Trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, domestic violence
As a sensitive, damaged young woman, Michele Leembruggen craved love and security but it proved an elusive dream because she functioned from the blueprint of her abusive, chaotic childhood, which set her up to fail in a perpetual 'ground hog day'.
To the outside world Michele projected an air of calm control and efficiency but on the inside, something felt very wrong. Under the weight of unresolved trauma and her terror of intimate relationships and of life, she succumbed to chronic anxiety and depression, self-medicating with alcohol and dissociating, not realising she suffered from quiet borderline personality disorder and complex PTSD.
After many years of searching for a 'cure', Michele found a trauma therapist who promised healing but whose own unresolved trauma threw Michele into a destabilising reenactment of her dysfunctional relationship with her borderline and narcissistic mother and she became pathologically obsessed. When the worst happened and the therapist abruptly stopped seeing her, Michele's fight for sanity and healing, truly began.
A Hole Where my Heart Should Be, is a beautifully written and insightful memoir of what it feels like to live with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Quiet Borderline Personality Disorder, of confronting our deepest fears and in doing so, finding redemption, and coming home to our true self.
"Ronnie told me the clincher for her was that any love I received drained away, like water through a sieve. She told me simply, "Your bucket has no bottom and that's borderline." I told her, "Yes, there's a hole where my heart should be."
