was having such a difficult time personally professionally and really i didn't get accurately diagnosed until about five years ago so that was a breakthrough for me was to find a clinician who within two sessions was giving me books about borderline personality disorder and reading the books it was seeing myself in those pages and recognizing the places that i was the symptoms that i was experiencing and what they were causing me to do in my life so that was the beginning of my recovery was being diagnosed and being diagnosed accurately so what it's like to live with bpd is having these overwhelming emotions and not being able to control them it means being hot and cold on people it means feeling betrayed easily it means feeling abandoned and that is the key for me is the feeling of abandonment that i felt for so many years losing friends having difficulty in the workplace those are things that happen because i wasn't regulated my emotions was weren't regulated and i wasn't able to see what was going on i was looking for answers i was looking to figure out what was wrong with me but i would go to different clinicians and would get diagnosed with depression or anxiety but never with borderline and i think it's hard in some ways because it is a very stigmatized [Music] mental illness just the name of it borderline personality disorder you have a personality disorder that's fundamental to who you are to your sense of self and i think that's hard for me it's still hard for me to say that i generally will say bpd or borderline i don't generally say borderline personality disorder because i don't want that other person to have the knee-jerk reaction of oh then you know something must be really off with you something must be incredibly wrong with you so i learned about this form of therapy that's called dialectical behavioral therapy so it uses mindfulness techniques it helps you with interpersonal relationships it talks about how you can regulate your emotions which i desperately needed have desperately needed all my life and looking at distress tolerance ways to calm down when the emotions run high and went to a group that was about dbt and for about a year went through all the worksheets and all the discussions and hearing from other people their their stories as borderlines was really helpful to me and i think was mutually so we got a lot from each other i don't know anyone else with my diagnosis so it was great to be with other people who could relate and kind of laugh at some of the things that are heartbreaking in the moment but when you know someone can really understand kind of that space and that situation you can laugh about it it's it's very supportive laughter and you know we take ourselves very seriously so it's fun when we get to actually laugh about ourselves a little bit so was taking really those um you know all those worksheets and all the discussions and really practicing it in my daily life it doesn't work unless you practice it so um i've learned that the hard way too so my recovery hasn't been like this it's been like this but it the trajectory is is upward so that i feel pleased about if i hadn't found the therapist that i did and found someone who was trained in dbt i would still be floundering i would still be in the very early stages of recovery i wouldn't be in my recovery if i hadn't found those people and it took a long road to get there you know reach out for help and if it's not for you or you don't feel like that's right for you that's okay go and find someone else go and find another place go you know find an online community that you can connect with [Music] three symptoms of bpd that don't get talked about very much one would be black and white thinking so something is this or it's this and the gradation when our emotions get high goes away so either a friend is the best friend we've ever had the most wonderful friend or the friend that betrayed us in some ways i think the sense of not having a steady identity so feeling a lot of emptiness and loneliness feeling those feelings is also part of borderline personality disorder people talk a lot about self-harm but i think something that people don't talk about as much as risky behaviors driving fast promiscuity you know doing things that are not in your best interest for your good health i think that would be i would say that's something that doesn't get discussed as much as i think it should be especially for younger people who are they're laying down the tracks of their lives with these risky behaviors and overwhelmed emotions and it's hard to get a good start without while all that's going on so i found nami by just looking around searching the net for support groups for ideas to read blog the blogs that they provide just really to to learn more about my mental illness and see other what other people were talking about with their mental illnesses i love reading the blog i find the nami blog to be really really helpful even if it's about a different mental illness just some of the similarities across mental illnesses the isolation the frustration the fear the loneliness the hiding you know trying to hide your mental illness because of how people might react to it i really feel that my own recovery has been enriched by reading the words of other people and how they've struggled with their own recovery and how they've grown and been able to share in a very open way their mental health journey nami means recovery nami means finding out that someone is feeling some of the exact same feelings that you're feeling what nami does breaks through so much the stigma and breaks through the silence it's getting better in terms of people accepting that there is a lot of mental illness one in four one in five people have some kind of mental illness some kind of mental health diagnosis and and i think because of organizations like nami we're getting better we're out of the shadows and i think it's even harder for folks who've had a difficult childhood young adulthood to hide to be for it to be a secret there's a toll that that takes on us because having secrets was something that was very toxic as a younger person and to feel like we have to hide in today as my 50 plus year old self is is really damaging to my recovery and so coming back to an organization like nami who's breaking through that and people are finding ways to be together and connect with one another and and find the joy that they can find connected that they're not all about their mental illness that their mental illness is accepted and supported but they're not all about their mental illness i'm not all about my mental illness [Music] i've worked with people for 10 years and just recently told them of my diagnosis and and it explained some things although the last four years i've been doing better in my recovery but just the fact of working with somebody for that long a time and not ever sharing that big piece of me that that um reality of of me i think nami really helps me with um where to go to with all that emotion of telling someone in the fear of them seeing me differently or believing differently in me um just goes back to what the strength can be in recovery and that i'm in good company and that that people care that people are there for me when i need them and if somebody doesn't understand or judges me i have a whole bunch of people who don't judge me who support you know who i am and what i'm trying to do in my own recovery i lived a long time without a sense of hope and so that really is important to me i want to share my story most of all because i was not diagnosed in a timely way i looked for what my diagnosis was i reached out i was in therapy i saw psychiatrists i did reading on my own i really tried to understand what was going on with me and i think more than anything if if i can encourage someone to seek help and if they've sought help but it hasn't been right for them to seek it again to try again to go to the nami website to read some of the blogs to learn about some of the support groups to find themselves in those you know in those support groups i'm very aware of the fact that it took me a long time to get to the point of diagnosis and through that many things happen in my life and if someone younger than me can get support more quickly than i was able to do then that makes me feel like telling my story is worthwhile [Music] what i would tell my younger self i think is to believe in myself enough to think that i could be have help to get help to be supported to feel like i was worth supporting i think that would be the fundamental thing is to tell that young person you can find support you can't find help and you're not alone [Music] you