Chasing Butterflies: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Borderline Personality Disorder

By Amber Zufelt

Chasing Butterflies is a book designed to educate and empower those suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder and their families. You will be given powerful coping skills and other tools you can use to take control of your life once again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312761773

Book preview

Chasing Butterflies: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Borderline Personality Disorder

©2014 Amber Zufelt. All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-312-62944-8

Table of Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………

Common Misconceptions…………………………………….

Learn Your Coping Skills……………………………………

For Your Loved Ones………………………………………..

Stay Social…………………………………………………….

Make Friends With Your Demons………………………….

Embrace Your Weird………………………………………..

Love Yourself………………………………………………...

Look For Beauty……………………………………………..

Who Am I…………………………………………………….

Light Your Fire………………………………………………

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Introduction

Hey y’all! My name is Amber Zufelt and I’m here to tell you a story. It won’t be just any story, but one that is coming straight from the heart. I’m a twenty-something year old woman who has come to the absolute brink of madness and somehow found a way back. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in psychiatrist’s offices and seeing therapists. I’ve been through all kinds of therapies and here I am now. I’ve even spent some time in mental health facilities. (You know what I’m talking about). No one really seems to understand what I go through on a daily basis.

I have spent so much time and frustration trying to find books that explained what it’s like inside the head of a Borderline Personality Disorder sufferer. I wanted my loved ones to understand what I was going through. Most of the books out there are by doctors or psychiatrists and they explain the medical side of it. That’s not really what I wanted. I wanted to have something I could give to someone and say this is what I go through every single day. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something that really explained your life in a way the people around you could understand? Borderline is complex. It’s more common then you may realize, but it’s vastly understudied and there isn’t nearly as much education out there as there may be for other types of mental illness. I want to build a bridge between sufferers and their loved ones to help create a better understanding. It’s hard for us to explain what we’re going through in a way most people would understand. 

Why did I choose the name Chasing Butterflies? Well, that’s exactly how it feels to me. I’ve run around my whole life chasing one dream, then the next. It was the same thing with my identities. I would wake up one day and decide this look wasn’t working for me so I moved onto the next. I never really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up because I had a constantly changing sense of self. People who don’t have Borderline don’t understand how big of a deal it is to actually know and embrace your own name. I say to people Today I know who I am, and I really know my name. No one gets how big of a deal that is unless they’ve spent time not knowing themselves.

A lot of people who have Borderline suffer from other mental disorders and having other people inside them is common. This is caused by a fracture in your psyche brought on by traumatic experiences. At least that’s the best of my understanding. I don’t have other personalities: I have a frame of mind I refer to as Kittie, which is my extreme manic phase. I have limited control over my emotions and actions and I don’t think like myself, feel like myself, act like myself. You could say Kittie is another personality, but the difference is that I’m present. I know what’s going on even though I don’t have complete control. I’m just extremely manic and I feel like a completely different person. Sometimes it’s really nice to not feel anything but happy. It’s also really nice not to feel responsible for anything or worry about being held accountable even though realistically, I am. That, I suppose, is the very core of mania.

I’d like to start by introducing myself and telling you a little bit about me. I grew up in Oklahoma. I come from a huge family which of course has its ups and downs. That’s okay. Some people wish they had the size of family I come from. I’ve talked to a lot of only children who wish they had a brother or sister to talk to when they were a kid. I have one child of my own and he’s the light of my world and I also have a gorgeous step-son who is an absolute blessing. I like to watch them and the way they process things, how they act in emotional situations, and how they cope with the bumps and twists of life. We can learn a lot from children. They’re free spirits. They’re fresh and new and everything is a new experience to them. It’s a beautiful thing.

Before I go any further I would like to point out a few things to you.

Disclaimer: I am NOT a doctor, I don’t pretend to be a doctor, and I have no interest in becoming a doctor. It’s too much responsibility and I’m just not feeling that kind of life. As such, take what you read in this book with a grain of salt.

What I’m going to do is introduce you to my struggles and the ways I’ve learned to overcome them. Some things work for me that may not work for you, nevertheless, I want you to really look inside yourself and decide what you want to do. This is your life, your struggle, and I’m only here to help you along the way as much as I can.

Let me be a light to help you find your way. This is your journey. The way I think of it is, we’re all warriors. We’re fighting a battle no one can see but us. Every breath we take could bring on the next epic battle scene and we never know how we’re going to react or how it’s going to feel.

Living with Borderline Personality Disorder is like constantly having a third degree burn on your heart. While some people might feel a tiny sting, kind of like a sunburn, we feel it all the way down into our bones, to our very core. And you know what? That’s just fine. That’s perfectly okay. It makes us a different breed of awesome, in my humble opinion. We’ll talk a little more about that later.

Okay, back to me. I was diagnosed with Borderline when I was in my mid-twenties. It’s apparently something I struggled with for a long time but I had no idea what was going on. I thought I was crazy. I was emotional, irrational, impulsive, and making a whole lot of bad choices simply because I needed to feel connected to myself. I took my entire life to the extreme. I needed to find who I was. Some mornings I still wake up and look at myself in the mirror and wonder who the heck that person is that’s looking back at me. That’s okay, that’s normal. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it’s very common with Borderline.

I’ll have these awkward moments where I literally don’t recognize my own reflection. There’s a technical term for that and if I could remember the big fancy word I would tell you what it is. It’s similar to agnosia, which is a mental disorder that blocks a person’s ability to recognize any faces. In this case, it’s only you. It also only occurs on occasion. For some people it’s more often. For me it only happens a couple times a month. Honestly, it can be terrifying. I’ll nearly jump out of my skin looking at that person because I wasn’t expecting it. It’s a very eerie and strange feeling. Kind of like that sense in the pit of your stomach that says something bad is about to happen. Has that ever happened to you? It happens to me more often than it should.

Unfortunately, it’s just another symptom that’s very common with Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s the same feeling of impending doom or the unknown raincloud some people express in the pit of their stomach. It’s certainly not a good