Why do I even try?? in Chaos

I met with my counselor this morning and we talked about how group was going. I told her that I’m making some progress but last week was rough.

She helped me work on some of my homework from group that I’m struggling with. We have to come up with ways to “challenge” our automatic negative thoughts....This is not easy for someone with BPD…we truly 100% believe the negative things that we think about ourselves so trying to come up with “challenging thoughts” to disprove the negative ones feels impossible.

One of the ones we worked on was: “telling others how I feel makes me vulnerable.” I believe this 100% and therefore will not communicate how I feel most of the time.

I admitted to her that I tend to use avoidance as a way to cope. If someone or something upsets me I keep it in and don’t confront it. I avoid situations as best as I can that will cause me high emotional intensity so i refuse to talk about my feelings which 90% of the time I don’t know what I’m feeling. I literally have a page in my group binder that has a list of feeling words that I need to look at in order to be able to identify what I’m feeling....pathetic huh.

She told me that I need to work on letting people know what I’m feeling and try to open up to my bf. So feeling encouraged by this I came home and tried to open up about my BPD and what it can be like for me. That how a normal thing for them can trigger me and cause me high emotional intensity and it’s hard to manage. Well it was like he wasn’t hearing me. Instead of just listening and try to understand he would compare it to how someone else had a similar experience. I felt unheard, like he just wasn’t getting what I was saying and that I was for once talking about my BPD and he was brushing it off.

This is exactly why I don’t communicate how I feel because in the end it doesn’t matter.