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On My Side
I often hear people with BPD/ERD say that they feel that their loved ones are “not on my side” or that the loved ones are “supposed to be on my side.” This phrase stuck out at me when I read the story about the suicide of Megan Meier (the “MySpace suicide” case), because, although I have no insight into Megan’s mental health, clearly when she was insulted and rejected on MySpace, and she was emotionally dysregulated. She came to her mother, and after her mother admonished her for the use of foul language on MySpace, Megan cried and said, “You’re my mom. You’re supposed to be on my side!” (This…
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Primary and Secondary Emotions
Last week, I was reading a portion of Dr. Marsha Linehan’s book “Cognitive Behavior Treatment Of Borderline Personality Disorder” and stumbled upon a reference that I had never noticed before. It reads: Emotional validation strategies contrast with approaches that focus on the overreactivity of emotions or the distorted basis of their generation. Thus, they are more like the approach of Greenberg and Safran (1987), who make a distinction between primary or “authentic” emotions and secondary of “learned” emotions. The latter are reactions to primary cognitive appraisals and emotional responses; they are the end products of chains of feelings and thoughts. Dysfunctional and maladaptive emotions, according to Greenberg and Safran, are…
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WHINE and DBT Skills Compared
Occasionally, a discussion on my private email list that I feel it would be helpful to share here. I only do it if the discussion is not personal in nature. This discussion is about proper application of the skills in WHINE and how they compare to DBT skills. My list member’s question/comments are indented… my responses are not. Now I have some time to answer these questions and the ones you ask in a later post. Let me start with these. Thanks again Bon. Now I am re-examining how best to communicate. I have a bunch of things I have been thinking about WHINE that I wanted to ask you…
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Tough Love Reconsidered with BPD
Does one use tough love with BPD? You can’t START with tough love, because first emotional trust has to be established.
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Interesting Article from Time Magazine on BPD
Here is a new article from Time magazine on Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): Thursday, Jan. 08, 2009 Minds on The Edge By John Cloud/Seattle Doctors used to have poetic names for diseases. A physician would speak of consumption because the illness seemed to eat you from within. Now we just use the name of the bacterium that causes the illness: tuberculosis. Psychology, though, remains a profession practiced partly as science and partly as linguistic art. Because our knowledge of the mind’s afflictions remains so limited, psychologists–even when writing in academic publications–still deploy metaphors to understand difficult disorders. And possibly the most difficult of all to fathom–and thus one of the…
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Cheerleading as an effective relationship skill
Unfortunately, the concept of cheerleading is something that I mention in WHINE, but I left out as a tool for a Non-BP/BPD relationship. I mention it when talking about what NOT to do in when a person with BPD is emotionally dysregulated (or experiencing an EDM – emotional dysregulation moment). I am planning on providing a “supplement” to WHINE on this website when I finish working on it. I left out a few things that can be effective in a relationship with someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, and these things have come up in the ATSTP Email Support Group. So, I’ve decided to address one of these, cheerleading, now. Not…