Well this really is going to be fun… a blog full of the randomness of my mind; the stuff you shouldn’t say out loud. It won’t all be like that though. I’m just going to talk randomly about whatever pops into my head, so if I’m honest the topic could be absolutely anything.

For those who know me, you’ll know I’ve done a lot of work around mental health and self-harm in particular. Next month it’ll be 9 years exactly that I first came into contact with mental health health services. As it so happens, next month will also be the first time in 9 years that I’ve ever been discharged and completely out of secondary mental health services.

In 2013 my CPN (community psychiatric nurse) went on maternity leave. The team gave me my options: to try a 12 month programme specifically for people with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, or be discharged from services. At that time I was absolutely distraught just to hear the dreaded “D” word. How could they even consider discharging me when I felt so low?

Living with a personality disorder is a very scary, lonely and confusing thing. Having first been diagnosed years ago, I refused to believe that my diagnosis was correct. However, if it meant I had to do group work and 1-2-1 work every week rather than being discharged, I would. At that moment I would have agreed to anything to avoid discharge because I was so terrified of not having that support to fall back on. Now as I see it, I was afraid of being abandoned and rejected. I was afraid that people would no longer care about me. My needs were somehow being met by the professionals who worked with me, and for as long as I had a professional to work with, I felt somebody cared. I felt I always had at least 1 person to turn to in times of crisis.

Anyhow, I agreed to do this 12 month programme that the team were piloting. It took about 12 months for them to set it all up and prepare people for the group work. During this time I had regular 1-2-1 sessions with a new CPN. She, and others in the team had been trained in Structured Clinical Management (SCM) which is what the 12 month programme was based around. I was dreading doing the group work, but the group was only small and we all got on. I have 2 group sessions left and I will have completed it.

I have to say, at the beginning I was only going along with it to stop them discharging me. I am so glad I did agree to it. Every week we’d discuss different things, learn new skills and then be given optional homework to practice what we’d learned. I gave things a try, I liked the theory of things and remember saying “in theory it sounds brill, but doing it is a completely different thing”. I started with little things, practicing talking more openly with loved ones, being honest with people about how their behaviour sometimes affected me, and moved on to start being more assertive. First I started saying no to things I really didn’t want to do. I was riddled with guilt every time I did it, but I had to tolerate it. I had to mentally remind myself that I had the right to refuse to do something I didn’t want to do, that if other people were unhappy with it that was their problem, not mine. And to my surprise, it became apparent quite quickly that this shit was working. People seemed to stop relying so heavily on me for things and stopped assuming that I would agree to do something they asked of me. Behaving in this way eventually led me to start believing that I was as worthy as anyone else of asserting myself and my own needs. The skills they taught us in group helped me to assert myself in a way that wasn’t offensive to others. I learned to be honest with people. I learned to sit people down and tell them if something they had said/done had upset me. That way, I stopped bottling every little annoyance up, and my overwhelming feelings slowly started to reduce. I became more aware of my emotions; how to name what I was feeling and what to do to change it if I needed to, or how to tolerate certain feelings until they passed.

I feel a little like I’m waffling. I didn’t want my first post to be so long and babbly but you know me, I get on one and can’t stop myself.

I’ll carry on with this in my second entry. So, if you wanna know what’s so different for me now, how I’ve managed with my self-harm and how I feel about the looming discharge then keep checking back for post 2!