How to Deal With Borderline Personality Tendencies | Being Well Podcast

hey everyone welcome to being well i'm forrest hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before welcome back one of the most important skills we can develop in life is learning how to relate to our strong thoughts feelings and emotions accepting them experiencing them authentically and then also learning how to regulate them and we're all going to have times when those feelings are particularly strong and maybe even a bit harder to manage than normal it's very common to have these natural fluctuations in how we feel about others or ourselves but some people struggle with this more than others a clinically significant form of this is known as borderline personality disorder or bpd which is characterized by a real pattern of instability in a person's emotions moods behavior even their self-image and their relationships bpd is actually fairly common and even more common are very normal challenges with emotional sensitivity stability and regulation so today we're going to be diving into what borderline tendencies are and what we can do about them to help us do that i'm joined as usual by dr rick hansen rick is a clinical psychologist best-selling author and he's also my dad so dad how are you doing today i'm doing great forest and extremely happy that we're going to be talking about this subject yeah i think it's a really important one i'm looking forward to it i've been digging into a bit of research and i'm excited to learn a bit more from you but before we get into it a couple of quick reminders uh first remember to subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you're currently listening to it on that really does help us out and then second you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com being well podcast and for the cost of a few dollars a month you can support the show and you'll receive bonuses like deep dives into the research behind each episode transcripts and ad-free versions of everything that we make so i would love to start today with you just explaining what it means to have borderline tendencies maybe going all the way up to what full-blown borderline personality disorder looks like of all the major identified personality styles we could say or tendencies that are problematic in the sense of creating distress for the person who is acting them out and swept away by them as well as dysfunction in relationships in jobs and so forth so we have these two elements distress and or dysfunction that are the underpinnings of the other d word used in psychiatry and clinical psychology quote unquote disorder this among other such things such as paranoid personality disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder is one of the most difficult to talk about it's complicated it's slippery it's murky and its history is marked by a tremendous amount of patriarchy frankly and pathologizing of young women in particular who had every reason and right in the world to be royally pissed off about their situation and they'd had it up to here so the roots of this totally uh yeah way of looking at things they're really fraught so we have a kind of sensitivity the other aspect of it is that there's kind of a disconnect between the official checklist account in the bible of psychiatric and psychological classifications which i'll get into in a minute and on the other hand what it feels like from the inside out and what it feels like to be with someone whose underlying borderline-y ish module is in full activation so i hope we can move back and forth between this more orthodox outside-in clinical description and really emphasize more in a compassionate and empathic way from the inside out what it's like and why it's this way and especially what we can do ourselves if for various reasons we have these tendencies just factually okay what can we do about it so that's sort of my framing here and you can tell i'm backing my way into this one a little more carefully yeah well i i think that's really appropriate here for all of the reasons that you alluded to as you were giving that that introduction to what we're going to be talking about today uh and please correct me on this if i'm wrong about any of it dad because i'm doing this for memory right now and i'm not a clinician so please um my understanding is that a lot of this actually finds its roots and freud's work with hysterics in the early 1900s that word hysteric itself has a lot of gendered loading associated with it um and then eventually this work got kind of categorized and codified as what became known as emotional dysregulation disorder which then over time got turned into what we now know as borderline personality disorder through uh a long process of codification and the moving around of these various diagnoses and maybe we could have a conversation sometime in the future dad about um the dsm which is the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders which is the bible that you were referring to earlier the bible of psychology and psychiatry and what goes into that and what contributes to something being included or not included in that which can have a whole bunch of impacts including in what somebody can get covered by insurance which certainly in the united states is a major contributor to how treatment works so this is kind of thorny territory talking about this at all but it's just a fact that there are people who struggle a bit more with emotional regulation than others and this shows up out in the world and has consequences in our relationships so it's an important thing to talk about but it's also like you were saying kind of fraught here maybe a way in is to start with the nine