The Roots of Emptiness in BPD

1. Nihilism.
2. Neurodivergence.
3. Neuroticism
4. Trauma
5. The Spirit of the World.
6. Loneliness
7. Dissociation
Conclusion

Emptiness. Not a scientific term, is it? And so, the language of psychologists falls short. Not all things are to be explained empirically. This is when those predisposed to the arts are to be employed. For intuition reaches further than science, although its ability to reach further than studies and liable to more flaws in its subjective power non the less. For Newton, after being struck by the fruit and his intuition confessed before declaring his scientific confirmation.

I offer you what I have. These are the words of my lifetime reference point. Not from the textbook but from the heart. I, like you, am in the trenches every day. And the trenches show roots and veins that can be examined. By The roots of emptiness.

They are Nihilism, trauma, alienation, loneliness, and neuroticism. All nurtured by the waters of hate, resentment, and pain. It is NOT boredom. Boredom is light; BPD emptiness is heavy, it makes you want to die. That is a distinct difference. Only those looking from the outside in label it as such.

Psychology is more complex than cosmology, Something which the reader can contemplate for the rest of their days. The brain is deeper than the universe. I feel we are, like those of previous years who believed you could fall off the edge of the world. Well, I believe our psychology is in its absolute infancy. The world of neurology is flat, so to speak. And our greatest scientists were those who were led by intuition, einstein, newton, Jung…

Out of all the symptoms of BPD/EUPD, it is emptiness that reaches the deepest. It is this pervasive anti-matter, so omnipotent and evanescent, that one fails in its examination and even more so in attempts of description. Even now, as I turn thirty, this all-encompassing sensation is still present. I am not nihilistic, although I do feel the futility in trying to correct matters as written, “that of which is bent cannot be made straight”, and although this is not an accurate description of nihilism, for I have faith, it is by genetic extension a cousin of such absence of hope.

There is little science here where I tread. And although the lack of understanding has been extracted as a common symptom of the disorder. All, although expressed in various means, all have a sense of vacant doom that aches within them. I feel as if trauma has wired our brains as if to fear at a constant low vibrating level, all things in life that could trigger our negative emotions, such as human interaction. And it has been said that fear is worse than reality, perhaps so, depending on one’s reality, I suppose. There within our fearful expectations, we live, everpresent and vacantly in this imaginative woe and in this state, the body stays for fear of being ill-prepared.

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1. Nihilism.

Humans need purpose like plants needs sunshine; without such, we wither. Even the most dedicated to anarchy and chaos still find the need for meaning through music or perhaps the aesthetic of clothes they wear, and still need interludes to their ideology of chaos for sleep, no? BPD is a hurricane of unrelenting negative emotion. If one subscribes to the ideology of hedonism, he puts himself in danger. For if one weighs the purpose of life through the scales of joy and sorrow, he will soon see the scales tip in the direction of suffering. If one contrasts this with the glossy highlight reels of the world, well, it doesn’t take long for one to give up. Emptiness is a logical next step.

Those with mental health problems do not possess a monopoly on this aimlessness. It is an epidemic; despite the pretty little five-second ads and polished profiles, do not be misled; the world suffers from nihilism. Hence radical political ideologies sprouting left, right and centre, literally.

It has been written, “man does not live on bread alone,” this gaping chasm opens up opportunities for bad actors to mislead those further down the road of suffering.

If one believes we are nothing but an accidental cellular collision merged in the ancient unseen soups of our young Earth, then well, why should one raise one foot in front of the other? If we are nothing but an outlier of rock, water and air engulfed in the endless lifeless universe and even the sun, eventually, will swell, engulf us and die in a supernova explosion. Then, truly, what is the point?

The logical extension of these ideologies is futility and suffering. Why should one continue in the death of the planet and contribute to societal evil and the malevolence of man?

See how short of words one needs to justify his suicide? No, my dear friends, it is not to be this way. One must find salvation and have a spiritual orientating belief. One that sustains suffering, and if you have a PD, suffer you will.

This is the first root of emptiness, nihilism.

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2. Neurodivergence.

Navigating the world with this biological sensitivity takes great introspection and strength to decline requests and invitations. Episodes of great irritability and dysphoria are common in PD(s). Suffering is like the waves of the sea, high tides, low tides, rip tides; they all come and go endlessly. Indeed, it seems our triggers are as numerous as the stars. It has been well documented that these bouts not only last longer but require more energy to recover from.

Emptiness, I believe, has various manifestations and origins. For physiological fatigue is not to be ignored and is undeniably a part of the disorder. Studies have shown our brains are vastly different to the classical neurology of men.

It is such a challenge to identify one’s mood when it can be so easily warped, misled and changed so radically from moment to moment. Is one tired or depressed? You can be in the middle of a walk and feel as if you will fall to the ground because of a triggering thought. Our triggers can be as numerous as the stars. Furthermore, our recovery time is longer than what the average person needs.

