Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality

This book is excellent for students of psychology and people generally interested in the lived experience of a person on the borderline. Johnson is uncompromising in form and content as she brings you up close and personal. Her work is raw and worthy of the time it takes to sit with and process for the careful reader.To address critical reviews: this book is not a guide to "dealing with" BPD. It's not a self-help book. It doesn't have a happy ending (or beginning... or middle...). That is not the point.What Johnson sets out to do is recount her experience at the phenomenological level- that is to speak directly to her experience before interpretation or theorization. In a world dominated by disconnected theory, the documentation of lived experience prior to analysis is SO valuable. As a master's level clinician working with people on the borderline, Johnson's fragmented and eclectic narrative style mirror the challenges therapists (and loved ones) have working with clients of similar presentation.

You may not know you have a friend or co-worker with Borderline Personality Disorder; you only know that person is difficult, obnoxious, odd. Maybe you have it yourself and wonder why you feel lonely and empty constantly. Maybe you are BPD diagnosed. Maybe you are simply interested in psychological issues. In "Girl in Need of a Tourniquet," Merri Lisa Johnson opens her heart and head to give others a look into both the science and the sociology of the BPD patient.The book is odd in organization with poetry, song lyrics, charts, scientific quotations, and personal anecdotes somewhat randomly accrued. Each one helps to explain why Johnson was once "a girl in need of a tourniquet." (title from a song lyric) One psychologist said that a Borderline has no emotional skin, and therefore, when emotion is felt, usually rage, the rage will continue until the patient basically bleeds out.The book recounts Merri's disastrous love affairs with the wrong men and the wrong women. It explains her need to be perfect. She sets a goal to become "the perfect BPD patient,"- an in-joke. BPD patients are notoriously difficult patients due to their incessant and unreasonable demands for attention.Johnson does not spend a lot of time with finding her parents at fault though she lived a chaotic childhood. She does use her knowledge and research to show the effects of a child's attachment disorders based on that chaotic childhood where the biggest fear is abandonment. The wounded child never overcomes that primal fear, that lack of security.Johnson luckily found love in her spouse, Stace. She tries to help her sisters, and through these surviving loves, she begins to save herself from self-destruction. She began to face the challenge of learning to live beyond her BPD through acknowledging that she is not perfect. A number of chapters assess her sexuality.This is not a fully clinical study of BPD, but it is a guide into the mind of someone who has spent her life trying to understand why her rages and tantrums threaten to extinguish her life through drugs, alcohol, and cutting. "I Hate You, Don't Leave Me" is quoted often. If you know someone with BPD or suspect it in yourself, this is a prescriptive book for borderlines."Girl in Need of a Tourniquet" matches "Girl, Interrupted" as an excellent guide into the mind of the borderline.

--This is not your typical memoir, where the author progresses chronologically through his or her life. The author focuses on a relatively small slice of her life, recalling tumultuous relationships and her "psychological journey" during this time.--Her life account is spliced with excerpts from various sources on borderline personality disorder and personality development in general. Sometimes this can be distracting, as it pulls you out of the author's own account, but in some ways I appreciated this- there are experts on personality disorders and they have probably said it better than or more concisely than those of us who are not personality experts.--The author utilizes a lot of figurative writing- this is a very "artful" memoir in that sense.--Overall, this was a unique reading experience.***Finally, there are graphic descriptions of the author's self-injurious behaviors. Anyone who has struggled/struggles with this should proceed with caution when reading this book. I believe it could be very triggering, more so than other memoirs I have read, and may not be the best reading option if you are not "in a safe place" emotionally.

This memoir of a college instructor coming to terms with her recent diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder is an excellent read. She is able to hide her constant turmoil and chaos from others including coworkers for a long time, but eventually her affair with a coworker and then a student gives her dysfunctional reasoning away. At one point she cuts her arm with a razor all night and then proudly displays her arm at work the next day in sleeveless attire; it amazes me she was able to keep her job. The ending was abrupt and jumpy, and I would honestly like to know how she managed to maintain a job teaching college students while proudly displaying her cutting and making out with students in the parking lot, even riding with one to a conference held in Atlanta. That boggles my mind that the college didn't step in...

I loved reading this book. The unique writing style of the author kept me intrigued. Although there was quite a bit of it I didn't personally relate to, I still felt completely able to travel alongside her throughout the book, due to the extraordinary writing. Toward the end, when she explains Borderline Personality Disorder in more detail, I found it to be really informative and helpful. I have recommended this book to others since finishing it.

I liked this book. I bought it to take on an airplane ride. It came before my trip and I ended up reading it before I got on the plane! Our community has a small library and not a lot of inventory, especially new books. I donated it to the library to help others with this condition. It's a great book and shows there is help for this disorder.

Hated this book. I have a diagnosis of BPD and am currently doing MBT. I've read A LOT of books on what it's like to be borderline and I have to say I found this the least accessible of them all. I just couldn't relate to it at all. It felt really false and 'crafted', like a novelist trying to imagine what it's like to be borderline and show off their writing skills, rather than someone's actual lived experience - it just didn't feel genuine at all and when you're writing about something like this, it needs to be. This book seemed so 'constructed' and contrived which made it very hard to engage with the narrator or relate to their experience. At times it felt like a caricature of people like me - I found it really irritating and frustrating. Plus the book lurches all over the place, it's very 'bitty' and disjointed, not helped by the Emily Dickinson style punctuation. I just hated it. Sorry.

I’m genuinely a little insulted by this book.Okay, I don’t like the authors literary style and that’s personal preference but some of the definitions she gives about borderline personality disorder (BPD) and some of the ways she describes people with the same diagnosis are not only offensive but downright incorrect and insulting. Quotes such as those below, for example:“Our three primary types are marbled with fat veins of petulance. We are stubborn. Demanding. Bitter. Agitated. Vicious. Indignant. Hostile. ““The petulant borderline is our gangster alter ego”No actually, we’re not all like that.I read this book in hope that it would help push forward my own recovery (from BPD I might add) but I honestly cannot recommend it for anyone. You’d be better reading an honest story about BPD and recovery is “The Buddha and the Borderline” by Kiera Van Gelder.

Extremely relatable. Highly recommended for borderlines and their friends/family.

This book should provide a 'trigger warning' in the details. I was completely mystified why a book about someone with BPD would have illustrations like those of "cutting". One would assume a book about a specific illness would be read by others with the same - which may involve self-harm ie cutting. I had to return the book without finishing it, because it was triggering, I would have appreciated them as advertising the book as having "triggering illustrations". It may not mean much to some, but for those of us who use self-harm to cope under distress, the images - though slight - are haunting.