Please hug your children tight and tell them how loved they are

We often see on social media these days things to tell your children every day, things along the lines of:

I love you
I’m proud of you.
You’re feelings matter.
It’s okay to feel scared/sad/angry.
I’m proud of you.
It’s okay to make mistakes we all do.
I’m sure you’ve all seen these kind of posts but I want to share this to highlight how important that is, from the other side of the story.

I am what happens when you don’t tell your children these things, when you laugh at your child for being scared of something silly, when you get cross with a child for being upset. Things that at the time parents will think nothing of. But as I learn more and more about my diagnosis I have found a lot of research to suggest the one and only cause of Borderline Personality Disorder is as a young child having the core belief that “My feelings are inherently shameful and wrong.” This leads to children growing up hiding their feelings because they believe they are something to be ashamed of and cannot be shared. This also leads to a second core belief by extension of the first “If my feelings are shameful and wrong then I must be!”
I definitely believe I grew up with this belief and through traumatic circumstances later in childhood it got worse. This is a severe mental health condition which is so badly understood by even professionals that it is so hard to get help for. This is a lifelong battle that I am in, I do believe I will be better than I am now and I am already better than I was but this isn't something I will simply get over. It isn't treatable by medication. It is a lifelong battle every day me against this.

So you want to know what I think when I read a facebook post that says tell your children every day how much you love them? I think “Yes please do, or they will grow up to be like me”

I'm going to post the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder now for anyone who reads this but is unsure what it really is. To be diagnosed you have to have 5 out of the 9, at some point in my life I have had all 9.

You feel very worried about people abandoning you, and would do anything to stop that happening.

You have very intense emotions that last from a few hours to a few days and can change quickly (for example, from feeling very happy and confident to suddenly feeling low and sad).

You don't have a strong sense of who you are, and it can change significantly depending on who you're with.

You find it very hard to make and keep stable relationships.

You feel empty a lot of the time.

You act impulsively and do things that could harm you (such as binge eating, using drugs or driving dangerously).

You often self-harm or have suicidal feelings.

You have very intense feelings of anger, which are really difficult to control.

When very stressed, you may also experience paranoia or dissociation.