All men have energy limitations, and if one imagines them as batteries, you can categorise them accordingly. Social, physiological, emotional, and cerebral. If one has a PD, these batteries can be depleted instantly. It is like having emotional vertigo.

Extremes of anger, despair, euphoria, dysphoria, loneliness, claustrophobia, the adjectives are endless. Our biology operates at a higher frequency, therefore depleting like a race car, faster.

I do believe this chronic emptiness can be traced back to a deficit of energy.

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3. Neuroticism

Even from a very young age, one will be aware of their vulnerabilities. Even without the explicit knowledge and perhaps without the power to articulate or even voice to one’s self due to the nature of the human organism, we are wired to remember the holes we have previously fallen into. We remember the pain of an insult, the despair of rejection and the heat of embarrassment. This is how we fall into maladaptive practices in our attempts to cover, pacify and protect ourselves. We know we are susceptible to such overpowering emotions that have you feeling as if you do not want to live anymore.

Yes, life and death are in the power of the tongue, and we all inherently know this. How many fewer layers of skin do we have? It is like walking into a burning building and not getting burnt. We soon learn how impossible this is, and so many will refuse even to enter.

It is an extremely hollow sensation to be at the mercy of others’ tongues or actions. Imagine walking at a knife’s edge perpetually. It is a certain expression of powerlessness, and such a predisposition requires hyper-vigilance, which is exhausting.

Emptiness is the knowledge of the aforementioned. And who knows how the day will turn? Whether one should frequent heaven or hell, or perhaps the alternation of both? I believe this is another origin of emptiness.

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4. Trauma

Despite having good health, hope for the future, a loving support network, meaning full academic pursuits and a good routine, emptiness still resides within me. This has confused me and, even more so, my occupational therapists and psychologists. Usually, a commendation to the deficits previously stated.

Imagine an abyssal anchor pulling from the pit of my stomach. It drags and descends but always remains; it is impervious to joy, love, and purpose; whether one moves or one is moored does not seem to change it. Indeed, this has puzzled me for many years, being not a formal student of psychology. However, I do believe, after years of thinking and reading, that the root cause is early-child trauma.

Let’s envision a grass field, untouched by neither paw nor foot. Then the first person walks diagonally across, then another, then another. After some time, the grass has completely been folded backwards, and the more people that traverse it, the more prominent it becomes. Now imagine fewer people walking across it, and then the traffic is reduced. Neurology is the same, think of habits that are hard to start, but once you get going, you discover momentum, and after a while, this habit is actually harder to stop than it is to continue.

I believe our brains, by trauma, whatever shape it comes, works the same way. So even though my environment is drastically different, the neurological infrastructure stays in place. I do believe that this rejection, horror, and hostility have been carried with the years.

Yes, I believe trauma is another significant and perhaps the most pervasive root of emptiness.

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5. The Spirit of the World.

Ever since memory served me, I have always felt this ethos of evil. Granted, this is not everywhere, and there have been places full of good, loving people. However, in the masses and crowds of cities or the sociological hierarchies of companies, clubs, and jobs, the vast majority have always been unkind in the dark.

I believe most with PD(s) are empaths. We pick up on small cues and can read the trueness of people’s silent hearts. One can discern between the mask and the man. I can tell you where or specifically list how I know. It could be the eyes, the tone, or the words spoken when you are not present. Such minutiae build up a bank of knowledge that my subconscious access in the capital of intuition. We are mirrors. We can mirror the moods of the masses, and in solitude, one may open up this sensation. It is psychological debris, and this hostility, if at odds with one true nature, will fill you with negative emotion because you are not acting out and thinking in the words of your true heart and soul. The heart will condemn itself if not in line with its true nature. Evil celebrates itself; the good in us will condemn it. This self-consciousness and affliction of the soul or conscience will provide emptiness until one cleans up this debris.

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You may be an optimist and disagree with my societal diagnosis. Fair enough, good for you. Your predisposition is evidence of a kind heart; the realist in me, however, would urge you to keep your optimism but sharpen your eyes. The most naive is afflicted with the worst. Or, as it has been written: “Be as innocent as doves, yet cautious as serpents.”

Evidence of the true nature of the world manifests on the faceless words of the internet. If a man is a result of how he treats his inferiors, then imagine the naked and exposed nature of a man is measured by how he treats those behind a screen.

I believe we mirror this ethos back. Another root of emptiness.

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6. Loneliness

Ithas been written from the oldest of texts we have: “It is not good for man to go on alone…” Take me, for example. I have Avpd, avoidant attachment style, and introversion that is in the 90 percentile (different from per cent), and even I have been cursed with the paradox of needing to be alone and yet, in the silence of my solitude, needing company.

We are social creatures to the core. Even our sanity is out-sourced. Spend long enough alone, and like tom hanks from the film Castaway, you too will create your own friend from a football. Yes, solitude is like water for me; I need it to survive, but too much? I drown.

