You Are More Than Your Mood

For people with Borderline, we often have difficultly maintaining our identity and can sometimes believe or act out that we are our emotions or we are a mood. Recently, I woke up depressed, which I hadn't done for a while. I found myself falling back into old habits, feeling like I didn't want to engage in my normal activities.

Whether its something fleeting from one moment to the next or a mood that seems like its not going away, we all need to learn we are more than our moods and emotions. Have you ever woken up in a particular mood, like I did and it seems to be the set default mood for the day? Your mind decided on it without any input from you. However long it lasts, whether a day, a week, a month, there's nothing harder than when you feel permanently stuck in it. But even then, you don't need to listen to the mood, perpetuate the mood, though you can acknowledge the mood.

Acknowledging the mood to those you trust around you, letting them know that you feel down in a gentle informative way, releases it's power over you. It gives those you trust, the opportunity to share that they too have felt similarly before. That you are not alone.

It's much more preferable than it being some secretive force with the prerequisite that only you will ever feel this way. With the belief that no one could possibly understand, it exacerbates the deep seated loneliness that those with BPD experience and can amp up the intensity of the emotions even further.

If those who you have informed don't share with you instances when they have felt the same, it still helps you to own up to feeling that way. Voicing it gives you the space to realise you are not the emotion, you are just feeling the emotion and is a practise that can help you to separate yourself from it.

If you've not heard of Valued Living, it's something which is referred to in all the DBT-Dialectical Behavioural Therapy material and which is recommended if you have Borderline. Valued living is where you try to live based upon your values, rather than your emotions. I found valued living one of the most important tools for life and is a topic I will cover in more detail in future blogs.

If you live by your values, you'll find that your emotions will start naturally to take a back seat and they'll no longer be in command of the choices and decisions that help to make who you are. It won't make the emotions go away, but it will help you to get on with your life and give them only the space that they are meant to have. For someone struggling with intense emotions it can make a huge difference.