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The following piece is a personal reflection of raw writing from someone in our cohort who struggles with complex emotions. They have written it in an attempt to provide comfort to someone out there who also struggles with heightened sensitivity, overwhelming emotions and BPD traits.
***This is one person's lived experience. Experiences of complex emotions are different for everyone, and the views and experiences described here are the author's own. Please note this blog discusses experiences of dissociation, self-harm and suicidal thoughts.***
Photo by John Noonan on Unsplash
Complex emotions can feel ‘scary’ to feel, but they are human, and carry a lot of positives with them. They make you sensitive, empathetic and vigilant of other people’s thoughts and feelings. Although overwhelming and often harmful, there are ways to manage them.
I found that with psychodynamic psychotherapy, l was able to reduce some of my anxiety at times, and discovered a lot of aspects of my personality l was not aware of. This was important, because it allowed me to go beyond labels such as OCD, BPD and anxiety, and understand important parts of myself that l did not know about, or was not aware of.
l exist in a movie
When l told my therapist that l believe l am not real, like l exist in a movie or l am an alien on a different planet, she looked at me and told me this is a symptom of people who struggle intensely with mental health called dissociation.
Often, l would walk the streets, thinking l am the only person who exists in the universe, because the people who walked past me felt so distant. Like they weren't actually there.
From my experience zoning out can be a way to cope with overwhelming, complex emotions that feel too intense to process. It can be a coping mechanism and a way to escape those emotions. Stress- induced paranoia due to perceived abandonment and rejection can be a trigger for this.
Hidden symptoms
When my therapist told me I have anger in me, l was shocked. I often told her that l cannot feel any anger, but now l know that it was hidden below my anxiety.
For me, some emotions can feel like ’hidden symptoms’, existing underneath anxious thoughts. When l do not struggle with anxiety, l find that my other symptoms are more intense. This isn't unusual to people with complex conditions.
Emotions, in my experience, can be difficult to pin point, identify and understand. They can get mixed up, making them even harder to manage. For this reason, l confused sadness and anger for a long time. This reflects the idea of complex emotions, where multiple emotional states coexist and influence one another, often blurring clear distinctions between them.
Who am I?
Not knowing who you are is extremely confusing at times. This is something which worried me a lot as a kid. I never knew who l was, what l liked, what l disliked, or what l wanted to do. I would act like the people around me, or celebrities l liked, in an attempt to find a stable identity.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
An unstable self image is something l struggle with to this day, but psychodynamic therapy was vital in helping me understand aspects of my personality, likes and dislikes, along with other things that l wanted to know about myself. It increased my self awareness, and helped navigate my true identity.
For me this experience connects to the idea of complex emotions, as confusion about identity is often accompanied by overlapping emotional states—such as anxiety, insecurity, and frustration—which can interact and make it more difficult to clearly understand both one’s feelings and sense of self.
Abandonment
Perceived abandonment, instability in how I see myself and other people and black and white thinking can be extremely confusing. Because of this, l sometimes struggled with self harm in my teenage years. Although a very lonely and isolating experience, it is important to remember that you are never alone. There are many people who struggle with self harm and/ or suicidal ideation. I appreciate that struggling with mental illness can be and is like being stuck in a prison in your brain, or being stuck in a little bubble, but there is help available, and there is always hope.
Overlapping feelings
Intense, extreme attachments to other people is a frequent phenomenon in BPD, or people with attachment difficulties. In my experience, this is centered around the fear that people will reject, or leave me. Issues with self esteem are directly linked to this, because many people with similar traits believe they are not worthy of a healthy relationship, so they will struggle to form healthy attachments to other people.
Insecure attachment individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder will often have issues with abandonment, and will not react well to it, either by spamming their partner/ friend repeatedly, or by withdrawing completely. Perhaps the most draining consequence of this is never being able to forget them, and them being in your mind constantly. Obsessively and repeatedly.
In my experience, this stems from a deep insecurity linked to self esteem, inability to trust other people and fears centred around relationships. This also reflects the nature of complex emotions, where overlapping feelings—such as anxiety, fear, longing, and insecurity—interact and intensify one another, making emotional experiences more overwhelming and difficult to regulate, especially because romantic relationships are intense for everyone.
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Keep having those difficult conversations.
Keep listening.
The minute you start talking about it, it gets easier.
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