so-called symptoms or criteria in the standard checklist and five of them uh being really consistent for a person are the diagnostic criteria it's it's a box score way of diagnosing people that's the system that's used in the dsm diagnostic and statistical manual which itself is quite controversial because this approach to categorizing people in ways that are extremely consequential including ways that historically have led to people being locked up and they're people who think that this whole approach kind of the box score uh you know criteria is wrong that we need to have something that's more grounded in a developmental theory of the case and this is something that many people have talked about and are working on all that said so let's do the box score and we're talking here about a chronic pervasive pattern that crosses relationships across the situations and crosses times it's not a passing sort of thing based on the worst date of your life it's more like we're talking about something quite consistent so that said one frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment two a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation three identity disturbance markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self four impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging such as spending sex substance abuse reckless driving binge eating etc five recurrent suicidal behavior gestures or threats or self-mutilating behavior six emotional instability due to a marked reactivity of mood in other words the mood is really variable such as intense episodic dysphoria irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days emotional volatility seven chronic feelings of emptiness something missing inside unfulfilled longing a kind of deep deep deep hole in the heart as i've talked about for myself when i was a kid eight inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger nine transient sometimes stress-related paranoid ideation you know paranoid thinking or even severe dissociative symptoms a sense of going far far away becoming really unglued inside you know things start seeming somewhat unreal okay those are the anointing i mean the fundamental framing in helpfulness and mental health is what why and how what i mean by that is what is characteristic including uh in comparison to a relevant group that you might belong to like a person that age that gender that situation in um in society and that's the what how extreme is it what's present and how extreme is it second why is it is it situational is it grounded in a really really rocky childhood does it seem organically even genetically rooted distinct from you know upbringing or environmental factors you know why is it the case because the why drives the how to help yeah i think that what i'm interested in here is that those are the diagnostic criteria as you were saying in order to receive a bpd diagnosis from a clinician somebody would need to meet five of those criteria on a regular basis in a number of different situations yeah uh of course i want to give a quick note here that nothing that we are dispensing on this podcast constitutes medical advice and to actually get diagnosed you should always work with a clinician and in general i just think that people are way too free about casually diagnosing both themselves and other people with significant conditions um you just see it all the time these days where someone will kind of off-handedly refer to somebody else as a narcissist or way too ocd or they'll just like use technical terminology in a very casual framework and i actually think that there are some pitfalls with that 100 significant so i would just really caution people against doing that but that being said we do want to dispense some helpful advice here on the podcast in general and it can be really useful to look at that list and get a sense for huh yeah this feels like something that could maybe characterize a pattern of things that i struggle with or a pattern of things that somebody i know and care about also struggles with so with that as the framework here i do think it would be really helpful to get a sense of what this looks and feels like on a day-to-day basis outside of that formal diagnostic framework imagine that either you are or that you are being with a two to three-year-old child who is really upset after having been separated or facing separation from a beloved caregiver let's say a parent and this little child is just kind of coming unglued is really upset uh and is both clinging and complaining or clinging and punishing they want very intensively you know the caregiver to stay or to come back and they're also really angry at the caregiver for separating for from them including in an almost primal sense of the caregiver differentiating or having an identity or life of their own because that feels catastrophically destabilizing inside for the child how does a three-year-old get there typically it's a combination of nature and nurture typically there's a combination on the one hand of a often very sweet and interpersonally engaged very sociable temperament combined with lots of sensitivity to what's happening outside them and what's happening inside them and often with a fair amount of anxiety in the mix so that's kind of on the inside of the kid and then on the outside often it's a parent who unwittingly promotes anxious insecure attachment a parent who draws the child close and then pushes the child away a child who themselves is unreliable and unstable one moment they're charming and wonderful and just so great next moment they're drunk or they're gone or they're preoccupied with their partner and their own potentially borderline-ish hungers for their