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20 Rules for Understanding #BPD
The “most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events.” Based on experience with people with BPD, I have come to notice that these emotional memories become linked within one’s mind and outside of time. In other words, a distance of many years does not diminish the linkage between an emotional-laden memory and an event currently taking place. A person with BPD will link long ago negative emotional experiences with current events because it “feels the same.” In that way, the person with BPD will sometimes act on these emotional memories in a way that is inappropriate for the current situation. No related posts.
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What are emotions and why do we have them?
Emotions are built-in mechanisms for keeping us safe. The “base” of emotions in our brain is in the limbic system, deep within the core and just above the brain stem. I like to refer to emotions as the “land-bridge” between the mind and the body. When you experience emotions both your body and mind react. If you feel fearful, your body reacts by speeding up your heart-rate, contracting capillaries in your extremities (that is why you can “go pale”), and releasing adrenaline into your bloodstream. Your emotion, fear in this case, is preparing your body to run away fast, which is the natural reaction to fear. Emotions are, in some…
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How does one mentalize?
It is important to remember that mentalization is about NOW. It is not about any other moment than now. Therefore, if you aredragging old issues or future worries into the conversation (or if the other person is) then you are experiencing a “failure to mentalize.” You mentalize by continually monitoring the progress and state of a conversation. You mentalize by asking questions about thecurrent conversation, the feelings and intention of the other person and monitoring your own feelings and understanding of the current conversation. It is a natural skill and is built into the human mind; however, it is also a difficult skill, because we are often not mindful of…
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Someone to Call Home – #BPD and Attachment
Even as adults, sometimes people need their mommy. People with BPD, being so emotional, need other people a lot. The people thatare being needed are “attachment people.” The first attachment that a person makes in their life is usually to their mother. Some in the psychiatric community call BPD an “attachment disorder”, meaning the initial attachment with the mother is disordered in someway and it models future attachments which also become disordered. The birth of the self and how one looks at oneself is developed during the period of first attachment. If this attachment is done in a non-disordered way, the child develops a stable self image, one in which…
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Ask Bon: Why is this person so sensitive to rejection?
Rejection Sensitivity is the tendency to “anxiously expect, readily perceive and overreact to social rejection.” Someone with BPD will almost certainly have this feature. Have you ever had your loved one ask you: “Are you mad at me?” Or has your loved one asked you: “Do you like me?” over and over again? Or have they said, “You could do so much better than me. Why are you even with me?” These questions and others like them are indications that your loved one is suffering from rejection sensitivity. Someone with rejection sensitivity will also avoid tasks, meetings or other social interactions if there is any sense of rejection implied. She…
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Ask Bon: Why does this person idolize me one day and call me “the devil” the next?
Black-and-white thinking is the tendency for a person to believe that events or other people are either “all-good” or “all-bad” in any given situation. People with BPD will often vacillate between these two polar ways of thinking, sometimes about the same event or person. This way of thinking is also known as “splitting.” In the support community, loved ones of BP’s will say that they have been “split-white” (meaning, they are thought to be all good) or “split-black” (thought to be all bad). A person with BPD who thinks in this fashion will have an inability to see “shades of grey” in a situation or relationship. This approach can be…