Life with Borderline Personality Disorder

Do you know what borderline personality disorder (BPD) is? Many people have never heard of it, despite the fact that more than three million people are diagnosed with it each year in the United States alone. Symptoms include but are not limited to: depression and anxiety; an extreme fear of abandonment; black and white thinking; reckless, impulsive behavior; uncontrollable rage at situations that do not call for it;; and suicidal ideation. This condition is usually (but not always) the result of abuse.

There are a number of reasons you may not have heard of BPD. It often is seen as a “fake” disorder, made up by those seeking attention. This is ironic, because needing attention is a symptom of BPD. However, studies such as this one have shown that BPD is a real disorder, and affects those who have it just as much as any other disorder.

BPD often is falsely portrayed as a scary disorder, along with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Individuals with BPD often are labeled manipulative, abusive, or dangerous, even though there is no proof that having it makes someone inherently violent or abusive. In fact, people with mental illnesses, including BPD, are much more likely to be the victims of violence than to be violent themselves.

The lack of awareness of BPD hurts those who spend years wondering what is wrong with them, and why they feel this way when so many others do not. Without knowing that other people have gone through the same things, they are left to feel alone and broken.

I myself was diagnosed with BPD when I was 17, but I started showing symptoms long before then. When I was in middle school, I became depressed, in addition to the anxiety I had been feeling since I was a very small child. I did not go to school for days, and when I did, I mostly wore sweatpants, and was distant and inattentive. When a friend and I got in a fight that ruined our friendship, I became so distressed that I self-harmed and was forced to go to a mental rehabilitation facility. This happened again the following year, when a close friend of mine moved away and decided never to speak to me again.

When I got into my first serious relationship in high school, I never left my significant other alone, texting them all day, every day. If they did not respond in more than 10 minutes, I became so scared of being abandoned that I would have breakdowns where I screamed and sobbed. Around this time, I also became filled with rage at the slightest inconvenience, and found myself hyperventilating often. More symptoms of BPD emerged as I got older, and they only got more intense.

If I had known about BPD back then, I could have made the connection that these experiences were symptoms of my personality disorder, and that they were not my fault. I could have reached out and gotten help much sooner, and I could have found a community of people with similar experiences that I could relate to. I could have seen there is nothing wrong with being mentally ill, it is just as normal as not being mentally ill, and it is nothing to feel bad about.

Spreading awareness of BPD, and showing that it should be embraced instead of feared and hated, is incredibly important. Finding a name for what you experience can bring so much relief, and can allow individuals to find community with others like them, and get treatment if they would like to. Awareness of BPD could change lives for the better.

Reference

Schmahl, C. (n.d.). Faculty of 1000 evaluation for Neural Correlates of Negative Emotionality in Borderline Personality Disorder: An Activation-Likelihood-Estimation Meta-Analysis. F1000 – Post-publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature. doi:10.3410/f.717954824.793463060

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from World of Psychology http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2016/08/02/life-with-borderline-personality-disorder/

How to Stop Emotions from Controlling Your Life

Emotions are designed by nature to be fleeting. Biologically, emotion is meant to prompt us for action, give us important information about our surroundings, motivate us and help us communicate to others. However, most of us have learned to ignore this internal guidance system and avoid negative emotions altogether.

We have learned to unconsciously shut down our body’s internal processing system when we start to feel any signs of vulnerability, fear, or rejection. We stop our bodies from allowing these natural emotions to rise up and convey their message. We do this when we overuse television, social media, alcohol or drugs, or partake in any addictive behavior. We also avoid emotion is by distracting ourselves with meaningless activities.

While denying emotion is common, we can’t ignore the consequences. Unpleasant emotions don’t go away just because we ignore them. The body will store unacknowledged emotion as a way of preserving it, so it can fulfill its function at a later time. But emotion is not designed to be stored in the body. Our bodies will slip into illness and disease because of this. Anger, depression, anxiety, sadness, and shame are a few common emotions we tend to push down and carry with us.

When these emotions persist, we must realize we can’t stop them from rising up. These emotions will continue to gain power and presence in our bodies until we process them. But ultimately, no matter how powerful they feel, they are simply emotions. They are not something to fear. We are capable of feeling even extreme emotions without allowing them to hurt us. We must experience what they feel like in our bodies, interpret their message and then watch them vanish for good.

