I’m sharing my paper, “Separation From Self as Pathology or Adaptation?” This paper examines personality-disorder diagnosis through feminist, trauma-informed, and transpersonal lenses. Rather than treating emotional intensity, dissociation, relational instability, or self-injury as evidence of individual defect alone, it asks how these experiences may emerge within histories of trauma, gendered social conditioning, and disconnection from one’s emotional self. I explore the disproportionate pathologization of women, particularly through diagnoses such as Borderline Personality Disorder, and consider how psychiatric categories can sometimes individualize pain that has social, relational, and political roots. The paper also considers whether experiences commonly understood as “symptoms” may, in some cases, represent survival strategies, embodied communication, or difficult movements toward greater integration. A central focus is nonsuicidal self-injury, approached neither as somethi......