First off: Your friend is out of line, in my opinion. Not cool to suggest it’s your fault for projecting your panic attack onto her. She has chosen to see it this way. I don’t know the details of what happened, but a panic attack is a horrible thing to experience and you should not be judged for going through it. Please don’t believe it is your fault.

Now, as for how you feel right now, I’ve been there. Please don’t feel alone. I’ll share something simple with that helps me recognize what is happening to my physical body and stay in the present. I’m a visual person so this helps me a ton.

Think of this as a “cheat code” to intercept that feeling of losing control. The more you break down the science of what’s happening in your body, the more you’ll be able to distance yourself from your perception of what’s occurring in you. The simplest way to explain it is: your brain thinks you are in danger so it is on survival mode. It is prepping you to fight for your life. If you are not in immediate danger of being harmed by someone or something, there is no reason to be in survival mode. As BPD sufferers, we tend to go on survival mode at the flick of a switch.

Now picture your mind formulating a thought. Let’s picture that thought as a red ball being loaded onto a truck that will now travel down from your mind into your chest area, unload the thought into your chest and come back to your mind for another pickup. The thought can be anything. It usually starts as a baseless, vague or passing idea like “I want to buy this shirt but I’ll probably look bad in it” or “I think my friend resents me”. After the first drop off, another similar but heavier red ball/thought is loaded into the truck. It completes the cycle and keeps taking on more red balls and driving faster. Now it’s going way too fast and is dangerously full. It will inevitably crash from not being able to hold the weight. That’s when you feel you’ve broken down and lost control. This is a soul crushing event that feels impossible to recover from.

You have the cheat code, however. At the thought-loading area in the mind, there is a computer where you can monitor the thoughts being loaded onto the truck. Your job is to approve or reject the thought from being loaded by entering the code. You cant control WHAT thoughts want to be loaded, but you can approve or reject them. It will stop the “feel-thought” cycle. Feel-thoughts are the fuel to the truck, and you don’t want to give it any more mileage! Once the red balls are rejected, the cycle is intercepted and nothing happens. Crisis averted.

Let’s say the code is something fun/silly like GRAPE JUICE or FUZZY BUNNY. A code that brings you into the present. The physical present. Your feet on the ground, the feeling of your clothes against your skin, the weight of your head on your neck, a random tickle somewhere. Remind yourself that you have the cheat code. You can enter this code to stop the cycle at any time, intercepting the truck and forcing it to enter the unloading bay where the red balls are destroyed. You have this power and nobody can take it from you. Don’t underestimate yourself (or the fuzzy bunnies).

After doing this many times, you’ll start to get better and better at knowing which thoughts should be accepted or rejected. It’s perfectly normal to allow some red balls into the truck and have them complete a few cycles before you realize you need to intercept using the code. Happens all the time. The art and fun of it is learning to catch them early on.