partner and sometimes a parent who alternates between idealization and devaluation between cherishing and horrible punishments even abusive ones you know when you have a invasive disruptive parent or invasive disruptive environments poverty disengaged or intermittently engaged let's say male parent figures siblings who come in and come out being someone who's in foster care moving through multiple placements and never really finding stability you know there's this combination of the two together and i really think it's incredibly important to bring in these dimensions of the innate genetically rooted temperament of the person and often a catastrophically unhelpful environment of all kinds including an environment that i mean basically most parents don't wake up in the morning thinking to themselves how can i promote anxious and secure attachment you know how can i promote borderline tendencies inside my my child they don't they're they themselves are grappling with a lot of stuff but at the end of the day as you kind of started out facts are facts what is is whatever it might be and the result can be then this image of a three-year-old who's kind of falling apart both tantruming and clinging and um really really suffering inside and then of course that three-year-old grows up and here we are today so kind of looking in the here and now at ways in which the adult version of that tendency might show up in the world there are these two big characteristics and borderlininess and the first one is instability and the second one is impulsivity and borderline is kind of unique among this category of personality disorders and just how extreme a person's emotional instability might be it's very very easy for a borderline-ish person to move pretty quickly from different moods from one to the other from angry to happy to sad and then because of that the world both internally for this person and externally because there's that lack of a developed sense of security that you were talking about dad there's this real feeling of internal insecurity the world is constantly changing uh relationships tend to be in flux a lot there's often a consistent pattern of instability inside of those interpersonal relationships and also people who have this kind of a personality structure tend to view things in pretty black and white terms and shift relatively quickly from one to the other and this can sometimes be so extreme that a person might deny that they ever used to be different they might say something like no i've always felt this way i was just lying to myself before is that more or less consistent with your experienced dad oh very well said so i think of it as the hungry heart on steroids the hungry heart that is extremely vulnerable to feeling let down uh there can be a sense uh as a sitting with them as i have that they're tracking you and if your eyes look away as your eyes just did a moment ago because there was an external sound they get angry with you you're not paying attention to me you're not here yeah there's chronic fear of abandonment and right and so and when you're on the receiving end of this you can feel like there's this intensity as in extreme anxious insecure attachment in which that person is being very controlling or insistent there's an intensity of monitoring a constant you know mommy don't go daddy don't go even to the point that if the other person starts having thoughts of their own that are different that too can be really shocking there's a term from when you think about narcissism this compelling need for like-mindedness for the sense that others are like-minded with you they see it your way they agree with you 100 they're totally with you and in this more borderline aspect of that there's constant insecurity chronic insecurity no matter how reassuring the last 10 minutes or 10 years have been it might also fall apart in the next moment and the unfortunate thing then is that the drive for reassurance as this as as an external source of internal stability which is the root of the issue that drive for reassurance and various kinds can push others away just when you really really need them the most which is really quite poignant even tragic yeah there's this common dynamic that i think i learned from you dad way back when probably when i was in some relationship or another that you described as the pursuer distancer dynamic yes which is this very very common model that appears in relationships where you have a pursuer and a distancer it's exactly what it sounds like where one person is kind of constantly seeking the attention affection desire interest of the other and then the other person has more of a desire for personal autonomy maybe one of these people is the pursuer wants a lot of intimacy whereas the other person the distancer wants a lot of autonomy and the more intimacy that the pursuer seeks for the more autonomy that the distancer looks for and you can see that really emerge inside of borderline-ish relationships yeah really really well said and that's why it has helped me uh you know working with people to keep coming back to that desperate collapsing three-year-old child it's so understandable what that child wants let's say perfect union perfect rapport uh perfect like-mindedness is yes desirable when you're one or two or three years old but it's impossible in complex adult relationships with individuated partners and there will often be a kind of dynamic in which there is someone let's say person a person b let's say person a is a kind of highly stable even to the point of being a little maybe boring or are you calling me out right now dad you talking to me over here not at all no i mean but someone who well you know someone who's