Sensing Things

One of the prominent symptoms of BPD for me personally is the unfortunate ability to basically sense how someone important or close to me is feeling, and the tendency to connect it to impending doom. I’ve done this for as long as I can remember, and I hate it!

My husband is not a man of many words; he communicates short and to the point when it comes to serious stuff, oftentimes taking an uncomfortably long pause before responding. He has explained to me that when he does this, it means he doesn’t know what to say or how to word what he does want to say, so the silence is simply his way of pausing to formulate words.

It can sometimes take hours.

There are other instances where he will come home from work and I can just feel it in the air that he’s feeling something negative, whether it’s exhaustion, frustration, or some annoyance from work, I can feel it as soon as he walks in the door. That’s usually when I start with the thousand questions to get to the bottom of this negative feeling in the air, just so I know it’s not something I’ve caused. I’ve always done this.

I remember being a child and sensing my mother’s frustrations just in her guilt inducing sighs, like she expected me to come up with a solution for all of her problems. She would complain about money constantly, overwhelming my little brain even when I was a teenager. She would always throw in deep sighs and insinuating words that my gut always told me meant I was the one she was mad at. Most of the time, I was right. It wasn’t me personally that she was mad at, it was my existence and the fact that she had to work so hard to provide. These things made me feel guilty about her having to raise me on her own, only receiving child support from my birth father but never anything else.

Now as an adult, I understand that she has always been mentally ill as well, despite her denial of such things. I know now that none of those problems she complained about were my fault, however the mental damage has already been done. I’m currently learning to apply DBT skills to situations when I “sense” someone close to me is having a bad day and my brain wants to tell me “it must be your fault”. It sure as hell isn’t easy to repair decades of mental damage in just a few months, but I trek on.