What an amazing coincidence, I just watched David's playlist yesterday. David if you see this, seeing you speak about your struggle with BPD really helped me feel comfortable in my own skin as a guy with BPD myself. Your bravery to be open about it made me and many other people feel validated in a way that we hadnt been before. It made me feel more human. I appreciate you, and congratulations on your marriage 🎉
Ahh! That makes me teary eyed. I'm really glad you were helped by my openness. I know it can always be a struggle to find inner peace and acceptance but I hope if I can be any example that we can at least find bits of it and find fulfillment in this life we may never have expected ourselves to.
This is a wholesome channel. So much content around BPD/NPD is purely negative and borderline hateful. Please keep spreading knowledge and compassion about this subject.
What an inspiring story of healing despite the odds. This man has been through so much and has come through with wisdom and peace. I wish him all the best, thank you so much for sharing his story
Thanks to David for continuiing his story for others to draw strength from. I managed to escape my deeply troubled family of origin in my later 40s, I would get out but then feel v obligated to go back. I was very cognizant of attentively meeting expectations. The only life skills my folks imparted were how to do manual labour for them, and how to accept toxic behaviour and disrespect. Just a thought for the interviwer, mirroring a guest's mood and energy isn't a bad thing at all. David's vibe was on the more thoughtful and gentle side, and this contrasted sharply at times with the interviewer's interruptions, redirects, and points of order. It felt not great as a viewer seeing a series of mid-sentence interruptions when for example the thing about how to refer to PW NPD traits could or should have been raised at the start, or at least let a dude finish his thought before jumping in. tbh how that played out has given me pause about this channel.
Amazing… and I thought the videos were recent. So good to see him more calm, and aware. And to see the reality of it, how the fantasy of 'everything's gotten better' is just a fantasy. “i never promised you a rose garden" comes to mind. I had such a mother too, somehow more perverted, in the sense that abuse was disguised and covert, and is today so much harder to deprogram from, as the messages did sometimes not even come from words, and were coated with "this is good for you". When your tormentor also plays rescuer, that can f'up your psychology quite a lot. I have a feeling it's easier to get out of overtly abusive situations… I can relate to him, a lot. Only in my case, I went through a phase of being the persecutor, and now struggle finding my way back and forgiving myself. He's so inspiring and humble. That's so valuable to hear and see. It gives a realistic image of what people on the spectrum can aim for. You are amazing David. I think you'd make a great father with this beautiful empathy and warmth that you do possess. If ever. Also, thanks borderlinernotes! This channel has been so so helpful to me, and probably is to many others I'm sure.
Thank you so very much and I'm both happy (and sad) that you can relate - I would not wish the dynamic or the resulting trauma I experienced on my worst enemy. It breaks my heart to know my fate is such a common story and there are plenty others like me who aren't able to extricate themselves from the situation and live lives tarnished by the awful trauma resulting from it. I try to be humble in all of this, because we're all imperfect and nobody is immune to psychological despair and the effects of cumulative trauma.
What a fantastically inspiring story of healing and perseverance. This man has been through so much and come through on the other side with wisdom and peace. Thank you for sharing!
Hahah thank you so much! If you enjoyed that little tidbit definitely pick up a copy of The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. It blew my mind when I read it for the first time. Quoted this from the book: "Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways-the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever."
I'm lost for words he is so brave to do this and am so glad,I have BPD and CPTSD,I still havant figured out when I am and people pleaser and empath but draw people towards me who want to abuse my kindness and see it as a weakness
As someone who has struggled with the same kind of tendencies, you have to be very mindful of if you're helping someone because it aligns with your personal beliefs, feelings and views or if you're helping them because you feel pressured to. Drawing the line between those two can be very difficult.
Great to see updates like this. Fits nicely with the whole message of the channel ( progress in not linear, people are people not angels or demons). David's perspective on having children made me a bit sad. Maybe I am projecting here and he is making a healthy aware choice. But the whole "world is too horrible for children" seems such a redo of his mother telling him the world is an awful place. I can be awful too, that is true. But is rarely just awful.
