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People With Borderline Personality Disorder May Misinterpret Facial Emotions
In studies, BPD patients sometimes saw anger in a ‘neutral’ face and reacted to that threat. BON: this is kind of a “duh” idea. It’s been well-noted/studied for some time. It is noted in When Hope is Not Enough as well as what, as a loved one, you can do about it. Anyway…. People With Borderline Personality Disorder May Misinterpret Facial Emotions In studies, patients sometimes saw anger in a ‘neutral’ face and reacted to that threat. THURSDAY, May 23 (HealthDay News) — Symptoms of borderline personality disorder often mimic traits of other psychiatric disorders, complicating diagnosis and treatment. But researchers in Canada say they have identified a characteristic that…
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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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Story about resentments from Zen
I really like the book Zen Shorts, which is a children’s book about Zen and Zen stories. There are 3 stories in the book and this is my favorite, which is about resentments and hanging on to negative feelings: Two traveling monks reached a town where there was a young woman waiting to step out of her sedan chair. The rains had made deep puddles and she couldn’t step across without spoiling her silken robes. She stood there, looking very cross and impatient. She was scolding her attendants. They had nowhere to place the packages they held for her, so they couldn’t help her across the puddle. The younger monk…
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Active Minds hosts Pershall to combat mental illness stigmas
Pershall spoke about her battle with anorexia, bulimia and borderline personality disorder. Active Minds hosts Pershall to combat mental illness stigmas By Daniel Mcinerney Courtesy of www.activeminds.org For three days, Stacy Pershall suffered from violent seizures that left her body bruised and her tongue so badly bitten and swollen that she was unable to talk. The seizures were the result of a near-fatal drug overdose from an attempted suicide. On Thursday night, Active Minds, a national student organization dedicated to removing the stigmas associated with mental illnesses, invited Pershall to tell her story during National Eating Disorder Week. Speaking to a full theater in Trabant University Center, Pershall recounted the…
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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…