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Five things you can do as a supporter of a person with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
Five of the first things you can do when you discover that someone you care for has Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I often have “newbies” or beginning non-BPD family members ask me some things they can do to get acclimated to the world of BPD. I have thought about this long and hard and have come up with these five things: 1. Watch “Back from the Edge”. This 48 minute documentary was made by New York Presbyterian Hospital and includes some of the world’s most knowledgeable experts in the treatment and understanding of BPD, including Dr. Marsha Linehan, the inventor of DBT. The video is available here: Back from the Edge…
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Emotional Regulation (or lack of) and you (the loved one)
Some commentary from WHINE: With BPD, the messages that are sent are sometimes not in tune with the actual environment – there may indeed be no basis in reality for her reactions. An ancient Hindu text characterizes this “misperception” of reality in the following manner: “A rope may be momentarily perceived as a snake before ignorance is lifted.”11 The importance of this “ignorance” is that during the time the rope is perceived as a snake, your emotions react almost automatically. (I say “almost” because if you have been taught to love snakes and not to fear them, you will not have a fear reaction even if you misperceive the rope…
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Chennai’s family courts grapple with poorly qualified counselors – India and BPD
The U.S., Canada and U.K. are not the only countries that deal with borderline personality disorder (BPD). I can only image the numbers in India. Here’s an article about Indian courts dealing with a woman whose husband was diagnosed with BPD: Chennai’s family courts grapple with poorly qualified counsellors Ekatha Ann John, TNN Oct 1, 2012, 05.23AM IST CHENNAI: Every scar on 32-year-old Veena’s* body tells a story. When the mother of two approached a family court in the city to seek a divorce from her abusive husband, she was referred to a counsellor who advised her to go back to her tormentor and come to terms with the situation.…
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Book Review: My Alien Self: My Journey Back to Me by Amanda Green
I recently finished reading Amanda Green’s My Alien Self: My Journey Back to Me on my Kindle. It is a memoir that begins with the author’s diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and moves on to a journal entry from her teenage years about being raped – a journal entry that she didn’t remember writing about an event that she’d suppressed in her memory. The first half of the book covers the events in her life leading up to the BPD diagnosis and to the development of her alien self. Many of these events are typical of borderline thinking and behaving in the face of painful emotions, depression and dysphoria. She…
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Ask Bon: Why can’t this person listen to reason (or see the truth)?
It has been said in popular culture “if it feels good, do it.” In the case of BPD, the saying should be more like “if I feel it, it must be true.” Emotional reasoning is the inclination to believe that feelings actually equal (or cause) facts and events to happen. The feelings of someone with BPD are so immediate and overpowering; it is difficult for someone experiencing these feelings and emotions to believe that these feelings are self-generated. It is important to remember the function of emotions to understand why emotional reasoning takes place. As stated, the basic emotions function to detect threats to one’s survival (or either body or…
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Author shares daughter’s journal entries during Borderline Personality Disorder treatments
Pat Engebrecht shares her family’s heartbreaking struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder in “When Love is Not Enough The Chronicles of LauraJo”. Author shares daughter’s journal entries during Borderline Personality Disorder treatments By Mel Fabrikant Thursday, August 16, 2012, 03:45 PM EDT Pat Engebrecht shares her family’s heartbreaking struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder in “When Love is Not Enough The Chronicles of LauraJo”. For more than a decade, Pat Engebrecht and her family struggled to understand daughter LauraJo’s diagnosis, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). In “When Love is Not Enough The Chronicles of LauraJo” (ISBN 1461185785), she explains what it was like to be the mother of a young woman with an…