Deb's Story: Sober Life with BPD

The Bubble Hour

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.7 • 560 Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2021

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Looking back, Deb can see that she was self-medicating mental health problems with alcohol. When she entered a partial hospitalization program to assess and treat her symptoms of anxiety and depression, it was necessary to address the issue of alcohol use disorder that had developed as a result. She describes quitting alcohol as 'low hanging fruit' that made way for prescription drugs and therapy to work more effectively. Deb's diagosis is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), sometimes called 'emotional hypersensitivity.' She says that with BPD, "every emotion feels like a knife to the chest." (To hear another Bubble Hour interview about BPD, check out "Michelle's Story" Season 5, Episode 5) For links to resources mentioned in this episode, click here. Host Jean McCarthy's books and blog can be linked to through her website www.jeanmcarthy.ca

Transcript

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0:00.0	I own it, I did that, not proud, but that was me, and when I face it, I take back a little dignity, not looking for excuses, I just want to be free from power. Weakness had on me. Free, free, free, free.
0:32.2	Hi, everyone, and welcome to the bubble hour where real people tell real stories of addiction and recovery.
0:41.0	I'm Gene McCarthy, recovery author, blogger, and podcast host.
0:45.3	I've been chronicling my adventures in life after alcohol since my first day of sobriety nearly 10 years ago in my blog on Pickled and in the books that I write. I tell my stories there
0:55.9	and I hold space for your stories here and today I'm holding space for Deb. Hi Deb, welcome to the
1:02.2	bubble hour. Hi Gene. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being here. Now Deb, how long
1:09.6	have you been sober? Since May 29th, 2019. So it's more than a year
1:17.3	and a half last time I checked. That's feeling pretty good. Hey, do you feel like you're just
1:22.4	cruising along? No. No, you're going to have a blog for a long, long time with people needing you. Well, honestly, I think my story and probably a lot of people's is, it's primarily a mental health story with a lot of
1:48.3	alcohol running through it. In my family, everything I'd always had modeled and kind of copied
1:54.0	later was sort of a denial or lack of understanding of some behavioral and emotional issues and self-medicating was,
2:04.7	it was what my parents did. And you don't know any different than what you've seen. So it was
2:12.8	very normal to me that that we had a keg-orator in my dining room with my parents growing up.
2:19.7	That didn't seem odd to me until I started to have friends coming over to visit.
2:23.8	And this is a little bit odd.
2:26.1	Or they'd noticed the amount of empty cans that would be in the car to go to the
2:30.7	Redemption Center, things like that that I never would have picked up on and was
2:36.2	still in denial about well into adulthood as far as alcohol being an issue. But to back up a little
2:43.4	bit to just tell you about about me and my story, I'm 42 now working as a freelance writer, a little light this year for personal
2:54.0	reasons, mostly. So I live in the middle of Massachusetts, and besides taking care of my kids,
3:01.8	I really love exercise all forms. I don't like cooking at all, no matter how hard I try,
3:10.7	but I still try to jump around a little bit. Initially, I don't think my relationship with
	...

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