Borderline personality disorder/ STEPPS

I have been doing a course called STEPPS to try and help with my BPD/emotional intensity disorder(EID)
This course is currently run in America and holland, for those of you in the UK this course (unless you are lucky enough to live in west sussex) is not available as of yet. I am seriously hoping that it will be made available soon. But that is dependant on the 60 or so of us that are currently doing the course and whether it is deemed helpful enough from the study that is going on. So fingers crossed guys that this course gets the go ahead from the powers that be, as i personally believe that this is a fantastic (but very hard) course.

I suggest (from the suggestion of my care co ordinator) that if you have BPD you tell your therapist and get them to look into it so if it does go ahead then they are one step ahead.

This is a link that explains the course in full and i recommend that you read it!
STEPPS course

If you know nothing about the disorder then can i recommend that you read this link
understanding borderline personality disorder

The link will be able to tell you the diagnostic criteria etc.

In the first week of STEPPS we looked at what BPD/EID is and how it affects us and a bit about what we need to do to be able to change.

One of the things that you need to do is take responsibility for your illness and have a willingness to change. I know that I personally put the blame of my illness onto other people and situations in my life for a long time and was very unwilling to change as i was scared of what i would become.

I learnt through my care co ordinator before the course that with this attitude there would be nothing that could be done to help me. So first i had to accept responsibility and had to accept the change that would happen. Only then was i ready to start the course.

In saying this you don't need total acceptance of the illness to be able to learn the skills and put them into practice, you need to be open-minded and just try to do what is asked.

Emotional intensity disorder (EID) is a better name for BPD as it describes the illness better.

I think that the best way to describe the disorder is the way in which my care co ordinator told me when i was first diagnosed. You have all the same emotions as everyone else, the difference is that your volume is turned onto max volume and you can't turn it down. All your emotions are to the absolute extreme. If your happy you could end up hypomanic; if depressed, seriously depressed. Etc. This goes for all emotions.

You are born with a biological sensitivity to the disorder. Now this does not mean that you will definitely go on to develop EID, but that you are more prone to it. Your emotions as a child may be slightly more intense than the avg. child due to the biological sensitivity. If those emotions are dealt with in the right way then you can go through life not developing the disorder. However if those emotions are not dealt with in the correct way or some sort of trauma occurs then it can go on to develop into EID. It's like you are born a square peg in a round hole, you don't quite fit in and people don't know the best way to deal with you, society pushes you out, so you don't learn the skills you need to develop good emotional health.

Many people are wrongly diagnosed as having bipolar due to the extremities in the mood.

This does not mean that the emotions being experienced and reactions to events can't be managed. You can learn skills to change this.

People with EID will function normally a fair amount of the time, but in amongst this will have intense episodes of emotions. These emotions will be many times stronger then those that a person without the disorder feel, and also tend to last a lot longer too. People with EID often try to cover these episodes so that others don't know how bad things really are. But this can lead to more problems.

The graph below can help explain what it's like to have EID.

The solid black line shows the person without EID. The horizontal dotted line shows the biological sensitivity. When the child is born their emotions start off being a lot higher then the person without EID. If a person without EID was to reach or go over that line they would be having a pretty serious nervous breakdown. Most people never reach that line. A person with EID will go over that line each time they have an emotional episode. It will also take them a lot longer to come down from there. On their way down something else could happen that puts their emotions back up again meaning that they spend hours up at that level. It takes

a lot longer for the person with EID emotions to come below that line again to a level that for most people would still be very difficult.

This means that a person with EID is very sensitive to things that are emotive, they have a very intense response to emotive situations and they are slow to return to the baseline after an episode has happened.

The side is intensity and the bottom is time (sorry the picture came out a bit to small on here)
An example of these intense emotions would be Paul telling me he that he has to start work the next day. People without EID would be mainly fine about that, maybe a bit upset that their husband is not going to be around during the day any more, but would probably be happy that they had managed to get a job. A person with EID would interpret that as being abandoned, get very upset and possibly have a panic attack. They may self harm or get really impulsive and they would probably go from idolizing the person to devaluing/hating them. You tend to not think rationally at all and everything gets thrown out of proportion. Because the thoughts/emotions are so powerful it can make it extremely hard to doubt the thoughts that are coming in and so you start to believe them as fact. If you don't have the skills with which to deal with these situations then it can last from several minutes to even hours. Because during an episode you you often keep the feelings hidden others around you can doubt that you are even feeling what you say you are. This often leads to more intense emotions and can cause you to doubt whether you really are feeling what you think you are.

A lot of damage can happen in relationships, whether that be friends or family when these emotionally intense episodes occur. It can cause you to shut them off or just be very disruptive. It can also be damaging in a physical way you could end up lashing out at others or yourself, you may wreck furniture or you may turn to alcohol or drugs.

Self harm or attempted suicide during these intense episodes are a form of relief from the overwhelming feelings that they are going through. It can often be the only way in which they can show how bad they are really feeling, sometimes as a cry for help. Self harm between episodes can be because they want to be able to feel something. Between these episodes another episode may be building up, but due to how frightening these episodes can be the person will keep pushing it down and sometimes the only way they can do this is by self harming.

As with all illnesses not everyone will have the same symptoms and they may appear in different ways from person to person. One person may be impulsive by binge eating, another through drink and drugs another through reckless driving some not at all.

I know this is long, but i wanted to give you a small insight into the disorder.

I can't believe how much writing this has helped me, i hope that it may be of help to someone out there too?!

I will try and write up my experience of having EID. (but you will all have to promise that you wont hate me for it as its not pretty stuff!!!)