When you think of your BPD ex, what does it give you? Do you get a surge of adrenaline from fear or anger? Do you experience an old, familiar pain (which is also enlivening, 'cause dead people don't feel pain).
What do you GET from that mental exercise? What feelings does it engender in you? What fantasies does it activate? How much shame does it catalyze for you, given you couldn't make it work with him or her no matter HOW hard you tried?
There's something crucial you must take away from this:
Feeling ALWAYS precede thoughts. You will almost never have a thought pattern (especially if it's compulsive) without some pretty uncomfortable feelings in your body preceding it~ even if they have to do with nothingness or emptiness!
ALL darker thought patterns are spawned by dark or difficult FEELINGS. How did you distract from and survive those tough feelings when you were too young to articulate em? You went straight up into your head, to find meaning and reasons to attach to em. They felt less confounding to ya that way.
We do this with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, too. Anxious feelings in the body prompt us to mentally figure em out, so we can gain some level of mastery over em. If you decide that driving an additional block or two from your home makes you feel anxious, isn't it easy to stay within your safe little perimeter from home??
The truth is, most anxiety sufferers have been anxious and fearful and depressed their whole life. These emotions are always at their baseline, because of environmental influences they grew up with. In order to feel more mastery over our anxious feelings, we give that monster a face and name~ but this never gets it out from under our bed. It's always lurking around, just waiting to scare the beejeesus out of us, when we least expect it.
Learning to anticipate disaster triggers a lot of people's anxiety, 'cause they're always living in the future, conjuring up whatever terrible fates might befall em! Everytime we project into the future (which is an uncontrollable entity, incidentally), we predictably trigger anxious feelings for ourselves! It happens every, goddamned time, just like clockwork.
You might think of anxiety as the trigger on a gun that shoots adrenaline. Adrenaline surges in the body force feelings of hyper-stimulation, and of course, ALIVENESS.
So you're sitting around feeling bored one day, and what do ya do? You start mentally fast-forwarding into the future, thinking naively, that you can control it. Well, ya CAN'T. The rational awareness that you can't control everything that's up ahead, makes you feel out of control and anxious~ and VOILA! Now you're working up to a full blown panic attack, or at the very least, you've gotta talk yourself down from the ledge.
I have special expertise in working to dismantle anxiety and panic. I've had many clients with debilitating anxiety symptoms, and I've succeeded in ridding em of those, without the aid of medication. There are few, if ANY "psychotherapists" who can make that claim.
When I began thinning out my wellness practice, I wanted to give people the richness and healing they'd experienced while working with me. I decided to construct a tutorial that would VIRTUALLY give you the same insights, self-soothing tools, and complete understanding of your anxiety issues, without having to be hands-on with so many people.
My course isn't just designed to "end" your anxiety. It's designed to GET YOU WELL. Emotionally whole, grounded, happy and well humans NEVER suffer from anxiety symptoms! And that's just what they are. Anxiety problems are merely a SYMPTOM of far deeper issues which have never been addressed, much less, resolved.
Go to my HOME page and read all about the course. See if it's a fit for you, while it's still offered at a ridiculously low fee (about the cost of dinner out, at a fine restaurant). Honestly, I don't know when I'll return it to its original fee of $300, because God only knows how long it's gonna take the world to recover from the bullshit of the past 1.5 years, but for now, you can get this program on the cheap~ so why not assess whether my Overcoming Anxiety tutorial seems like it can help you??