There were plenty of reasons I didn't dive into here for lack of time. The difference between my mother's fearful projections and my own perspective is that she merely preached these views as a means of controlling her offspring, whereas I'm making the decisions I am in full recognizance of society as it is and the existential threats it is facing this century and beyond - and I believe it would not be ethical of me to create a life that would face an existence very likely even more painful and traumatizing than my own. While my wife and I are both saddened by it as well at times, the reality is neither of us could really provide the kind of life and world we'd want a child to grow up in, and by the time that child is my age (32) they'd be living in a world made unrecognizable by climate change, with only about 10-15 years of petroleum and natural gas reserves remaining. I don't know how I'd answer them if they asked me "you knew this was coming, why did you create me?"
Yo David, you have changed since the last video. I admire your lovely hair, and also some sick-ass tattoo is going on your arm. Keep being strong brother and have fun living your life, you deserve it. On my side, I still have some things to fight through as a BPD person and other stuff that I have on my shoulders, but don't worry I am getting better every day. And I also "help" my BPD mother in our household
Thank you so much!! I'm doing my best - that's all you can do sometimes. I empathize with the struggles you are going through and the difficulties of coming from such a background. I would hope you remember that you should not light yourself on fire to keep others warm, especially for your BPD mom. Since you're on the path of "figuring it all out", I'd highly recommend you check out Christine Lawson's book "Understanding the Borderline Mother". To say it merely gave me a helpful framework for understanding my mother (and my parents relationship) and how that related to the abuse and neglect they meted out - is an understatement.
Ill definitely cry too when my sons move out but I want them to feel loved but I had such a horrible childhood I find myself being too controlling of my kids out of fear they might get hurt or lost or ahhh i don't want to think about it
This is a truth I've had to learn as well. The darkness is not escapable, but we can learn to live alongside it. The best we can do is to accept the cards we were dealt and do the best we can in spite of them.
Thanks so much R for pointing out you can have NPD or grandiosity or plain old extremely high and fragile self-esteem without abusing, and you can abuse without any of those things. His mom was born with some sensitivities, she probably had some shitty stuff happen, she didn't choose to have any disorder but: then she CHOSE to not work on herself. She CHOSE to not look at herself and what she was doing. She CHOSE to have people around her to abuse. Shitty human being.
Yes, I'm glad she pointed that out. I've gotten in the habit of using the word in describing my mother's particular brand of wickedness as a kind of linguistic shortcut, but I don't do so in order to invalidate the experience of NPD individuals that don't engage in that kind of cruelty. As far as choice, I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I see my mother's life path as an affirmation of the fact this simply isn't the kind of just world/universe we like to pretend it is. People like her - who are highly intelligent, and socially savvy - can get away with incredible awfulness in our society, seemingly without end. She was able to keep up a front around her colleagues that had her loved and revered as a professional, even while in her personal life she'd be abusing her own children. Who was going to hold her accountable for her behavior, if not my father? And he simply fell in line with her to protect himself. That's the main issue. We may like to think of our lives in this frame of free will and choice, but our path laid before us is highly influenced by the society and systems we live in - a great deal of which basically tell you that as long as you're "successful" financially and sufficiently self-aggrandizing, you get to be as terrible as you want. So while my mother may have had intergenerational trauma and her own awful upbringing to deal with, she never broke that cycle - and instead meted out far worse trauma to her own children than what she experienced. My poor grandmother survived the Holocaust to see her own daughter treating her grandchildren the way she did, and my uncle thinks the great shame of that is what contributed to her untimely death. It's all so sad and unnecessary.
In thinking about what David said on how tragic this world is-a feeling I share-I wonder if that awareness is reasonable, but only half the picture. Isn’t life tragic to exactly the same degree that it is also awesome, beautiful, joyous…? The tragedy of suffering seems like an existential mirror to the joy of living. If there were nothing and no one to care about, it seems like there would also be no suffering. Just thinking out loud here. Don’t know if it makes much sense.
