I’m no Bilingual Borderline
Parlez-vous francais? Moi, oui. I’m conversational in French and can read it well enough to follow a book or newspaper. I also suffer from borderline personality disorder. Does that make me a bilingual borderline? Fortunately, no.
There are many aspects to BPD. Some of the ones that affect me most are a sense of shame, emotional dysregulation, negative self-talk, and rumination. This year, I made an important discovery: these problems affect me only in English, my first language, not French, my second language.
Although shame is a feeling, it’s a feeling based on thoughts. If someone punches you, you might feel angry. If you stub your toe, you might feel frustrated. But when I experience shame, it’s not due to something someone does to me, or to anything that happens to me, but rather it’s due to thoughts of inadequacy, lack of accomplishment, the absence of close personal relationships, and other things I think about. My French is good enough to watch a movie, but it’s not good enough to produce these automatic thoughts that lead to shame. I’m using this new-found knowledge to give myself shame-free periods by downloading French audio books and listening to them.
I have a similar experience with emotional dysregulation, negative self-talk, and rumination. My French either isn’t good enough, or it’s just not in my nature to do these things in my second language. Once my brain goes into French mode, emotional dysregulation, negative self-talk, and rumination don’t seem to be possible for me any longer. Once I go back into English, they reappear, but as long as I can keep myself in a francophone frame of mind, I don’t experience the symptoms of BPD.
If you speak multiple languages, you might experiment with activities in one of your non-native tongues to see how BPD symptoms are affected. I’d suggest looking for podcasts, tuning into foreign-language radio, satellite, or TV feeds, reading a book, or conversing with someone else in another language. If you don’t yet know a second language, it seems likely that learning one through audios might have the same effect of engaging your brain in a different way. I’d love to hear of other people with similar (or dissimilar) experiences.
Bonne chance!
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