A.J. Mahari's Audios/Videos to help you learn to more effectively cope through skill-building and cultivating conscious awareness that supports positive change.
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Coping Skills & Tools
A.J. Mahari's Audios/Videos to help you learn to more effectively cope through skill-building and cultivating conscious awareness that supports positive change.
Suicide is really not the answer to the pain of Borderline Personality Disorder. You may have once believed that or it may feel like it is the only answer when you are triggered and entrenched in black and white all or nothing thinking. You need to know that you really can find your way to Finding Hope From The Polarized Negativity of BPD and that was is crucial in order for you to be able to find that hope and to travel the journey From False Self To Authentic Self in BPD is for you to make a choice, one moment at a time to ride out the waves of intensely Dysregulated Emotions knowing that they will shift and you will once again find your way to feeling as if you can at least breathe again, feel safe again, for a little while. In order to find your way to the road to recovery and then along that road you need to be here.
If you have Borderline Personality Disorder and you struggle with suicidality you need to learn how to break down the moments and find an ever-increasing mindfulness, radical acceptance, and presence to the more difficult and troubled emotionally dysregulated moments in your life. Realize that these intense and distressing feelings - feelings that leave you feeling like you want to die or need to die to end your pain, come to pass. They aren't always and they aren't going to last forever.
Many with Borderline Personality Disorder struggle with suicidality. Reasons for this include the all-bad half of the splitting that occurs in the skewed and polarized ways that those with BPD often think. This along with the experience of magical thinking - believing that what one feels is real and having little or no sense of ever feeling differently than how one feels right now - or when suicidal heightens the intensity of the experience of negative and painful feelings and also increases the emotional stress that borderlines feel. When a borderline feels increased stress around feelings they do not know how to cope with, again that feel as if they are going to last forever, tragically sometimes they seek a permanent solution to what is a temporary emotional dysregulation, discomfort, painful and anxiety-ridden (often) experience. The reality that most with BPD (in the active throes) are highly impulsive often increases the chances of not only feeling suicidal but acting on it when triggered into dysregulated emotion.
"Unfortunately, suicidal behaviors and completed suicides are very common in individuals with BPD. Research has shown that around 70 percent of people with BPD will have at least one suicide attempt in their lifetime, and many will make multiple suicide attempts. People with BPD are more likely to complete suicide than individuals with any other psychiatric disorder. Between 8 and 10 percent of people with BPD will complete suicide; this rate is more than 50 times the rate of suicide in the general population." (Source of above quote - Suicidality in Borderline Personality Disorder - Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD)
The time is long overdue to free Borderline Personality, what it really is, what it really means in people's lives, from the psychiatric systemic pathological model which now includes Biopsychiatry This unproven but oh so pushed theory that Borderline Personality and any and all of what they call mental illness is a brain disorder by the "powers that be" in the dying "profession" of psychiatry needs to be challenged. Not directly, but inside of yourself so that you can find the healing and quality of life that you deserve and that is so possible to do in empowered alternative healing and recovery.
In that model and with the current edition of the DSM 5 we see more and more of the agenda of Big Pharma. The blurring of diagnoses that one could argue don't mean that much to begin with, is the agenda of the "bible" and "profession" of psychiatry now because they want to medicate you. There's money in it for them if they medicate you. There is control in it for the pathologizing and dehumanizing systemic unethical theories of biopychiatry put forth to you as if it is all true.
You, if you have been diagnosed or if you feel you have issue in your life that may fit one of their growing out-of-the-blue defined "mental illnesses" stop and ask yourself, aren't you more than any constellation of traits or issues? Stop to ask yourself, are they listening to me? Do they care about me? Am I more than a diagnosis or set of symptoms to them?
How can the answer you come up with to the above questions be yes? Why would I ask that? Simply because the systemic pathologizing of people as labeled with this or that "mental illness" non of which is truly based upon provable without doubt science, totally forgets about and in fact, ignores, the human and situational context of you, your life experience, and the reasons why you may be in need of help and support.
The question is what kind of help and support is really going to help and support you? Is it Big Pharma Funded biopsychiatry pathologizing and drugging you? Or would it look more like someone who has had and recovered from Borderline Personality (really, whatever that means anymore) and who knows what it feels like from the inside out? It is beyond time that this black and white massive head game of "mentally ill" "brain disorder" versus "mentally healthy" (notice psychiatry and it's DSM's don't even try to define mental health - heck there's no money, power to abuse, or ego to satisfy in that for them now is there?