Below are tips for releasing unprocessed emotion:

• Give permission.
  In a quiet place without distractions, get comfortable and take a few cleansing breaths. When it feels right, give your body permission to feel any emotion necessary. A firm affirmation such as “It is safe to experience this emotion” sends a direct instruction to the mind and body, which are intimately connected.
• Body scan.
  Scan your body from head to toe. This is less about doing and more about awareness. Your body will talk to you if you are listening. Notice to where your awareness is being drawn. Does it feel different? Constricted? Hot or cold? Tingling or painful? It may be subtle or it may be loud. Pinpoint the area to which you are feeling drawn. Unprocessed emotions commonly are stored in organs.
• Feel the emotion.
  Place your hands on the area of your body that you are noticing the most. Inhale and exhale deeply a few times. You will begin to feel the stored emotion. Breathe. Allow the emotion to rise. You may begin to feel uncomfortable and fearful. Try to observe it and release any thoughts that arise from the fear. Allow the feeling to be there. Accept it and lean further into it. Sadness, anger, regret, fear, humiliation, or any number of emotions may rise up. You may want to cry, stretch, scream, or move in a certain position.
• Find the origin.
  You may want to stop after step 3 if you are feeling overwhelmed. If not, ask yourself what the emotion is related. Uncomfortable emotions stem from unhealthy beliefs such as “I’m not good enough,” “I’m unlovable,” or “I’m not safe.” Continue to remain quiet, breathe, and hold your hands on the feeling. Specific themes, situations, or people may come to mind. Recognize and contemplate these connections. If a limiting belief has come to mind, let it go. Do this by stating something like “I am worthy” or “I am loved” or “I am safe.” Use any statement that resonates with you.
• The release.
  Regardless of whether we have discovered the emotion’s origin, it is now time to release it. Emotions want to be felt and acknowledged in order to be released. You have done that. Remember, no feeling is final. Thank your body and your emotions for communicating with you. Show love and gratitude to encourage your body to open up again in the future.

Discovering the limiting beliefs that are responsible for particular emotions is the quickest way to ensure the emotion is released permanently. If you have not discovered the emotion’s origin, it will likely rise again. But every time you practice these steps, it becomes easier to discover, process and eliminate these powerfully persistent emotions and limiting beliefs. You learn how to feel emotions as they arise, and most important, not carry them with us to drag you down and skew our perspectives. Ultimately, you will feel lighter, freer and happier for it.

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from World of Psychology http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2016/08/02/how-to-stop-emotions-from-controlling-your-life/

Best of Our Blogs: August 2, 2016

What’s harder than struggling with your own problem? Sometimes it’s seeing someone you love suffer through it.

That explains why we often try to solve their problems.

We get caught in an invisible dance. They’re trying not to upset us by pretending to do what we say. And we’re trying to find creative ways to get them to do what we think is best.

It’s a cycle that doesn’t end until we realize we can’t change others. More importantly, our happiness shouldn’t be dependent on their well-being.

In truth, we must always return to ourselves. If we’re stressed, feeling unworthy and unloved, we’re focusing our energy on the wrong person. Before we help anyone, we must first help ourselves.

This week, start the process of self-healing with our tops posts on improving your self-esteem and self-worth.

6 Reasons We Can’t Spot a Psychopath in Our Midst
(Childhood Emotional Neglect) – Would you know a psychopath if you met him or her? You might already know one. Here’s how to tell for sure.

How to Start Loving Yourself (Even When You Think There’s Nothing to Love)
(Happily Imperfect) – Every day you berate yourself for the things you shouldn’t have said or done. Do these things instead and you’ll turn down the dial of negative self-talk and turn up self-love.

5 Missed Signs of Anxiety in Angry Kids
(Parenting Anxious Kids) – If you think your child has a problem with anger not anxiety, you should read this. If he or she has sleep issues and seems angry for no reason, he could be masking his fear with anger.

20 Inspirational Quotes for Moms…to Read When You are Having a Stressful Day
(Mommy Matters) – Having a hard day mom? Read this. It’ll give you enough inspiration, motivation and hope to get you through another tough day.

How To Gain Real Self-esteem
(The Creative Mind) – You’ve worked on your outer life, but money, fame and material things won’t change how you feel about yourself. This might.

from World of Psychology http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2016/08/02/best-of-our-blogs-august-2-2016/

Employment as an Antidepressant

The ads pushing pills are everywhere. It’s difficult to avoid images of what we’re supposed to believe happiness looks like. A pill a day keeps depression away: I wish it were so simple.

For many of us, a pill a day keeps other things away. Enjoyable things, necessary things, normal body processes, even. For some of us, the side effects from these pills are too much to handle, their ill effects negating any good the pills may do.

I just left my new doctor’s office with a feeling I’ve rarely had: Pills are not the only way to beat the blues. Not that Big Pharma would have you believe that. They’re called alternative therapies. This feeling I have is a mixture of gratitude, relief, and hope. I think I finally found a healer. I finally found a great physician.

I don’t fear doctors. I fear their prescription pads. I fear the pills they prescribe. I fear the pressure to agree and to comply. No matter how much sugar my old doctor spooned in, those pills just never felt right.