really quite stable for the record i would refer to myself as quite stable maybe even to the degree of being boring so maybe i'm calling myself okay okay i was a surprise i didn't expect that stability is definitely part of myself i don't know okay okay and has their act together they're grounded they're rooted they're functional in the world they have an income and in other words they have a lot of stability and a lot of regulation and they don't they don't seem to have intense needs for themselves so therefore they can be quite generous quite available to the other person who forms a relationship with someone person b let's say who's got a vulnerability borderline tendencies think of someone who has a kind of whose psychological personality structure is like a ball with a crust and the crust is solid it's functioning and in certain situations that don't challenge it everything is fine but if you start moving into territory that's more about intimate relationships and that have elements that really reach all the way back to early childhood in terms of the stakes on the table in an intimate relationship well you can sometimes crack through that crust fall through that shell and there's no interpersonal there's no internal psychological structure till you fall for years developmentally all the way down to someone who's a toddler deep down inside okay so that person let's say sometimes can be fairly dramatic interesting uh lively interpersonally astute extra charming appealing in wonderful wonderful ways so then you have these two people who come together and then sometimes what can happen is that the person who's more vulnerable especially when they crack through their shell to that really activated young young young layer inside can become quite demanding and the first few times it happens the other person thinks oh wow i must have really blown it i'm so sorry you're you're really pretty upset about this i guess that means i messed up pretty big time i'm trying to understand it that's reassuring but what that can do and if you get caught in this as a therapist as i have at times it can create a kind of vicious cycle in which now the b person the more bordellini person has had a sense of reassurance there's been this test their partner their friend their sibling their parent passed the test which then activates even stronger buried longings for closeness and even fusion and measurement with the other person so they raise the stakes a little bit now the test gets higher and harder so their partner or the other person in the situation is now faced with a more intense test the critique seems a little overstated over the top it's kind of confusing so they pass the test the second time by being really really really reassuring very embarrassed very apologetic they bend over backwards they walk on eggshells for a while which reassures the bee person who then escalates further sure and even as it relates to the point yeah of a kind of preemptive strike on the devastating disappointment of the relationship by forcing uh disruption in the relationship sooner rather than later because if they become as dependent let's say as they were naturally when they were one or two or three years old if they become that dependent on this person in an adult relationship today and that person leaves them scorns them exiles them oh my gosh that would be so so horrible can't possibly tolerate that that better escalate early on to get it over with i'm certain that some people listening here are nodding along and going wow right now in this or whoa been there on either side of the coin yeah so what i can say about that is that i've had relationships with people who absolutely had tendencies in this direction a lot of the patterns that you're describing were ones that i've absolutely lived and what stood out to me in people who had these characteristics is that underlying feeling of instability how things move from being fantastic to being awful in a very very brief period of time and how even fairly small interactions can lead to really complete emotional collapses in another person that feel very disconnected from what's going on in the moment and seem to have a lot more to do with that person's personal history or what's happened to them in the past and so on with that as context though i just want to take a moment to say here that full-blown borderline personality disorder is diagnosed about three million times a year in the united states i believe that's really frequent and we're talking about not bpd we're talking about traits tendencies vibes in a particular kind of direction and much as we all have narcissistic traits and those traits are just kind of built into people most people i would imagine 90 95 percentage of people have some borderline-y traits i've got some borderline-y-ish traits and i would say that i'm probably not hitting any of those nine features that you named in terms of the clinical diagnostic criteria but i can feel a part of me using the language of ifs here for a second maybe a younger more vulnerable part that is absolutely searching for that kind of deep intimate joining with another person and i say that because we're not trying to pathologize this or to make somebody feel bad for being this way these are all ways that people are out in the world and there are aspects of them that are really quite typical but if we have these styles it's good to come into relationship with the reality of that so we can start kind of figuring out what to do about it so to summarize a lot of what we've talked about so far we're looking at a situation where a person experiences intense emotional swings where they've got big time fears of abandonment and a deep relational insecurity