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how you could benefit from holistic alternative means of help and support? What do you think about the possibility of someone like myself, really listening to you, really hearing you, really understanding you? In my Life Coaching - especially in the area of Mental Health and BPD specifically, there is no dehumanizing pathologizing. There is no "your just another mentally ill person and you always will be type of thinking at all on my part. That's Big Pharma, psychiatry, biopsychiatry territory. I'm sure there are some wonderful mental health professionals out there. However, they are taught to ascribe to this "mental illness" versus mental health black and white way of thinking.
All above Ebooks or Audios copyright A.J. Mahari - All rights reserved.
Ask yourself, how is they "know" so much about "mental illness" and diagnosing you with this, that, and the other thing, and yet they cannot define mental health?
You deserve to explore alternative holistic positive psychology based Mental Health and BPD Coaching that I offer. You deserve to know that you are way more than any issues or problems or "Borderline Personality" diagnosis. For years, many professionals themselves have been scratching their heads wondering what the hell is BPD supposed to really mean anyway.
It is time to look at what they call BPD in a new positive holistic alternative hopeful way and light. A human context model which I bring to Coaching people along with my own experience with what this meant in my life and what recovery from BPD really means and looks like and how to get from feeling like you are so "Mentally Ill" to knowing that you are not as lost or hopeless as they would have you believe you are.
It's time to really think about thinking about BPD much differently. Free yourself from the confines of a stigmatized pathologized systemic diagnosis that really has little to no human relevant context to it. Imagine what it could be like for you to come to understand how you can truly get free of BPD in a compassionate, caring, empathy and validation filled way - that you can come to so much, with a little guidance from me, inside of yourself. Pills aren't the answer. Psychiatry is not the answer. You just need support and validation, among learning some tools and coping skills to learn to turn the suffering from your past into a quality life in the here and now, yes, that means recovery. And recovery is not found in DBT alone. Recovery is not found in medication. Recovery is not found in the invalidation and re-traumatization of a psychiatric systemic pathologizing of you that dehumanizes and stigmatizes you. Recovery is a multifaceted yes. However, who better than one who has been where you are and who sees through what it all means and why it hurts so much to help you empower your own healing journey?
It's time to take your life back from the grips of Big Pharma and a systemic pathologizging of people that brands them as having "brain disorder" called "mental illness" - that is inhumane, unethical, and for most extremely unproductive in terms of finding your way out of this maze of hurt and pain that you know all too well not because you are some hopeless horrible person who needs pills and can never change - not at all - but rather because you have experienced incredible pain early in life and it has built defenses that helped you survive but that now keep you from knowing who you really are and from living your life the way you really want to.
Free yourself from the confines and the psychiatric systemic pathologizing model of Borderline Personality. The choice really is yours!
Does recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder mean reconnecting with people that had to leave to take care of themselves? In my experience the answer is no. It is important to grieve, let go and move on and to learn from past failed interpersonal dynamics so that they are not repeated in the future. What was then, was then. This is now. There are new people to meet, new relationships to forge and as someone who recovered from BPD, I have my - a found, known, and emotionally mature authentic self to fall back on in the meantime in ways that I didn't have when I had BPD.
I am asked often, as a Life Coach by loved ones of those with BPD as they grapple with leaving or going no contact, "What if I end the relationship and then he or she gets help and becomes this wonderful person?" This question can often keep those on the other side of BPD stuck in toxic unhealthy and/or abusive situations that erode their own sense of self. I address this what-if and what it means for non borderlines in my audio program, Breaking Free From The BPD Maze - Recovery For BPD Loved Ones Perhaps both those who have BPD and those who love or care about them, both need to learn that people sometimes come into our lives to teach us things and that there is no reason beyond the lessons the painful lessons to remain connected or to be dancing the dance of a toxic relating that is often enmeshed and codependent relating on the part of both the borderline and the non borderline - BPD Loved One.
A person with BPD wrote to me and asked:
"I was just wondering if, when you got cured of BPD, or at least were well on the way to recovery, whether you were able to heal any of the relationships that you had lost because of BPD issues? I have so many of those relationships, people that I miss and wish were back in my life. And if you did, I'd be interested in knowing how you went about doing that. Thanks a lot."
Let me begin by saying that I am sure that there is no rule about this. I am sure that some people may be able to go back, and or want to go back to past relationships and try again, whether those relationships are with family, friends, or past love interests. This has not been my experience, nor is it a desire of mine anymore. And, for most people, it is not actually a healthy risk. It means that both people, whether ex-partner or friend etc., has to have done the work necessary to heal their own pain and address the ways in which they were damaged in the past. For most people, hurt by someone with Borderline Personality, if they work on healing themselves and have ended a relationship or friendship and even in the case of family members with BPD that one has choosen to go no contact with, it is not very likely there will be second chances. Sometimes, often actually, for people with Borderline Personality, there are various stages in the recovery process where others might be willing to take another change, give you another chance, but often these attempts to re-connect take place before enough or full recovery from Borderline Personality has been achieved which leads others to see old anxiety and fear-producing patterns in someone they are giving another chance to.