But Dr. P is different. He’s like me. He sees the need to dig deeper and find the root causes. Rather than feeling like your thoughts are in mental quicksand, as they did when I was taking pills, alternative measures to depression and anxiety can be a lifeline to pull you out. Rather than feeling like failure grips your throat, the many talk therapies out there can ease that grip, putting you back into the driver’s seat of your life.

The spectrum of alternative therapies is wide and far-reaching. But Dr. P and I agree we need to add another one to that list: employment.

Many years ago, I thought the depression had won. I was out of work and broke. Bills were piling up. I needed income but felt too depressed to work. My then-doctor tried to convince me that work was good for me. But knowing this truth in a world where jobs are few is a cruel, cruel joke.

Let’s face it, we have too many employees and not enough jobs. It is now an employer’s market where employers can pick and choose. If we can agree that employment is an antidepressant, then you can see the dangers in this fact.

Employment as therapy hits many chords in me. The routine, the purpose, the paycheck at the end of the week, these are all beneficial in some way. Being surrounded by people to connect with may be even more beneficial than we suspect. I mean, even in my darkest hours, a smile or kind gesture can be like a sunrise on a dark morn. We are pack animals. We work better in a team.

Every single one of us is unique and one pill will never fit all. We have to keep searching, learning, inquiring of the pack to find the therapy that makes each one of us tick.

Surrendering to the darkness is not an option.

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from World of Psychology http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2016/08/01/employment-as-an-antidepressant/

5 Tips for Doing It All–Really!

We often hear and read that we can’t do it all. We need to pick and choose. We need to make serious sacrifices. We either have a great career or a great family. We either volunteer or have a side business. But we need to resign ourselves to the fact that we can’t have both. It’s a message women regularly receive.

However, writer and author Linda Formichelli asserts that we can do it all. For instance, if your version of doing it all means cultivating a connected family, building a fulfilling career, enjoying fun hobbies and traveling regularly, you can have that. She shares the tools and techniques in her thoughtful, thorough and insightful book How to Do It All: The Revolutionary Plan to Create a Full, Meaningful Life — While Only Occasionally Wanting to Poke Your Eyes out with a Sharpie. The book is filled with specific, practical, real-life strategies and examples (most of which I’ve double-underlined.)   

What does it mean to do it all? For starters, this desire comes from you. It consists of goals you genuinely want to accomplish because they’re important to you. Not because you’re feeling pressure from others. Not because you think you should do these things and if you don’t, you’re clearly less than or inadequate.

As Formichelli writes, “The point of doing it all is that you love all the things you’re doing, and you don’t want to say no to any of them, and they somehow fulfill your personal values. If you’re trying to do it all and it makes you feel cranky, resentful or just plain unhappy on a continuous basis, that’s not even close to the doing it all we’re talking about here.”

Below are five tips from How to Do It All to help you do it all — whatever this looks like for you.

Identify your obstacles.   

What obstacles are you facing in doing all the things you want to do? For instance, a common issue is lack of time. Which is why it’s important to evaluate how you’re currently spending your free time. Maybe you’re spending too much time browsing Facebook, running errands or worrying.

Formichelli suggests asking ourselves: “How can I better use that time to get done all the important things I want to accomplish this year?”

Another common obstacle is lack of motivation. We don’t feel inspired or energized. But waiting until we feel motivated doesn’t work, because that moment might never come. As Formichelli writes, “Act first, get motivated later.” She mentions the powerful book Get It Done When You’re Depressed by Julie Fast and John D. Preston, Psy.D, who underscore the importance of taking action, without motivation. (We’ve featured tips from the book here.)

Focus on your values.

Doing it all can be uncomfortable and stressful. And it requires some hard work. What makes it worthwhile is that these goals are connected to your deepest values, writes Formichelli, also co-founder of Renegade Writer Press.

For instance, you connect your desire to travel to your value of education by learning some Italian for your trip to Rome. You take your family on a camping trip to learn more about nature.

Formichelli also suggests having a “values board” with images of why you’re doing it all. Her top values are freedom, health, fun and family, so her board includes everything from images of her son practicing ballet to a plane flying over landmarks.

Revise your self-talk.

How we talk to ourselves naturally affects our next steps. Again, often we believe that we must choose between two things: We either travel or have a beautiful home. Instead of thinking “or,” think “and.” This reminds us of the assortment of options we actually have.

For instance, according to Formichelli, you combine your desires to volunteer and train for a 5K by working on setup for a charity race. To travel and remodel your kitchen, you cut certain expenses and explore travel hacks, such as getting cheap airfare.

Consider what you can stop doing.

All of us engage in activities that we really don’t need to do. Activities that steal time away from what really matters to us. Activities that don’t add to our lives in significant ways.

