About
There is a class of people who seem generally to be outside of the realm of the typical counsellor’s or therapist’s experience or training. I seem to be one of those people. We’re usually termed “Borderline Personality Disorder” and most therapists won’t even take us on as clients. We’re accused of being conniving and manipulative, while at the same time being denigrated for how poorly we relate to others.
Until the early 1990’s, “abuse” only encompassed physical and sexual assaults, as though these harms sprang, utterly unexpected, from otherwise happy and healthy environments. Thanks to Judith Herman (and no doubt others), the emotional aspect of abuse is starting to be acknowledged and studied, and the long-term psychological damage is being reclassified as “traumatic”.
The psychological / therapeutic community seems to be noticing how very many of our kind suffered abuse as children; it is beginning to realize that the beatings and the rapes weren’t always what did the most damage.
One of the results of that damage is that we often attract new abusers into our lives. Some people actually accuse us of seeking out new abuse, as though we ever enjoyed any of it or ever wanted any more of it. Many of our abusers are abusing other things, such as alcohol, upon which they are “dependent”. Because of our backgrounds, we do everything we can to “help” our abusers, so another name for us is “co-dependent”.
I think we have been broken in a particular way. As a result, we follow similar patterns in our lives, repeating the same mistakes because we really don’t know any better, and attracting people who hurt us because we don’t realize what we’re doing wrong that makes us attractive to that sort. I am hopeful that there is a fix for people like us. The purpose of this blog is to record my thoughts and perhaps even to announce the occasional success. Perhaps, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, there can be some healing and quietude.
Why the name “Braden Bryce”? It’s another one of those things that made sense at the time.