My experience with being diagnosed with personality disorders.

In the first meeting with my psychiatrist, she didn’t come straight out and say to me “you have borderline personality disorder (BPD) and obsessive compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) – here’s some medication”. If ever I needed an example of fate, it’s having been assigned Dr Elbaky when I arrived at Northside Clinic. She has seemed to understand me right from the start, and I’m incredibly grateful to have her as part of my treatment.

Instead, Dr Elbaky suggested I look up and research as much as I could “emotionally unstable personality disorder” (another name for BPD) and OCPD, and told me we’d talk about it more in our next session. So instead of the disorders becoming a label someone else had placed on me, they became somewhat of an agreed diagnosis that I was a part of. Because when I first started researching – boy did I feel seen. Like, here was all this information that blatantly described who I was – but not the parts I let others see. All the things I kept hidden (or thought I did, more on that another time!), that I worried about, that I questioned – did other people think like this? Behave like this? Why do I struggle with this? And so on.

A thought had struck me in the middle of my research. If all of these things are me, and they are a disorder – is there something wrong with me?! Is everything I know about myself bad and something that needs to change? And if I treat it – who will I be? Because basically what I’m hearing here is all the little strange, quirky things about me are a disorder that needs fixing.

Of course, that’s absolutely not how it is and Dr Elbaky had an excellent way of explaining it to me. Everyone’s personality is made up of different parts – strengths and weaknesses, positives and negatives. Personality disorders are sorted into three “clusters” (which I’ll talk about more in my next post), and everyone has a tendency to at least some of these traits throughout their life. When someone carries more than just a tendency to multiple traits within these identified disorders, they are considered to have that disorder. It doesn’t mean they are bad, or their personality is wrong – it’s information that can help that person understand why they do, say, think a certain way and why they struggle with certain things.

I don’t carry all of the traits of either of my personality disorders – but I do carry most of them. Reading up on the technical definitions of BPD and OCPD was like reading a checklist of myself, but reading more and more widely from different sources, people with similar diagnosis and experiences and different treatment options has been invaluable in me learning more about myself and accepting that BPD and OCPD are a part of me, not who I am.

What was your experience of being diagnosed with a personality disorder like? Please comment below – I’d love to hear from you.

Nicole xx