Frontiers. Boundaries. Borders. Borderline. Ninety four percent of people who have suffered trauma shows behavior that is often misread by untrained psychologists as borderline. Borderline is a personality disorder characterized by a disrupted sense of identity, difficulty to control impulses, self-destructive behavior, and chronic feelings of emptiness. The fact is, not every traumatized person turns into a borderline, however these two have one thing in common: The shocking experience of splitting of one’s identity.
When a person suffers trauma, he or she experiences a crush of their sense of being. Something has been broken inside; one feels as if one has died although one’s still alive. And that is one of the most disturbing things of all: working hard to continue living while you know, deep inside, that you are actually dead. In other words, trauma is a disruptive event that crushes one’s identity, and the cure looks pretty much like reconstructing the pieces that make up the narrative of who we are. Continued… From the frontiers of ourselves…