I e-mailed you professionally typed English caption files for all Dr Linehan’s clips. I’ll watch this another time. Please upload the files to accommodate deaf viewers. There’s other important info in there too.
David, thank you for telling your story. I have a feeling that what saved you was your father's vulnerability. I don't know the details, but it seems that he could've shown you that you don't have to be violent.
Well, unfortunately he was violent and unkind towards me as well in many ways, often at the behest of my mother - often to save himself from her ire. If you read "Understanding The Borderline Mother" by Christine Ann Lawson he and my mother are perfectly described by the Fisherman/Witch Mother pairing; lacking in confidence and security he so often would sooner sacrifice his children to save his own skin. But nobody deserves experiencing the horrid neurodegenerative illness that he died with.
I would not call his father vulnerable at all. He was an enabler of his mother’s bad behavior and apart of the abuse that David had to go through. Being someone’s emotional punching bag isn’t being vulnerable that’s being helpless
"I would like to leave this world a better place..." Beautiful. Thank you for sharing your story.
Thank you very much. I'm happy you found it moving. :')
What an amazing coincidence, I just watched David's playlist yesterday. David if you see this, seeing you speak about your struggle with BPD really helped me feel comfortable in my own skin as a guy with BPD myself. Your bravery to be open about it made me and many other people feel validated in a way that we hadnt been before. It made me feel more human. I appreciate you, and congratulations on your marriage 🎉
Ahh! That makes me teary eyed. I'm really glad you were helped by my openness. I know it can always be a struggle to find inner peace and acceptance but I hope if I can be any example that we can at least find bits of it and find fulfillment in this life we may never have expected ourselves to.
Wow wow wow “where are they now!” Amazing your channel has been around so long. Hadn’t realized.
Haha yes we're pretty old if you count the making of the doc film! Thx as always. -P
@@BorderlinerNotes thank you for all your work. Is it possible to see that documentary somewhere?
@@mehowkielan1984 For sure, it's available here: www.borderlinethefilm.com/ -- Thanks for your interest. -P
This is a wholesome channel. So much content around BPD/NPD is purely negative and borderline hateful. Please keep spreading knowledge and compassion about this subject.
I feel for him. So much trauma ❤️ I hope it gets better and better.
I appreciate you. Thank you.
What an inspiring story of healing despite the odds. This man has been through so much and has come through with wisdom and peace. I wish him all the best, thank you so much for sharing his story
Beautiful! Thank you for this Update, David and Rebbie! Love goes out to you! 🧡
What an intelligent and insightful person. Thank you!
Thank you so much. :)
Thank you for sharing David ❤
Thank you! I appreciate you.
Thanks for the follow up. It looks like he’s doing well.
Thanks to David for continuiing his story for others to draw strength from. I managed to escape my deeply troubled family of origin in my later 40s, I would get out but then feel v obligated to go back. I was very cognizant of attentively meeting expectations. The only life skills my folks imparted were how to do manual labour for them, and how to accept toxic behaviour and disrespect.
Just a thought for the interviwer, mirroring a guest's mood and energy isn't a bad thing at all. David's vibe was on the more thoughtful and gentle side, and this contrasted sharply at times with the interviewer's interruptions, redirects, and points of order. It felt not great as a viewer seeing a series of mid-sentence interruptions when for example the thing about how to refer to PW NPD traits could or should have been raised at the start, or at least let a dude finish his thought before jumping in. tbh how that played out has given me pause about this channel.
thats crazy. i remember i watched this guy when i was starting to suspect something wasnt right upstairs. you made me feel normal david, thank you.