There was a time, when I would have answered this question differently than I will today. Not only did I have to recover from BPD to understand what I am about to share but I needed a few more years of just living fully-aware of myself and in relationship to myself and in healthier relationships with others to know what my answer to this question is. My answer is, no. I could only heal myself. I could not heal a relationship with anyone who either didn't want to heal it or couldn't heal anything because they still need to heal themselves. There is also the reality that even after I recovered from BPD, it didn't change or take back the damage done and the pain caused and the heartache that I put others through. Sometimes there is just too much damage and pain to overcome.
About six years after I recovered I had a relationship with someone (long story) who had BPD/NPD. I learned a lot. Heck, it may have even been somewhat karma for me. I certainly didn't fail to notice that and be humbled by that. However, as someone who was a BPD Loved One at that time with in this relationship many years ago now, when I ended it, I went total no contact and never looked back. I refused and would not entertain and future contact from this Ex in my life again. The pain was too great.
The abuse I had to endure, too much. The damage took its toll. I then came to learn, on the other side of BPD, just how much healing and recovery is actually needed to truly move one from a relationship with someone with BPD not yet in recovery or not yet having had enough therapy to be able to make significant changes in how they relate. I have forgiven this person but that doesn't mean I want to have any contact with them again.
Then I could also site an example from my past with my own family. I walked away from my family in 1990, as I got serious about getting through my process of recovery from BPD myself. With only a few contacts in the last 23 years, I have not looked back. I have forgiven, though not been forgiven by a Borderline Mother still stuck and the same or by a brother manipulated by that Borderline Mother. They don't even know who I am today. But, it's fair to say, that for their own reasons and due to their own inability to work out the past, their own and our shared family past, they are still rigid black and white judgmental thinkers who won't even consider the possibility I have changed as much as I have and maintained that change and mental health for getting close to 20 years now. I have long since just radically accepted this. I have let it go.
Re-connecting with people that you have hurt due to Borderline Personality is rarely a good idea. It rarely works. I found out, the heard way, that just my recovering and changing alone, huge in and of itself, at the time, wasn't enough for my family, but nothing ever was enough for them. But, it also wasn't enough for many people I hurt in the past when I had BPD and I have to respect and accept and honour that because that is the best ammends I can possibly make. When we know better we do better. But when we do better it doesn't mean we get opportunities (very often, if at all) to have a re-do-it-over-again, and really once I had recovered, changed, moved on and built my life, met new people, had new relationships and friends, I didn't want to look back really either. I learned this in other ways in the examples I'll share below:
Of course I share this answer after having tried in a couple of places to re-establish relationship to a family member and a friendship with my first ex-partner.
In the case of the family member, my mother, it became painfully obvious to me that she and I had not had a relationship (certainly not one with any health in it) in my entire life. Okay, well, there I was healed, better, etc. so I thought well, I could try. In my trying it became apparent to me that the reasons why we had never had a relationship had much more to do with her than I. I had changed tons. My mother has not changed much at all. She still has very active BPD. What that meant was that there still wasn't any common ground from which to work. In my recovery from BPD, one of the greatest gifts has been to come to understand that with most relationships, like childhood neighbourhoods, you really can't go back. If you do go back, so much has changed. Life has a way of moving on without you and trying to go back when so much has changed, not the least of which is me and how I relate to others hasn't worked out for me. I have found too that since I have changed so much, grown so much and have boundaries and a healthy relational style now that truthfully there isn't a relationship from my past that it would serve me well to try to go back to. I have said my share of "I'm sorry's" to those that I have hurt. I have written some letters too. But that's about taking personal responsibility and was done without any desire or expectation to reconnect. Idid not communicate to anyone who had set a firm boundary with me of not wanting to hear from me again.
I am a different person now. I have different wants and needs. Many of the people that I knew when I had BPD were also not well in their own ways. I have found it best, for me, in my life, to move on and to continue to meet and get to know healthier people.
I did reach back one more time with an ex-partner of mine. I had hurt this person a lot and I did feel very sorry about that. I wanted her to know that. I tried to relate to her in the present as the person that I am today. She was not in a place with her own issues that she could really appreciate this or meet me half way. She was still more in the past with who I was and her own issues - fair enough. I have also since realized that my wanting to reach back to say I was sorry was very valuable.
