How do you rebuild your emotional bonds?

I'm hypersensitive to almost everything. So do you guys have any tips on how to freeze up. I mean I dont want to let anything and everything affect me.

I've read that BPDs are folks with expose emotional nerves, so is there any way to protect them and not be hypersensitive to everything?

Without the proper coping techniques, the typical borderline method is to shut down the emotions entirely (go numb). This isn't really choice so much as it is a reflexive response, and is indicative that the borderline is in great pain.

Other than that, I have found St. John's Wort to be effective in dulling emotions without shutting them down completely. Everything feels diluted while I am on it, and I feel like a experience emotions like a normal person does. But it feels weird, not right.

I don't like the time when I go numb either.

But the good part about feeling emotions is happiness is also at it's best, like others feel a surge of bliss but with me, when I cheer up, it's like a tsunami hit my soul.

Marijuana?

Perhaps though, the question shouldn't be what it is. It seems you'd like to feel less emotionally. I for one, while it can be excruciating, I feel the intensity of my emotions almost make my existence and humanity very real. The issue is how one deals and uses these emotions, right?

PLEASE..find ways to cope without shutting down. It sucks and the fewer people who are forced to cope that way the better.

Nowdays on those rare occasions where I am able to expose my twisted heart, and am accepted and validated rather than judged and critisized, I end up feeling PAIN. Incredible pain, yet i dont want to make it go away because i finally feel alive. I bear it as long as i can. To the point of longing for death and a little beyond, and when I'm like this my friends say I look like I'm doing better, "You have a sparkle in your eye today!"

I seem to have developed an almost eerie level of emotional intelligence that I use to calm others and help them find perspectives that are more helpful. Yet almost every waking moment I can feel that gnosis being used in my mind to keep me nearly emotionless. I cant stop pretending. I can want to murder someone and act friendly and even deferential and like i am over-eager for thier acceptance. 'My nads hurt and im looking at dating sites...great im hypomanic and horny but i can feel nothing' 'My hands are clammy, i am having difficulty holding up my side of the conversation and excuses to disengage keep going through my mind...ah, right social anxiety'

And every good feeling is even more tightly controlled. To feel loved for me is to feel that some vague internal resivior is not depleted.

To open myself to emotion is to step from the calm eye of the storm to a place i dont want to go back to. My fear has grown over the years.

Worse is the fact that im now blind to some of my own messed up behaviors. Recently practicing Radical Acceptance let me feel emotions relating to how i treated a friend. Remorse. Then rather than a vague sense of something inside not being depleted I felt Loved...because i hurt someone and they did not defend themselves or go away.

!!!

If you can find a therapist that is a good match for you. Beware of becoming overly dissapointed after a good start and of contenually percieving judgement and invalidation where there is none.

DBT skills should be immensely useful for you. Enrolling in a class would be wonderful but if you cant do that many useful skills can be found on the internet and I have no doubt that you could find some help from someone on these forums.

I should start tomorrow! I've already benefited from what Ive found on the net and from a free android app DBT911.

*** Potential Trigger Warning ***

BleedingHart wrote:Without the proper coping techniques, the typical borderline method is to shut down the emotions entirely (go numb).

That's been me for almost all of the last 17 years. Only on rare occasions when something I wasn't prepared for got past my defences have I had a true emotional reaction. Even I wasn't aware of this because I'm such a good actor that even I believed I was the person I portrayed myself to be, as did everyone else despite some of my occasional odd behaviour. I remember that it started with me wanting to alleviate the pain of a particularly difficult and emotional situation in my late teens, and it worked, but before long it snowballed and I had switched off entirely. It's only with a number of personal events over the past 8 months triggering a number of realisations that's led to a breakdown of my coping mechanisms (numbness) that I've started to feel and react (for real) once again, and now I'm told I behave pretty much as a typical borderline... Though outwardly calmer than most (for most of the time) despite the inner turmoil and confusion.

jaus tail wrote:So do you guys have any tips on how to freeze up. I mean I dont want to let anything and everything affect me.

I could give you tips, I'm practically an expert in being numb! But I can't in good conscience I'm afraid.

It may only be three and a half months since I 'awoke' and I have not been formally diagnosed yet, but I've learned more about myself and what matters in that short time than I'd learned about myself in my 35 years previous to that... I've realised how being cold has hurt those around me, I've realised how not caring has caused me to screw up almost every opportunity I've had and I've realised how being numb has helped me to do questionable and dangerous things without fear or remorse. Given what I know I could have been capable of, effectively having no moral compass, I honestly can't get my mind around how I've not ended up in prison or done something so risky that I'd have killed myself or someone else.

That's why I can't give you any tips on how to be numb, if you figured out how to detach yourself, as I did, it may go from a controlled form of emotional self regulation, to habit, to being something that's entirely automatic and subconscious as it did in me... And that's just too unhealthy and dangerous a way to live... Now that I am awake, I'd rather truly feel and struggle to cope with that than be a dead and blind man any day.

(Jaus Tail, I see you have a picture of a Busa as your avatar so I'm presuming you ride? I do, I have for most of my adult life... A main trigger for my recent changes has been the complications from an accident I had in August last year... I saw the diesel spill a little too late and simply thought "bugger"... As I slid down the road with three broken ribs, a shattered collar bone, and my leg, badly twisted and trapped under the bike, me being dragged along by the it, I was entirely calm and emotionless... At no point had I felt fear... Although I didn't think much of my reaction (or lack of it) at the time, looking back I can see that not giving a $#%^ about me or anything else and being oblivious to that fact is an awful and scary state of mind to be in, so trust me when I say you don't want to be there.)