Amazing… and I thought the videos were recent. So good to see him more calm, and aware. And to see the reality of it, how the fantasy of 'everything's gotten better' is just a fantasy. “i never promised you a rose garden" comes to mind. I had such a mother too, somehow more perverted, in the sense that abuse was disguised and covert, and is today so much harder to deprogram from, as the messages did sometimes not even come from words, and were coated with "this is good for you". When your tormentor also plays rescuer, that can f'up your psychology quite a lot. I have a feeling it's easier to get out of overtly abusive situations… I can relate to him, a lot. Only in my case, I went through a phase of being the persecutor, and now struggle finding my way back and forgiving myself. He's so inspiring and humble. That's so valuable to hear and see. It gives a realistic image of what people on the spectrum can aim for. You are amazing David. I think you'd make a great father with this beautiful empathy and warmth that you do possess. If ever. Also, thanks borderlinernotes! This channel has been so so helpful to me, and probably is to many others I'm sure.
Thank you so very much and I'm both happy (and sad) that you can relate - I would not wish the dynamic or the resulting trauma I experienced on my worst enemy. It breaks my heart to know my fate is such a common story and there are plenty others like me who aren't able to extricate themselves from the situation and live lives tarnished by the awful trauma resulting from it. I try to be humble in all of this, because we're all imperfect and nobody is immune to psychological despair and the effects of cumulative trauma.
The way you express yourself and describe your feelings and experiences, I relate very much to what you've lived through.
What a fantastically inspiring story of healing and perseverance. This man has been through so much and come through on the other side with wisdom and peace. Thank you for sharing!
I related to this so much. Thank you for speaking on this, David! Important and eloquent worm food ❤
Hahah thank you so much! If you enjoyed that little tidbit definitely pick up a copy of The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. It blew my mind when I read it for the first time. Quoted this from the book:
"Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways-the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever."
Wow, so glad to hear from you again. I can hear the wisdom and pain so clearly
I’m so happy that he found his person and so proud of his mental health journey❤ . There is always hope and the possibility of recovery for bpd
Sounds like David's doing really great. Way to go! We just make the best of it, and that's all we can do.
Going to watch later, at work - love to David, from a bipolar dude with his own bpd traits!
I'm lost for words he is so brave to do this and am so glad,I have BPD and CPTSD,I still havant figured out when I am and people pleaser and empath but draw people towards me who want to abuse my kindness and see it as a weakness
As someone who has struggled with the same kind of tendencies, you have to be very mindful of if you're helping someone because it aligns with your personal beliefs, feelings and views or if you're helping them because you feel pressured to. Drawing the line between those two can be very difficult.
Great to see updates like this. Fits nicely with the whole message of the channel ( progress in not linear, people are people not angels or demons). David's perspective on having children made me a bit sad. Maybe I am projecting here and he is making a healthy aware choice. But the whole "world is too horrible for children" seems such a redo of his mother telling him the world is an awful place. I can be awful too, that is true. But is rarely just awful.
There were plenty of reasons I didn't dive into here for lack of time. The difference between my mother's fearful projections and my own perspective is that she merely preached these views as a means of controlling her offspring, whereas I'm making the decisions I am in full recognizance of society as it is and the existential threats it is facing this century and beyond - and I believe it would not be ethical of me to create a life that would face an existence very likely even more painful and traumatizing than my own. While my wife and I are both saddened by it as well at times, the reality is neither of us could really provide the kind of life and world we'd want a child to grow up in, and by the time that child is my age (32) they'd be living in a world made unrecognizable by climate change, with only about 10-15 years of petroleum and natural gas reserves remaining. I don't know how I'd answer them if they asked me "you knew this was coming, why did you create me?"
Yo David, you have changed since the last video. I admire your lovely hair, and also some sick-ass tattoo is going on your arm. Keep being strong brother and have fun living your life, you deserve it. On my side, I still have some things to fight through as a BPD person and other stuff that I have on my shoulders, but don't worry I am getting better every day. And I also "help" my BPD mother in our household
Thank you so much!! I'm doing my best - that's all you can do sometimes. I empathize with the struggles you are going through and the difficulties of coming from such a background. I would hope you remember that you should not light yourself on fire to keep others warm, especially for your BPD mom. Since you're on the path of "figuring it all out", I'd highly recommend you check out Christine Lawson's book "Understanding the Borderline Mother". To say it merely gave me a helpful framework for understanding my mother (and my parents relationship) and how that related to the abuse and neglect they meted out - is an understatement.