My wanting to reach back to validate her pain and experience was very valuable. Even though I sat and listened to her absent any judgment or defense of myself, I would later realize that my reaching back was not as much for her as I thought it was - it was also for me. I did want her to have the opportunity to tell me how I hurt her and to apologize and try to make amends. I just didn't realize I also was hoping for her to forgive me. I thought I wanted and needed this from her for some reason. I didn't, at that time, realize that my giving also had some expectations with it. I was giving regardless. But later I would discover I was also wanting. I never really addressed this with my Ex. I just let her have her say a few times, we had a few discussions and then I dealt with my realization later on my own. I had no agenda of wanting to get back together with this Ex. I really wanted to apologize.
But with the level of my awareness at that time aside, there was something deeper that I was unaware that I so wanted - that I thought, for some reason, I needed. I had no clue at that time. Only in retrospect do I know what it was I was seeking. I thought I needed her forgiveness. I wanted her forgiveness. It was not really something that she could give. What this experience taught me was that it was I who really needed to forgive myself.
And this was all I would have control over anyway. I could forgive myself. I couldn't, nor did I want to try, control who would or would not forgive me. Part of being emotionally healthy and balanced is really appreciating the other person's feelings and boundaries and respecting them without challenge or without making it about yourself. I also found that moving forward and beginning anew was really the best way to go because then I could be the authentic real healthier me that I had become and create new friendships, connections, and relationships to people that there wasn't the legacy of my past damage done in the way. It can also be an obstacle that stops those far down the road in their recovery from fully recovering if they are making their recovery dependent upon others "getting it" now when they may well not care anymore. Harsh, I know, but, honest. And when you deal with what is, you will be much more successful in coping with it and in not blocking your way forward by wanting to look or go back. That's just counter-productive for both the people hurt by the person with BPD and for the recovered or recovering person with BPD.
I have since worked on that and been able to forgive myself for those years in my life and for the behaviour, abuse, and pain that I caused both her and myself. Having forgiven myself I feel absolutely no desire or need to have her be a part of my life anymore. She also didn't feel any need or desire to be a part of my life anymore. That, when you get to full recovery and take personal responsibility and truly understand the ways in which you've hurt someone (or several people) is not difficult to accept as long as you are able to work through forgiving yourself. Remember, always. But forgive yourself. I am reminded of this so often in ways that still humble me today when I work with clients going through this process and trying to win back people who they have hurt or reconnect with people be it family or an Ex that is not in a relationship and often they do this way too soon, way before they are changed enough to be consistent and congruent even if they get the chance to be let back into someone's life.
Borderline Personality Disorder, as it is defined in the DSM-IV, has been way too pathologized. It is going to be even more pathologized in the next edition of the DSM - DSM V due out in 2013. Who does that help? Taking human traits, albeit felt and expressed more intensely and frequently in those with Borderline Personality, and pathologizing them as a disorder really doesn't make that much sense. It is in and of itself, a black-and-white paradigm.
Borderline Personality is not intractable. It does not have to be a life sentence. In my experience, not only in 14 years of Coaching those with BPD and BPD Loved Ones, have I had the sacred opportunity to help, educate, and support my clients but I have also seen so many do incredibly healing work on both sides of BPD. As someone who was a child (now still an adult-child of a Borderline Mother and a BPD/NPD Father (died in 1997), and someone who was diagnosed with BPD at age 19 and recovered at age 38, I know first-hand what that process entails and that it is truly possible.
From my own inside out perspective, as someone who had BPD, and now is an average mentally healthy person (non bp) and has been since 1995, I know what it is like to live from within the vortex and painful suffering of BPD and what is like to live without that - a happier and healthier life. This is why I believe that we need to take the pathology out of how we define and explain Borderline Personality. As I know first-hand it is about early childhood unmet needs, abandonment trauma (actual or perceived) and/or a lack of secure mirroring and/or bonding between mother and infant. ("affect synchrony" - Allan M. Shore) It is a spiritual/emotional/psychological woundedness that is profound and deep but not intractable, not a brain disease, and it is not something that can be healed by medication.
Many people who love (or have loved and cared about) someone with Borderline Personality get hurt or have been very hurt by partners, family members, parents, adult-children, and so forth. The answer to this pain and to the ordeal that truly is the painful reality of Borderline Personality for those with it and those who are their loved ones (or were) is not to hate or to try to rescue and save or to punish, rage, give the silent treatment or blame others for your actions if you have Borderline Personality. The answer is understanding from those of us who have been on both sides and know this Borderline - Non-Borderline (Loved Ones) struggle that creates toxic relational dynamics and for many on-going chaos and drama in their lives which means a lot of stress and unhappiness.