Loneliness is empty; that is the emotion it creates, a vapidness, a hunger to be satiated. Something which needs to be filled. It is an absence. I tread carefully, for I know I am in the unknown and do not possess a psychological language.

Of course, I know this does not belong exclusively to the BPD pathology. This is a fundamental expression of the human condition. No man is exempt from the pangs of loneliness. Even in a crowded room, one may feel this.

“Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.”

― C.G. Jung

However, a dull throb to the man of average neuroticism is much less noticeable than the man who cannot breathe and is being stabbed repeatedly in the darkness of solitude. Yes, the omnipotent ominous black hole which consumes all is the very essence of BPD. We are perpetually the outlier, outcast, misunderstood and misspoken. This is what leads us to the lands of maladaptive coping strategies.

The truth, then, since this is the narrator’s pursuit.

I have thought about emptiness my entire existence. It was wordless before, you see. No, I did not possess the articulation of adulthood, but in was childhood, it was still there like a throbbing open wound, and I was bleeding out every day.

Everyone could see it in my eyes. It irritated my parents.

“Oh, for goodness sake, it looks like you’ve got the whole world on your shoulders”, they would rebuke, irritable, “there are people a lot worse off than you, you know..”

Yes, my pain would be compounded by guilt. I think they were irritated because they couldn’t do anything about it. So they got defensive as if I was silently judging them for their ineptitude as parents. I wasn’t, of course.

-But the subconscious is a mysterious world, and we often have conversations with ourselves we never hear.

I do believe this emptiness to be one of the most pervasive for us BPD/EUPD sufferers. It is part of the umbrella term that is the 7th listed symptom of EUPD. Even now, married as I am, engulfed in a great friendship network. A big family, growing bigger by the day. It is still there; lingering in the dark is this evanescent abyss.

I believe there are too many forms of this pain, and that is the reason behind its pervasiveness. Emptiness is a specific kind of negative emotional thought; it is the space where something else should be. Buddhism has a maxim that life IS suffering and that the root of all suffering is desire. Im not quite sure about the second claim, but the first one I absolutely agree with. If one looks behind all the psychotic smiling adverts and glossy social feeds, you will find this truth.

This loneliness is not to be amended by simply selecting anyone to socialize/elope with. I solemnly write to you now that if you have no selection criteria in which to be your associate, you will quickly trade the dull ache of loneliness for the gaping wound of trauma/rejection/betrayal. You name it; other humans can provide it; of course, the opposite is true. Some of the most meaningful encounters of your life will be with other people. I am just warning you that you have to be shrewd, for the most naive are the most liable to be traumatized. It makes sense; the more you are rosey-eyed, the more of your world is destroyed. And so the hole you had before is dug to the depths of the abyss.

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7. Dissociation

“Iknew perfectly well the cars were making noise and the people in them … but I couldn’t hear a thing; the city hung in my window like a flat imposter…” -Sylvia Plath

Before I was diagnosed, I read that put my book down and stared into the ceiling for hours. She had written about my experience in life. Throughout her book, the Bell Jar, she writes with astonishing accuracy about the life of someone living with EUPD. Although she was undiagnosed, I do believe she had this disorder.

She wrote about the life of someone living through a dream. Dissociation is a mechanism the mind uses to protect us from pain; the problem with this however, is that sufferers of this disorder are always in pain. Soon the detachment is the pain; we feel lifeless, flat, and devoid of any emotion. Sure, the bad but also the good. This is why many of us seek maladaptive processes to wake ourselves up. Drugs/self-harm, you name it. This emptiness, as previously mentioned, is the space where something else should be; therefore, by extension of that logic, how much more won’t we feel this when we feel nothing all the time? And nothing is a perfect synonym for emptiness, therefore another root of emptiness.

This type of emptiness is synonymous with feeling as if you don’t exist. Further extensions reach towards identity confusion and not having an anchor of personality.

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Conclusion

This was by no means an exhaustive nor extensive list. I hope that this article has aided you in your introspection and illuminated perhaps areas where one can attempt to amend their emptiness. If you are a family member reading this on account of a sufferer, I would like to say that you are a very special person and an anomaly; I wish you all the best in your search. If you are a psychologist or occupational therapist, I would like to deeply commend you on your open-mindedness for reading someone informally educated in psychology.

And lastly, if you are someone who sufferers from this disorder, my heart goes out to you. I know the pain you suffer every day. I know the cycling of euphoria, dysphoria, hope, despair, love and hate that you feel every day. Never give up in your fight. In your battle against this disorder, you are a feat of endurance that no one will ever understand or see. I beg you, as one of the highest suicide mortality rates in all the disorders of the mind, keep going. You are the lights of the night, and through your relentless courage to go on, you go on giving others courage.

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This was a long read. If you are still here, consider following me as I’m sure you will enjoy my articles in the future.

All my love,

Alfred.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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