33:36-33:47 This hit way too hard, damn
Ill definitely cry too when my sons move out but I want them to feel loved but I had such a horrible childhood I find myself being too controlling of my kids out of fear they might get hurt or lost or ahhh i don't want to think about it
No one escape the darkness of the past. Never forget that David.
This is a truth I've had to learn as well. The darkness is not escapable, but we can learn to live alongside it. The best we can do is to accept the cards we were dealt and do the best we can in spite of them.
Thanks so much R for pointing out you can have NPD or grandiosity or plain old extremely high and fragile self-esteem without abusing, and you can abuse without any of those things. His mom was born with some sensitivities, she probably had some shitty stuff happen, she didn't choose to have any disorder but:
then she CHOSE to not work on herself. She CHOSE to not look at herself and what she was doing. She CHOSE to have people around her to abuse. Shitty human being.
Yes, I'm glad she pointed that out. I've gotten in the habit of using the word in describing my mother's particular brand of wickedness as a kind of linguistic shortcut, but I don't do so in order to invalidate the experience of NPD individuals that don't engage in that kind of cruelty.
As far as choice, I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I see my mother's life path as an affirmation of the fact this simply isn't the kind of just world/universe we like to pretend it is. People like her - who are highly intelligent, and socially savvy - can get away with incredible awfulness in our society, seemingly without end. She was able to keep up a front around her colleagues that had her loved and revered as a professional, even while in her personal life she'd be abusing her own children. Who was going to hold her accountable for her behavior, if not my father? And he simply fell in line with her to protect himself. That's the main issue. We may like to think of our lives in this frame of free will and choice, but our path laid before us is highly influenced by the society and systems we live in - a great deal of which basically tell you that as long as you're "successful" financially and sufficiently self-aggrandizing, you get to be as terrible as you want. So while my mother may have had intergenerational trauma and her own awful upbringing to deal with, she never broke that cycle - and instead meted out far worse trauma to her own children than what she experienced. My poor grandmother survived the Holocaust to see her own daughter treating her grandchildren the way she did, and my uncle thinks the great shame of that is what contributed to her untimely death. It's all so sad and unnecessary.
In thinking about what David said on how tragic this world is-a feeling I share-I wonder if that awareness is reasonable, but only half the picture. Isn’t life tragic to exactly the same degree that it is also awesome, beautiful, joyous…? The tragedy of suffering seems like an existential mirror to the joy of living. If there were nothing and no one to care about, it seems like there would also be no suffering. Just thinking out loud here. Don’t know if it makes much sense.
I e-mailed you professionally typed English caption files for all Dr Linehan’s clips. I’ll watch this another time. Please upload the files to accommodate deaf viewers. There’s other important info in there too.
Hello Thomas, I am not sure we ever received those. Duly noted re captions. Thank you for that nudge. Our email is borderlinethemovie@gmail.com
No WAYYYYYYYYYYY
David, thank you for telling your story. I have a feeling that what saved you was your father's vulnerability. I don't know the details, but it seems that he could've shown you that you don't have to be violent.
Well, unfortunately he was violent and unkind towards me as well in many ways, often at the behest of my mother - often to save himself from her ire. If you read "Understanding The Borderline Mother" by Christine Ann Lawson he and my mother are perfectly described by the Fisherman/Witch Mother pairing; lacking in confidence and security he so often would sooner sacrifice his children to save his own skin.
But nobody deserves experiencing the horrid neurodegenerative illness that he died with.
I would not call his father vulnerable at all. He was an enabler of his mother’s bad behavior and apart of the abuse that David had to go through. Being someone’s emotional punching bag isn’t being vulnerable that’s being helpless
lost me at "narcissistic abuse"
Dude your hair is sick as fuck
LOL! Thanks so much 😂