Frank Yeomans: Understanding the BPD Mind

[Music] often times I feel that I have this great self-hatred and that I feel that I don't deserve to be here I feel that if if you know if I had gone away that no one would notice I feel those things but I know that that's not true how do you understand it when feel one way but you know there's another way one way to understand that is if you think of borderline patients or many of them as having particularly high standards but there's something about in the mind of many Beuerlein patients that has a kind of an absolute quality all or nothing and I find that a lot of Berlin patients are very uncompromising about others and about themselves if you don't fit this very ideal view of what a person should be and if you don't live up to the ideal then you think you're a failure you feel no value you feel worthless and it kind of justifies the kind of self-hatred you're talking about I think part of our work as therapists is to engage somebody to develop more real realistic acceptance of what it is to be human to not be so perfectionistic all right how would he start a good question first of all by helping somebody observe their system somebody usually does this unconsciously and automatically they're not sort of sitting there reflecting you know I'm judging myself as inadequate or I'm hating myself because I know I have this internal standard and the rest of me doesn't think I'm meeting up to it the internal standard is not seen as a mental creation if you will the internal standard it gets back to this distinction really wants internal what's external people think you know that's just what a person has to be to feel good about themselves if you can get somebody to realize that's kind of their creation if they could question that they have the capacity to modify so that they can come to a more realistic image of what it is to be an okay person and if you can help somebody realize you don't have to hold isn't let me put it this way it's nice to aspire to that but you don't have to be it all the time to feel like you deserve to exist as human beings we all have to deal with emotions that some of which come from evolutionary periods when humans existed in society well before the kind of civilized society we live in and it was more okay and maybe even necessary to have just raw expression of intense emotions loving emotions aggressive emotions as we become civilized we all have the challenge of how to find satisfaction for those emotional drives in a way that we can feel is acceptable everybody has a challenge not just Beuerlein people how do we you know act out our loving urges within a system that's socially okay and morally okay to us how do we act out our aggressive urges in a way that doesn't hurt anybody and doesn't offend our moral values so this is what I'm describing is part of a psychodynamic view of the individual which is there are all these competing moving forces our drives the prohibitions of society our internal prohibitions based on our value system and to find the balance of that is not easy it's particularly not easy if you're borderline person whose value system might be skewed towards I have to be perfect might tell you any manifestation of aggression is wrong and makes me a horrible person if you haven't mastered this integration of your urges how to fit them into a system that's both socially acceptable and morally acceptable to you then you don't have a full sense of who you are if that's not nicely put together then you're sort of left like a ship at sea without a rudder explains a lot miss pensall okay

Channel: Amanda Wang

Views: 72,988

Keywords: Mental Illness, Mental Health, BPD, Frank Yeomans, Transference Focused Therapy, Amanda Wang, RethinkBPD

Id: B_--SCmZ9Fc

Length: 4min 52sec (292 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2010