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Five common mistakes made by supporters of people with Borderline Personality Disorder
Based on the book When Hope is Not Enough: a how-to guide for living with and loving someone with Borderline Personality Disorder. During the past four years, I have been blogging about, providing advice to and consulting with hundreds of loved ones of people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). When loved ones come tome for support and advice, I usually find them confused, angry and at their wits end. People with BPD can be extraordinarily difficult to deal with and typically engage in emotion-fueled behavior such as raging, blaming and risk-taking. This behavior frustrates their partners and parents to no end. I have found five approaches in which the loved…
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The Narcissist versus the Borderline
A kind member of ATSTP posted Dr. Theodore Millon’s profiles of the Narcissistic Personality and the Borderline Personality. Here they are for you: Confident/Narcissistic Personality Functional (F) and Structural (S) Domains (F) Expressively Haughty (e.g., acts in an arrogant, supercilious, pompous, and disdainful manner, flouting conventional rules of shared social living, viewing them as naive or inapplicable to self; reveals a careless disregard for personal integrity and a self-important indifference to the rights of others). (F) Interpersonally Exploitive (e.g., feels entitled, is unempathic and expects special favors without assuming reciprocal responsibilities; shamelessly takes others for granted and uses them to enhance self and indulge desires). (F) Expansive Cognitive Style (e.g., has an undisciplined imagination and…
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5th Anniversary of ATSTP List and Some Support for Non-BPDs
Today is the 5th anniversary of the Anything to Stop the Pain support list. After over 50,000 messages and 600+ members, it is still going strong. The ATSTP list is offered for free to non-BPDs. In honor of this momentous occasion, I will clip a response from me to a list member. Any personal details have been removed. The only thing blog readers need to know is that this man’s wife has been diagnosed with BPD and is asking him for a divorce. We also have a couple of recovered borderlines on this list and they are a valuable resource (as is noted here): I believe that there is no…
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But I Love You Now Available in Kindle Edition
My “primer” book But I Love You is now available as a Kindle eBook. Like my other two books: When Hope is Not Enough (the big, green book) and Beyond Boundaries (the advanced guide) you can now read But I Love You on the Kindle. A note about But I Love You: This “primer” grew out of my book “When Hope is Not Enough: a how-to guide for living with and loving someone with Borderline Personality Disorder.” If you have read that book, you will not find much new material in this one. There are a couple of new things (most notably, the “cheerleading” tool), which do not appear in…
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Burnout, Compassion Fatigue and why non-BPDs lack compassion for borderlines
Do non-BPDs have enough compassion for people with Borderline Personality Disorder? A few months ago, Dr. Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, About.com’s BPD guide, posted a message entitled “Have Compassion” in which she said: “Many times each week I receive reader comments, forum posts, and personal emails that are incredibly hateful toward people with BPD. I do understand that many people have been hurt by individuals with BPD, and that usually these comments are written from a place of pain and anger. But, I am often shocked by the level of vitriol in these comments.” She went on to implore non-BPDs to have compassion for those suffering from BPD saying: “People with…
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Fox News Mental Health Guy Gets It Wrong on Lindsay Lohan
I read an article today about Lindsay Lohan from Fox News’ Dr. Keith Albow entitled “What Lindsay Lohan’s Parents Stole From Her”. While I can certainly understand Dr. Albow’s point at some level (although mostly I believe it was to attract readers to Fox with a catchy title about Lindsay Lohan’s situation), I have a problem with Dr. Albow’s analysis of Ms. Lohan’s parents. My problem has several facets to it, so you’ll have to bear with me as I go through them. The first part of my problem has to do with the “blaming the parents” aspect of mental health care and the attitude of mental health care professionals.…