I was a bullied child. I was the kid you’re only just now starting to hear about in the news. When I was growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s in Prairie Grove, a town of 1000 people in the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas, there were no anti-bullying laws, no It Gets Better videos on YouTube, no threat of expulsion for the kids who tormented others. It was a profoundly traumatic and isolating experience to be the school pariah, and it exacerbated my genetic predisposition for mental illness.
When you go to school with the same 75 kids from kindergarten through senior year, there is never a reprieve. There’s never a new class full of new people unless you move away. There’s one elementary school, one junior high, one high school. The kids who bullied you the previous year come back to bully you the next, no matter how much weight you lose over the summer, no matter how you change your hair, no matter how hard you try to be normal.
And I wasn’t normal. My depression was apparent (to me, anyway) when I was around eight years old. My brain seemed to go so much faster than everyone else’s, and I was so much more attuned to (read: paranoid about) the emotions and motivations of others. I had a hunger for knowledge I didn’t see in my peers, and I learned early on that you were profoundly uncool if your favorite thing to do was read. At night, at home, I lay awake in bed and stared at the bumps on the popcorn ceiling, the kind so ubiquitous in ‘70s homes, pretending the bumps were the stars in the heavens and I was dead and I would see those stars forever. I hated the concept of forever; it made me feel sick when they talked about it in Sunday School. I did not want to live forever with Jesus. I wanted, someday, to close my eyes and find peace and reprieve – from my peers, from my church, from my thoughts.
In 7th grade, there was a girl named Ashley, the type of kid with whom the other girls were friends because they feared her wrath. Junior-high girls being the most vile creatures on earth, Ashley’s gang had to find someone to torture, and I was that someone. The lockers at Prairie Grove Middle School were stacked two high, and mine was on the bottom. When I knelt down to get my books, Ashley and her friends walked by giggling and showered my head with intricately folded notes. You’re ugly, they said. You’re fat. You’re a geek. The only boy who could like you is (insert name of ugly, fat, geeky boy.) I pretended to ignore them, gathered up the notes, and dumped them into the trash with my face burning. Then I went to algebra and burst into tears, and the boys made fun of me for crying while Ashley’s friends snickered.
By high school, I had an eating disorder, which was not caused by television commercials or fashion magazines but by trauma and the need to escape. Anorexia and bulimia are not healthy coping mechanisms, but they are coping mechanisms nonetheless. In her book Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws, the brilliant Kate Bornstein lists eating disorders as one alternative. I wasn’t shocked and angered when I read this; I was nodding my head furiously in agreement. She’s not recommending a healthy person go and develop one, she’s saying that if the only alternative is killing yourself, an eating disorder is the less awful option. She’s right.
I graduated high school in 1989. In 1990, I was a theatre major at the University of Arkansas and still in the throes of anorexia and bulimia. I had learned, surprise of surprises, that girls who major in drama are very good at creating it. My mercurial moods and tendency to sob when I couldn’t remember my lines had made me a target once more. People were afraid of me; rightly so. And, because we were all still teenagers, they still left mean notes. Every day I walked into school and learned who I had supposedly slept with the night before (in reality, I never slept with anyone in the department — I was skinny and blonde, but who among those who saw me every day would sleep with me? To do so was to risk being similarly ridiculed and cast out.) One day, I walked into the green room and found a note with my name on it pinned to the bulletin board. Inside, it simply said, “It’s sluts like you who give women a bad name.”
One afternoon I sat at the kitchen table in the apartment I shared with my friend Polly, who was engrossed in a magazine. “I’m reading an article about a woman who sounds like you,” she said, and proceeded to rattle off the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder.
I said that it absolutely did not sound like me, but of course it did. So the next day I skipped Western Civ and went to the college bookstore, where I pulled a copy of the DSM off the shelf. My heart pounding, I looked up borderline personality disorder. Unstable sense of self; transient, stress-related paranoid ideation; unstable and intense interpersonal relationships; recurrent suicidal behavior. It was like someone had made an outline of my life. Horrified, I crammed the book back on the shelf and did everything I could to forget.
Fast forward to 2005. I was 34 years old, and over the past 15 years I had been diagnosed with clinical depression, attention deficit disorder, adjustment disorder, eating disorder not otherwise specified, and bipolar disorder, by a long string of shrinks who prescribed a long string of (unsuccessful, side-effect-ridden) medications. I sat in my latest therapist’s office, carrying an extra 40 pounds thanks to Depakote, and finally summoned the courage to whisper, “Do you think I’m borderline?”
She said yes almost before I could finish the question. I felt a bottomless pit open up in my heart, and I fell, down and down and down, into a despair I knew would eventually leave me boiling lovers’ housepets and listening to Madame Butterfly at full volume while clicking a table lamp on and off.
“It’s not your fault,” she said, which didn’t help at all, since everything bad in the world was my fault. “It comes from trauma.”
Which is, of course, only part of the story. A lifetime of invalidation only triggers something that’s already there — “inborn temperamental abnormalities,” as Dr. Joel Paris writes in his book Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder: A Guide to Evidence-Based Practice. If these abnormalities are a bomb, bullying can be the flame that lights the fuse.
But the right diagnosis means you can finally get the right treatment, and I was lucky enough to have moved to New York City, home of the dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. DBT is a type of therapy developed by University of Washington professor Marsha Linehan, who recently came out about her own struggles with BPD. Linehan realized that the way to recover from the disorder was to develop emotion regulation skills with a therapist who wouldn’t fire you for being difficult. The evidence that we could recover from a disorder previously viewed as untreatable was nothing short of revolutionary.
I recently published a book titled Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl, and I speak to young people, parents and clinicians about bullying and personality disorders as a member of the Active Minds speakers bureau. The question I’m asked more than any other is how, exactly, DBT works, and what it’s like to go through the treatment. In subsequent posts, I’ll address the four modules — Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation and Interpersonal Effectiveness — and give examples of how they helped me recover.
