And also, the structure you've been used to for all those weeks is gone. I mean, there are all kinds of non-pathological reasons for any person to be showing what are then called the symptoms of 'borderline personality'. With that number of categories, anybody who walks into a therapist's office is going to fit probably a very large number of those descriptions. And this is all the more true because so many of the criteria for these labels use terms like 'marked' or 'deficient', so there's this huge scope for subjectivity on the part of therapists. Women especially are taught to pathologize ourselves, to undervalue ourselves, to think there's something wrong with us.
Men are to some extent as well, but in a somewhat different way.
Women who are survivors of sexual abuse, for example, all think it's their fault, that there's something wrong with them. I went from assuming my feelings were weird to assuming they weren't so weird, to realizing that if I had a feeling, not only is it not weird, but probably it's universal.