The answer is looking at why people with Borderline Personality (or so classified for purposes of understanding here) do what they do and what that means if you have Borderline Personality or if you are a loved one. Choices need to be made. Boundaries need to be set often by loved ones. Those with Borderline Personality need help to learn how to take personal responsibility and get on the road to recovery.
Pathologizing people who hurt (even when they hurt you) is not going to help you, the loved one, or the person with Borderline Personality. We need to break this down into human terms and with a context of compassion and understanding the context of just what Borderline Personality really is. It is not the pathologized "monster" that the DSM-IV makes it out to be. It is not even the stigmatized "monster" that hurt and abused loved ones or Ex-loved ones make it out to be. It is pain, it is people emotionally out of balance who lack coping skills. This in no way means I am saying people with Borderline Personality aren't responsible for their words and actions - they are. However, they are not "monsters". They are not "sick". They are not "freaks". They are not deserving, no matter what, of being name-called anything.
We need to separate out the behaviour of people with Borderline Personality from their behavior and the ways that they think in cognitively distorted ways. We need to know that no one can rescue someone with Borderline Personality.
Borderline Personality with this Emotional Dysregulation and attachment and relational difficulty that originates in childhood through no fault of those diagnosed with it, in many cases not even the fault of a mother and in other cases can be seen to have roots also in abandonment, neglect, sexual abuse, and adoption, and other factors, needs to be re-framed.
Too many people diagnosed with have been villified beyond belief. Not to defend undefendable behavior, actions, or words on the part of many with Borderline Personality, we need to collectively realize that even this extreme expression of human pain has context and meaning and matters.
At its roots the dance between those with Borderline Personality and those who are often so hurt by them, be they partners, children, or other family members or friends, have to realize that where everyone meets in this unyielding clash of emotional universes is codependency and what is a lack of boundaries and a clash of human issues.
It's time that people with Borderline Personality stop being pathologized, stigmatized, all painted with the same prejorative brush. It's time that we put human context and personal responsibility on both sides of Borderline Personality at the forefront of coping with it from both sides in ways that help those who want out of the dance to free themselves from the dance be they "Borderline" or be they "loved ones".
Life Coach, BPD (and Loved Ones) Coach and Peer-Therapist, A.J. Mahari, talks about how you can answer the nagging questions about whether or not you or a loved one of yours may have Borderline Personality in this 66 minute audio.
Mahari talks about her own approach from her own expertise in understanding what Borderline Personality Disorder is often thought to be, how it is pathologized, how psychiatrists have check-lists that mean a lot of people with BPD (high-functioning people) aren't getting the diagnosis they need to be able to understand what they need to learn more about and become more aware about so that they can heal.
Mahari has a new-age and creative positive psychology approach to what BPD really is that she knows makes sense because she had BPD, diagnosed at the age of 18, a few months before her 19th birthday - how life was in the past up to that time in her life, and why, and then from her ensuing recovery process which was successfully completed when A.J. recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder in 1995.
Resistance to treatment in Borderline Personality Disorder is very common. There can be as many reasons for this resistance to treatment on the part of people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) as there are individuals with BPD. As someone who recovered from BPD in 1995 I can honestly say that knowing what that resistance is about from the inside out because, I too, often, in the process of my recovery, when I was in therapy, would present resistance and defense that blocked my learning, gaining insight, awareness, and my taking personal responsibility.
One of the biggest issues of resisting treatment in those with Borderline Personality Disorder, which I also had to work through in my own recovery, has to with the rigid all-or-nothing black-and-white thinking patterns which are largely negative, caused by and built on by the maladpative defenses created by the Borderline False Self that are the legacy of the Core Wound of Abandonment in Borderline Personality Disorder.
Another major reason for resistance in treatment for people with Borderline Personality has a lot to do with the dissociative nature and the reality of triggers. Triggers which cause the re-experience of emotional dysregulation that is intense and overwhelming that most with BPD are unable to cope effectively with until they actually get enough treatment to learn how to cope - treatment that is often blocked by fear, negative thinking, resistance, fear of triggers, shame fear of abandonment and the maladaptive coping mechanisms built up over the course of life of the person with BPD. The major challenge of the reality that people with Borderline Personality, often consciously unaware of what they are actually thinking that leads to their intense feelings, are often trying to escape those feelings at all costs. Magical thinking, believing that what one feels is really real and what is, along with not being aware of the cognitive disortions in thinking that are causing their feelings most with untreated Borderline Personality end up feeling helpless and hopeless and can't cope with those feelings either. What anyone with Borderline Personality will greatly benefit from is learning to become more aware of his/her thoughts and way of thinking and then engaging in some process of treatment that helps them learn to Change Thoughts and Change Their Feelings and gain new healthier perspectives on their styles of relating to self and to others.
