Anything to Stop the Pain - BPD and Non-BPs

I wanted to start re-posting on my blog and the subject of the day is parenting style. I have noticed that there seems to be a conflict between the parenting styles of a person with BPD and that of a non’s spouse. It seems that (maybe because of the invalidation that the BP has experienced) the BP is likely to be harsher with punishments and more likely to invalidate a child’s feelings. I don’t know if this is because the BP sees the emotional volatility reflected in a child’s behavior and is guilty about it or because they never learned to deal with a child’s emotional swings in a way that is validating.

My wife can be very validating and understand at times (even more than me); however, she also takes the “life is hard” and “get over it/suck it up” route with our children at times. I don’t know if you other nons have experienced the same thing, but I see a lot of that in my Google Email Group. If you’d like to discuss this further, you can leave a comment here or, better, request to join the Anything to Stop the Pain Google Email Group by going here:

http://groups.google.com/group/ATSTPGroup

bon :: Feb.17.2007 :: Parenting, Borderline Personality Disorder :: No Comments »

From a review of DBT therapy:

Linehan groups the features of BPD in a particular way, describing the patients as showing dysregulation in the sphere of emotions, relationships, behaviour, cognition and the sense of self. She suggests that, as a consequence of the situation that has been described, they show six typical patterns of behaviour, the term ‘behaviour’ referring to emotional, cognitive and autonomic activity as well as external behaviour in the narrow sense.
Firstly, they show evidence of ‘emotional vulnerability’ as already described. They are aware of their difficulty coping with stress and may blame others for having unrealistic expectations and making unreasonable demands.
On the other hand they have internalised the characteristics of the Invalidating Environment and tend to show ’self-invalidation’. They invalidate their own responses and have unrealistic goals and expectations, feeling ashamed and angry with themselves when they experience difficulty or fail to achieve their goals.
These two features constitute the first pair of so-called ‘dialectical dilemmas’, the patient’s position tending to swing between the opposing poles since each extreme is experienced as being distressing.
Next, they tend to experience frequent traumatic environmental events, in part related to their own dysfunctional lifestyle and exacerbated by their extreme emotional reactions with delayed return to baseline. This results in what Linehan refers to as a pattern of ‘unrelenting crisis’, one crisis following another before the previous one has been resolved. On the other hand, because of their difficulties with emotion modulation, they are unable to face, and therefore tend to inhibit, negative affect and particularly feelings associated with loss or grief. This ‘inhibited grieving’ and the ‘unrelenting crisis’ constitute the second ‘dialectical dilemma’.
The opposite poles of the final dilemma are referred to as ‘active passivity’ and ‘apparent competence’. Patients with BPD are active in finding other people who will solve their problems for them but are passive in relation to solving their own problems. On the other hand, they have learned to give the impression of being competent in response to the Invalidating Environment. In some situations they may indeed be competent but their skills do not generalise across different situations and are dependent on the mood state of the moment. This extreme mood dependency is seen as being a typical feature of patients with BPD.

bon :: Feb.07.2007 :: DBT :: No Comments »