For a great amount of time I thought that beating my borderline would be to learn to not freak out despite of unpleasant emotions. And this is what I often read online, that borderline is about feeling emotions too strongly in comparison to a regular person, so it is all about keeping them down.
Bullshit!
The habit of trying not to react to unpleasant emotions is the root of the problem. Every single emotion is correct. There are no invalid emotions. Emotions come from the subconscious mind which is result of thousands of years of evolution, and it is not likely that the couple of years when my parents were bringing me up could screw that up. To think that is ridiculous.
Emotions are correct. What is not always correct is the reaction to them. Is the inability to listen to them. To acknowledge them. To interpret them. To feel them.
One trap is projecting the past onto the present. But after so much work I did on analysing my past and finding out about where my buttons are, and processing those past traumas, I should have trusted my emotions more. If it is not the past, it must be the present.
Each single freak out is me screaming at myself in order to be heard. Whenever I feel that something is wrong, something is wrong. So simple, yet so hard to understand. Denying it is creating the living hell of a borderline, this is what is causing all the craziness and freaky symptoms. The remedy which is most often offered by specialists is only aimed at removing the visible symptoms, but makes the actual condition worse. We do not need to calm down, but we do not need to need to act our anger out either. We need to look inside ourselves and feel it inside. We need to dig to what emotions are hidden beneath the anger. To what is hidden behind the fear. The more you suppress your emotions the louder they will scream. The fact that we feel emotions too strong is not the cause of borderline, is only the natural effect of the unconscious habit of suppressing them.
We learned to suppress emotions because there was no place for emotions in our homes, where we felt neglected and rejected. This has to be unlearned, or I would even say that feeling emotions has to be learned, perhaps for the very first time.