There is often both a strong desire to get out of the pain that is experienced when one has Borderline Personality and an equally strong need to protect against the very treatment process being undertaken to create relief, to build coping skills, and to find the lost authentic self. I, as a BPD Coach and Peer-therapist who has been there, from the inside out, totally understand this duality. It is not a duality that most with BPD can be fully aware of in the beginning of treatment or coaching with me or any therapist for that matter. I do, however, have a specific methodology of working to help people with BPD with is very crucial paradox of desire to get well and the need to block that process which presents as resistance to treatment. I have developed this methodology from my own experience of this very painful and primal struggle that I too have been through and that I was able to get beyond to recover from BPD.
People with Borderline Personality will benefit from gaining more awareness about what is required in the first steps of recovery from BPD and from learning more about how to begin to find Hope for relief from pain and for recovery.
For so many who seek treatment with BPD it is this resistance paradox that both sees therapists (mental health professionals of all different disciplines) often give up on patients or clients with BPD or get stuck in their own frustration and counter-transference with the Borderline client, over-medicate them, and/or simply refuse to treat them any longer. It is also this Borderline resistance paradox that is not well understood by those who have never been where I have been, had BPD and made it all the way through to recovery - all the way back to know what this paradox actually is, to identify it as I have done and to then figure out how to work with people with BPD without allowing frustration to interfere with compassionate care and a dedication to loyal supportive and validating continued work with BPD clients.
This resistance paradox is very confusing and not well understood by many with BPD who seek treatment and then feel failed by therapist after therapist. It is also a method of self-sabotage on the part of those with BPD though it rarely is a very conscious process.
I have learned in the last 11 years of my work as a BPD Coach and Peer-Therapist with thousands of BPD clients that it is crucial to understand and to know how to support clients though this resistance paradox because treatment no matter the methods or modality or combination of said cannot be successful without this paradox. This paradox is a part of the process of unwinding the defense mechanisms of Borderline Personality Disorder which is one key part of the recovery process and which borderlines resist the most out of fear and mistrust and an inability to cope emotionally. It can be for some the most formidable aspect of treatment and often what drives them out of treatment that fastest.
This is why I believe it is so important for people with BPD to come to understand what this resistance paradox in BPD represents, why it happens, and with my clients, in the way that I work to treat and coach those with BPD to wellness and recovery it can be a central and on-going theme that must be re-visited many times over. I don't see this as a negative or a reason to give up on someone. I see this as a natural part of the process of what it truly takes to recover from the actual cause of Borderline Personality Disorder because it is not a "brain disorder" or a "chemical imblance" in the brain and it cannot be cured with any medication. Psychiatric medication is not the answer to recovery from Borderline Personality. I will have an in depth audio available soon at Phoenix Rising Publications about this treatment resistence paradox in and of itself as well.
It is very important to remember that study results are just that - results based on the sujbects studies and results can be skewed, manipulated, and misinterpreted. Even if somewhat accurate and I think to be more sure of what they claim they need much wider numbers of study subjects, what a study finds does not necessarily make it so in everyone's experience. If you haven't been studied how do you know if you would have fit the conclusions of any give study. What is first troubling to me about this study is that the term "remit" is used. What is meant by that?
If you have Borderline Personality Disorder, they still don't want to tell you what getting well really is and means. "Remit", in my opinion, is some next-to-meaningless term. There are more people writing books and some professionals, albeit in vague language talking about recovery from BPD being much more possible now. Yet they continue to use a word like "remit". I know myself, I recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder in 1995 and it had nothing to do with remission. I also don't agree that I had "lingering social functioning". What do they even mean by that. I think there is a distinction to be made here between what they, Gunderson et al, mean by "remit" versus what I know and mean recovery actually is having achieved it and lived it all these years.
From the study:"Symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD) often remit over a 10-year period, but patients continue to experience severe and persistent impairment in social functioning.That was the finding from a follow-up of patients with BPD in the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study, a report of which appears in the August Archives of General Psychiatry. The analysis found that the 10-year course of BPD is characterized by high rates of remission, The report extends and confirms previous reports about the long-term course of BPD, which have suggested that therapies for the disorder tend to work well for the most acute symptoms—such as self-harm and emotional dysregulation—but do little to address impairments in social functioning."
