There are certain things about BPD that are straight across the board no matter the subtype. Having a lot of and intense emotions is one of them. I had 1 session of my DBT therapy and was given an emotion wheel and within days it all came rushing back to me. I used to use an emotion wheel before but had stopped right around the time my ex and I had started dating because I was so happy. I didn’t really need it. But this exercise was a throwback to one of the main reasons I used it in the first place.
There’s the obvious reason that I feel a lot. There is always SO much feelings and depth of feeling that it’s difficult to figure out what the core feeling is. I would come to realize that I was angry, confused, overwhelmed, sad and a host of others all at the same time and because each emotion was so big it was difficult to unravel the giant ball that grew way past the point of control. But the other and more pertinent reason I used the emotion wheel was because I was often unaware of what I felt. Not just that it was a big ball of feelings but that I didn’t have a right to feel it, had too many things to worry about to be sitting down feeling, and because feeling was to admit that I was too emotional and therefore not warranted in what I felt.
So what was and has been my alternative? Thinking. If anything happened or happens to me my first reaction is to jump to the logical explanation of why I have the stance that I do. I go into philosophical arguments, spiritual and theological beliefs, psychological analysis, societal, political and economic theories, factors and perspectives and some historical facts to boot. The therapist met me one time and deemed me “Alice in wonderland” because my thoughts DO NOT stop and down the rabbit hole is where I end up Every. Single. Time. The last time I got to a point of wanting to physically pull a trigger was solely because I was frustrated at not being able to stop myself from thinking, not being able to get out of the rabbit hole.
What does this have to do with the emotion wheel? Simple. I realized that I trained myself to justify my actions, my stance and by extension my feelings with logical thinking. I had been so afraid of feeling, afraid of being rejected, afraid of being invalidated that I chose not to feel at all. The irony is that I was still acting on my feelings without knowing it. For instance, my friend asked what he could do to help me and I started to explain that there’s nothing he could do, that I have to just do this or that but then I started to explain that because I’m chronically ill…where does the help stop. I started saying to him essentially “if you help me, eventually you will stop, eventually you will get tired of me, eventually I will become a burden…eventually you will leave”. This is when I start tearing up and I wondered why. About an hour or two later it hit me that even with all that explaining, I was acting on the fear of abandonment (another huge BPD trait).
The emotion wheel is now an exercise in getting me out of my head. Yes, there are usually come cognitive reasons behind why we do what we do and feel what we feel but our emotions WILL come out. So this emotion wheel exercise is a bit taxing, tedious and exhausting but it does help me to at least make connections that weren’t there before.
So please. Join me on my journey and feel free to let me know how an emotion wheel helps you, can help you or is helping you. If it’s not, share that too.
Love,
Dat Bahamian Borderline
IG: bahamian_borderline
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