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Are you a grudge collector?
Why being a grudge collector makes you into a slave and dependent on others for justice and self-worth. Reexamining the duality of praise and blame and how people’s feelings play a roll. I noticed today that my wife with BPD is a grudge collector. She holds onto blame from others for a long time. Judgments made about her actions and times that she has been blamed about things (especially when she feels she was NOT a fault) are repeated time and time again in our house. I suppose she ruminates on the perceived humiliation from these incidents. She also craves recognition for her “special abilities” such as her large vocabulary…
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Understanding Accountability and BPD
Often, I have had nons say to me that they want their borderlines to be accountable and responsible for their actions. I recently got a 1 star review of “When Hope is Not Enough” that indicated that the reviewer felt that my approach to BPD was a “recipe for walking on eggshells”. It’s clear to me that the reviewer didn’t really understand the content of my book. The reviewer went on to say that: This book doesn’t hold a BPD anywhere close to being responsible for her actions by granting the notion of “emotional dysregulation” a power of grand excuse. Clearly, the reviewer didn’t understand the idea of emotional dysregulation…
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A Preoccupation with Interpersonal Relationships
This feature is a new one that I have added to my “model” of BPD. I added it because I was attending the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ISSPD) and listened to Dr. John Gunderson present a detailed model of his experience with BPD. The purpose of the presentation was to present a “real world” clinical model of BPD from the viewpoint of someone with many years of experience treating the disorder. One of the features that Dr. Gunderson provided was this “preoccupation with attachments.” I believe this feature is born of an unstable sense of self. A person with BPD has difficulty “locating herself in the…
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Lindsay Lohan and possible BPD (more detail this time)
Well, it’s been some time since I have written anything about celebrities with possible borderline personality disorder. Personally, I wish some celeb would just come out and admit that they have the disorder and help others by showing that there’s effective evidence-based treatments for BPD. I guess the stigma is too great and they feel that it would hurt their careers. Of course, for some, their behavior is what is hurting their careers. Today, I am turning again to Lindsay Lohan (click here to see all posts about LiLo). Lately I have been receiving a ton of alerts with news stories that contain LiLo’s name and reference BPD. These are…
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An exercise in being Non-judgmental
I have been working on a second edition of When Hope is Not Enough, in which I am adding some exercises as well as some new tools and perspectives to make the book even more effective. One of the exercises is in learning how to be mindful of one’s judgmental attitudes. I often say that people with BPD are almost allergic to judgment. I find that this can be tracked back to shame which in turn can be tracked back to an unstable sense of self. Here is the first draft of the exercise: One way to become non-judgmental is to become aware of your (often) unconscious and conditioned judgments.…
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A new article about BPD in NY Times and the reaction
I was both encouraged and dismayed by Jane Brody’s article about Borderline Personality Disorder in the NY Times. Here is the text of the original: June 16, 2009 Personal Health An Emotional Hair Trigger, Often Misread By JANE E. BRODY In the popular 1999 movie “Girl, Interrupted,” Winona Ryder portrays a young woman who tries to commit suicide, then spends nearly a year in a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. The film, based on a 1993 memoir by Susanna Kaysen, was gripping. But experts say it oversimplified this common yet poorly understood mood disorder. Georges Han, a recovered patient now studying at the University of Minnesota…