Firstly, I take issue with the idea that BPD symptoms just remit. As if they just get better without treatment. If some traits or symptoms can get somewhat better for some people over time without the process and work of therapy and/or BPD Coaching with someone like myself, then I can see that other issues would remain because the underlying unfinished and unhealed and unaddressed childhood woundedness of abandonment that results from insecure bonding, unmet needs, and/or neglect, abuse, and trauma, and that causes emotional arrested development would remain untouched and would still be actively in play. So, this remission sounds rather surface. Also, in my over 10+ years as a BPD Coach it has not been my experience that people with BPD report to me that as they get older they experience any such remission. In fact, quite the opposite. BPD, left unaddressed and untreated usually worsens for those diagnosed with it as they get older. I have, and have had, many clients with BPD well into their 40's, 50's, 60's and beyond that report getting worse - not better. Where's the remission? I hope they aren't basing this notion of remission on the "biology of BPD" because as many professionals also argue, not just my personal opinion, BPD has but a biological component but is not a biological disorder or a brain disorder. It is a psychological disorder born out of early childhood woundedness and therefore there can be no miracle of aging that shifts biology enough to "remit" the symptoms of BPD without treatment and/or coaching. It doesn't make sense. So they claim that the "report extends and confirms previous reports about the long-term course of BPD..."
If one is give adequate and competent knowledgeable and comprehensive treatment (and this can be received via my BPD Coaching in and of itself or in tandem with therapy as well) to people with Borderline Personality Disorder it will help them make tremendous strides and shifts in much more than "acute symptoms - such as self-harm and emotional dysregulation" which equally means increasing awareness, shifting, changing, and healing in social functioning and relating to one self and to others. Is it just me, or do you notice how little sense many of these studies actually make. Where's the actual proof in the pudding? There really isn't any because of the nature of and often biased agenda of most studies in the first place. There is no there, there.
Publishing this study, in my estimation, like so many others, seems to be an attempt at justifying psychiatry and at maintaining its ever-growing (biopsychiatry) strangle-hold on the hopes of those with BPD that they can actually recover. I do not find, from my own recovery experience, or the recovery process of my clients, that what this study says is accurate at all. It doesn't connect the dots. It isn't logically cogent. One point does not logically follow or fit with the next point and the fact that it begins with the idea of BPD as something that will remit in time, versus the reality that BPD can be recovered from with the expert and effective BPD Coaching like I offer and/or competent therapy with a therapist that is an expert in BPD and that believes you can get well wreaks of Big Pharma's behind most studies agenda. It seems to send out a truly unproven conclusion - BPD will remit in 10 years - and also it seems to simply ignore what recovery from BPD really is, means, and entails.
I can assure you that in my 16 years of having been recovered from BPD, a) It has nothing to do with remission b) underlying aspects of BPD do not exist in my life and this can be proven and has been substantiated in my case right down to the biological level and I certainly have not contined post-recovery to experience "impaired social functioning". This type of "science" which really isn't definitive at all continues to be churned out by professionals as justification for what? Do they know what they are really doing?
Can they even begin to contemplate a recovery model for BPD when it seems they are too interested in Big Pharma money? Psychiatric drugs aren't helping people with BPD find a way to have symptoms remit or helping them recover - quite the opposite they are holding them hostage to biospychiatry and intense on-going pain and suffering that is the result of Big Pharma and its biopsychiatrists working in tandem to hold people with BPD hostage to BPD - not help them recover. More of us that have recovered, we are the experts in what that means and how it is achieved - NOT the professionals who either have never had BPD or the ones who still have it and don't even get treated or recover themselves. Beware of money-making political footballs in mental health and don't believe every (or really any) study that you read.
They are self-serving documents by professionals and for professionals. They do not have the best interests or the actual reality, and hope for recovery of those with BPD at heart or in mind. By the way the professsionals that disagree wtih the biology ie - "brain disorder" biopsychiatry notion of BPD and there are many, such as Dr. John Breeding, Dr. Niall McLaren and Dr. Dan L. Edmunds to name a few, have a very difficult time often just getting their work published. The professional journals don't publish them because they are not truly really scientific. Science requires scrutiny, evidence, to be tested and re-tested in ways that replicate similar evidence. By denying those professionals that diagree with many of these studies and the geneisis of them even having the opportunity to question and debate the science of or methodology for these studies one can only conclude that these studies are being insolated from the regular avenues of real science because they won't be able to be replicated or proven upon scrutiny and because they are in fact pseudo-science to begin with. They are simply not reliable or provable.
