Emotional Dysregulation Does Not Equate With Drama

People who suffer with Borderline/Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder quite frequently — and very unfairly — get labelled as drama queens/drama llamas/annoyingly erratic/attention-seeking. This is because of a tendency to be totally broken one minute, and then relatively fine the next. This rapid escalation followed by de-escalation can, from the outside, look like nothing more than fishing for reassurance/compliments/attention, and for seemingly trivial reasons (“I mean, how bad could it possibly be if she’s over it in half an hour, for frakssake?”).

It. Is. Not. That.

If I post to Facebook, saying I am in mid-crisis and falling apart and EVERYTHING IS AWFUL FOREVER then it is because it honestly feels like that. Emotional dysregulation is a horrific thing to deal with. Every emotion is turned up to 11, usually with very little control to be had over it. If it’s not cut off somehow, it can amp up and up and up to dangerous levels. The kind of actions a sufferer can take to arrest the process, unless they have very good training in how to bring themselves down without outside intervention, are often unhealthy and, tragically, sometimes fatal.

Unless you’re lucky enough to be able to afford having a therapist on retainer who you can call any time, or have a friend who is always available and patient enough to listen to you scream/sob down the phone over something they don’t really understand (and what if you needed to scream/sob over something involving them?), then sometimes all you can do is get it out there ANY WAY POSSIBLE. I personally can’t afford an on-call therapist, and I can count the number of people I’m comfortable enough to call in the midst of a breakdown on three fingers, and they are all busy people with jobs and social lives and other responsibilities, plus I’d rather I didn’t rag those relationships to the point of exhaustion by expecting them to be my constant emotional babysitters.

The easiest form of de-escalation is to write down what I’m freaking out about online. Usually these posts are very heavily filtered, but sometimes not as much as they should. Not only does it open a path for people to give their two cents which may be useful, or to simply offer empathy/sympathy/love, but it also takes time to write these things out — time which will, to a certain extent, serve to lessen the panic feelings. Also, writing painful anxieties down is exceedingly therapeutic, because it gets your thoughts and feelings in some kind of row, lets you read them back to yourself, and is massively cathartic even if you can make no sense of it. I’m in no way exaggerating when I say it can save your life.

In summation, try not to judge the disordered people you know for their seemingly rollercoaster-y behaviour on social media or blogging platforms. We are venting steam — steam which is under a staggeringly huge amount of pressure because we generate more than the average, neurotypical person. Do we wish we had healthier or more private ways to achieve this? Of course we do. By our very nature, we hate being seen as needy or dramatic or attention-grabbing. But we’re all doing what we can. That shit has to go somewhere and sometimes it simply has to be where others can see it. Because that internal pressure can’t always be adequately released by shouting into an empty room.

Otherwise we’d just be doing that instead.

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