What are those activities in your life? How can you stop doing them?

For example, quit social media. Formichelli did, finding that it wasn’t vital to her business or personal life. (So did Cal Newport.) Stop watching TV or watch less. Or watch your favorite show while folding laundry. Hire a cleaning service, get your groceries delivered and automate tasks, such as paying bills.

Be proactive.

When we don’t establish structure or boundaries, we become slaves to other people’s schedules. To avoid that, block out specific times for your desired tasks. Then schedule other tasks around those blocks. Set up medical appointments well in advance, so you aren’t picking between times that don’t work for you. Or have standing appointments, such as getting your hair cut and colored every eighth Saturday at 5 p.m.

Formichelli also suggests dedicating an entire day or several hours for “admin” tasks—which you can’t delegate or skip. This prevents that awful scattered feeling (“I have 100 things to do!”) Formichelli’s admin day is Friday, which might include tasks like planning school snacks, ordering groceries, paying bills and fixing something around the house.

Doing it all is really about doing what fulfills you. What I love about Formichelli’s message (and book) is that with some creativity, hard work and planning, we can build a life filled with meaning, beautiful memories and what truly matters to us.

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from World of Psychology http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2016/08/01/5-tips-for-doing-it-all-really/

Some Tips for Healthy Aging

Advances in medicine, lifestyle, and especially in technology have us living longer. And the big question facing most of us is not so much how long we will live but rather how well we will live as we get older.

Tags: aging, diet and weight loss, health, relationships, relaxation, sleep

from Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life http://counsellingresource.com/features/2016/08/01/healthy-aging/

Screenagers

“Babe, can you put your phone away for a minute? I am trying to talk to you.”

We have probably said this. We have all probably had this said to us. Some of us are digital natives — we grew up glued to a screen. Some of us are digital immigrants, awkwardly attached to our devices like scrambling-to-keep-up voyeurs.

If we took a Google picture of Earth from space at any time of day, we would see millions of stick figures hunched over tiny flickering boxes, as if their lives depended on it.

The once evolutionary imperative for humans to walk upright is now solidly threatened. Follow this hunched bending pose for centuries and we most certainly will become large-headed, folded-up creatures, with eye features, or apparatus, built to stare into tiny, incessant glare. All of this is in the name of being more rapidly connected to everyone, at all times.

There is no doubt that our devices have brought us previously inconceivable delights: instant information, free international contact, selfies, endless streaming arts and music and stories, human rights activism, and dazzling computation and creativity. The costs, however, cannot even be properly calculated. Our engagement is so frenzied and metastatic that we cannot possibly pace observation and research to keep up with the dizzying growth of usage and multiplying types of use.

What we know for sure is that as a society, we are fatter, lonelier, substantially more medicated, more self-harming, suffering more neck and back pain, and more anxious or depressed. What we know for sure is that our attention spans are shrinking.

Screenagers ages 11-18, who have been nursed with screens in their parent’s free hand, demonstrate what I would call a “remote participation” in their own and each other’s lives. It is as if everything that happens to them or others is viewed on a flat screen and evaluated as “ready for posting.” This produces teens and adults too who are hyperaware of being watched and watching. This often translates into a particularly heightened self-involved consciousness mediated by a constant analysis of “net worthiness.” What are the consequences of young people who grow up being “snapped” for every occasion?

The other day I was facilitating a teen group and one of the teens shared a horrific assault that had just happened. I was astonished to see that not one of the other 15 teenagers reached out to respond. Their reactions looked much like a group photo of folks watching a disturbing movie: mouths were in varying degrees of open and eyes stretched wide.

There was no offering of hugs or Kleenex. There were no guttural sounds of empathy or even any words of support. The thought hit me that they would know just what emoji or acronym to use if they could be texting their response. When I queried them, it wasn’t that they did not have empathy or feeling for their peer, it was that they just couldn’t access it without a “screen in between.” Their social instincts had atrophied from lack of in-person use.

The good news is that teens are flocking to our programs at AHA! (www.ahasb.org) where the screens are put away and the entire curriculum focuses on social and emotional skills and genuine contact. They are actually yearning for this type of presence and interaction.

Recently, after one of our exercises in authentic contact and sharing, Malcolm, age 15, said, “I don’t even know how to describe this feeling I am having. It is like feeling really alive for the first time.”

Stalling the rampant expansion of “The Machine” may prove futile; however, we can support a parallel movement to put away the devices and truly connect with one another. It’s not too late to offer an alternative to being plugged in, but massively numb and disconnected. Let’s teach ourselves and our children to stand up straight again, to look at each other kindly with both our hearts and our eyes. Let’s create a world in which a screen doesn’t create a barrier between living a full, meaningful life and ourselves.

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from World of Psychology http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2016/08/01/screenagers/