It is so important to remember that psychiatry knows much less than it lets on. Stop just trusting a psychiatrist because he is one. What does it mean in this Big Pharma psychiatric medication pushing world? What can it possibly mean beyond the control psychiatrists seek to have over the masses to market their medication to and make money from? It is not a system or a profession that truly has the humanity, and the actual getting well of those with Borderline Personality Disorder at the heart of its agenda. In fact, is that even a part of that profession's agenda? They perpetuate the negative and continue to refuse to explain or map out recovery or even lend it credibility by continually firing out these "studies". Studies are just not proven science. At best they are theories floated out there with power, lack of ethics, and often hidden agendas attached.
Life Coach, BPD/Mental Health Coach and Self Improvement Coach, A.J. Mahari, has added to her Coping Tools Skills audio collection with this Audio that is 59 minutes long and a wonderful journey that will help you learn to cope with triggers whether they are from Borderline Personality Disorder, having been Sexually Abused, Childhood Neglect or Unmet Needs, generally, or unresolved abandonment wounds from childhood that can leave people with issues of Depersonalization, Denial, Derealisation, and/or Dissociation - feeling unreal, not connected, not grounded and/or not present in the here-and-now. Listening to this Grounding Relaxation Exercise is a way to build coping tools and skills to effectively deal with triggered emotional dysregulation, distress, discomfort, feeling unreal or disconnected and with the scary feelings that can explode from your past right into your here and now and be re-experienced as if they are happening all of over again.
Daily practice with this grounding relaxation exercise audio can and will help you to build here-and-now presence, connectedness, safety, and grounding skills that you will be able to extract from practicing with the audio and use in your daily life.
Life Coach, BPD/Mental Health and Self Improvement Coach, A.J. Mahari in this original Radical Acceptance Meditative Practice audio for people with Borderline Personality Disorder offers an unique and practical way to actually begin or continue to practice radical acceptance while learning how to build some new coping skills that will help people with BPD take breaks from the pain, negativity, suffering, rage, and emotional dysregulation and reactivity that is at the heart of so much of their daily experience.
This skill-building audio is one hour and 35 minutes long and offers those with Borderline Personality Disorder an effective way to learn how to take a break from the rigors of all that BPD manifests in their lives. It is meant to be a Radical Acceptance Meditative Practice audio that you can do daily and that will help you to begin to experience the empowerment of radical acceptance and how it can provide you with positive, healthy, healing, ways to begin to create worth and a safe place inside that, with practice, will be a place that you can call on or retreat to when triggered as you continue to listen to the audio and build your radical acceptance practice.
Author, Life Coach, BPD/Mental Health and Self Improvement Coach, A.J. Mahari now has her Thought Changing Affirmations Handbooks 5 Volume Set available. Through the use of these positive affirmations, one a day, or one a week, you can learn to change your negative painful thoughts into more positive pain-neutral and/or happy contented thoughts. Whatever the mind can conceive it can achieve. If you want and need to stop suffering and to experience more peace, more calm, less to eventually no emotional dysregulation in your life than Mahari's 5 Volume Set of Changing Your Thought Positive Affirmation Handbooks will be invaluable to you in your recovery process. A natural way to help empower your own recovery. A natural way that you have control over to change your negative thoughts into positive ones. You will feel so much better about yourself. Thoughts define our experience. What you think really controls what you experience, your pain, difficulty in relating to others, in relationships, in knowing who you are and so much more. It is all generated by the rigid thought patterns you've built up from a very young age and added to over the years. Affirmations might sound silly, or hardly like a hopeful solution to improve the quality of your life, but take it from Mahari who not only knows this and witnesses incredible change in the clients she coaches but she knows this first hand having recovered from BPD in 1995.
You can use these "Positive Affirmations" - short positive statements targeted at a specific subconscious set of beliefs - to challenge and undermine negative beliefs and to replace them with positive self-nurturing beliefs. How we think creates our experience. If you are thinking largely negatively you will create and perceive your life experience through a negative lens. If you are thinking more positively the exact opposite will manifest in your life - your thoughts, experience, relationships, and your over-all life experience.
Affirmations actually reprogram your thought patterns. They change the way you think and feel about things, and because you have replaced dysfunctional negative beliefs with your own new positive beliefs that will bring positive change naturally as you practice replacing old negative thoughts with new positive ones. This will start to reflect in your external life. You will start to experience seismic changes for the better in many aspects of your life.
Positive affirmations, using them and practicing them, will create permanent change in how you think and therefore in your the way that you experience your life.