that underpins those fears of abandonment and also probably situations where somebody doesn't really feel super internally stable maybe there's a little bit of even like gifted childish stuff going on in there kind of like we've talked about in a previous episode where somebody doesn't really have a strong feeling for who they are separate from other people which can be the real foundation for that relational insecurity who am i when you're not around finding that sense of self in another so those are some of the major characteristics when you've worked with people who had those those buckets of traits what are some of the practices that you found be particularly helpful for them the real to me crux of it is regulation and nurturance on the regulation side it's to be really careful you know when you're getting hijacked by let's say that three-year-old anxious and secure on steroids module inside try to recognize that and not act it out catastrophically it's one thing for example to to fall on the floor and cry it's another thing to throw a knife at somebody regulation really important and what a person can do over time is try to shore up various systems in the body that are regulatory that maybe are much more accessible initially than something that's psychological like regulate your gastrointestinal system regulate your immune system regulate your hormonal system to the best you reasonably and sensibly can't this is an not a trivial step to take and it's one that often in the beginning is much more accessible before getting into more psychological stuff you know and it also is really useful for a person to uh train in things that are regulatory like mindfulness or the cultivation of a kind of witnessing that can step back from uh the reactions labeling the reactions and you know that's my inner you know tantrumer that's my inner hungry little kid just to be able to name it to tame it in as the saying puts it so this is really helpful uh learning how to calm the body learning how to just settle down learning how to take 10 breaths each one with long exhalations and then there's the nurturing side which gets at the deep root of it the regulation aspect does get at some of the root of it but there are many many many people who have by nature a spirited excitable sensitive temperament who don't have the relational hunger and the deep sense of not being glued together deep down inside that characterizes someone that's more on the borderline spectrum so nurturance look for any which way you can to truly internalize the social supplies coming your way and as you and i have talked about a lot we wrote about it a lot in resilient and i've written about it elsewhere as well look for opportunities that take in the good when others are present with you when they are in rapport when they are loyal to you when they do care about you when they're still in the game even if you are getting kind of upset right slow it down to take that in and i have had the clinical experience frequently with people who said basically i want to be loved and yet when we really explore ways that they actually are loved and liked and included and appreciated and seen they push away those supplies because those supplies maybe activate intense longings for love that they anticipate will end in disappointment and betrayal and disaster or because at some level they are not willing to exercise their willpower for five or ten seconds to slow down and just stay with the experience of someone being caring sometimes because it's hard to shift their psychological gaze from the other person outside them to their own interior even for 10 seconds because like a child who is insecure who stops monitoring the caregiver for even a few seconds then the caregiver could go away but if the person is willing to engage the process of understanding themselves without pathologizing themselves just on a factual basis with compassion that you talked about for us and also bring to bear increases of regulation and also bring to bear a few minutes each day at a minimum but a few real minutes each day the internalization of healthy social supplies there really can be a healing over time so that to me kind of charts a course that a person can take in a very summery way i'm summarizing a lot of stuff here but they can really foster a healing and um a beautiful well-deserved kind of homecoming to feeling good about yourself as a person and fundamentally stable inside so that there's an ongoingness of well-being deep down inside yourself yeah those two those two ideas of regulation and nurturance together actually reminded me of some of the uh sometimes they're called third wave behavior therapies things like act or dbt that are often based on in dbt it's referred to as a synthesis of opposites or an integration of opposites and dbt was actually a therapeutic approach this is dialectical behavior therapy that i think was largely born out of the attempt to treat people who had very very strong borderline tendencies and it begins with radical acceptance of the person's current level of functioning before moving on to what are called like change oriented strategies in other words ways to deal with the way that things are and that actually sounds quite similar to what you were saying dad where on the one hand you want to regulate those underlying tendencies that you might have or that a another person might have and on the other hand you want to feed the hungry bee right like if these tendencies are based on on this deep internalized feeling of emotional insecurity then the best way to have the tendencies go away is by teaching somebody that they can feel more secure and more stable inside of their relationships um i do have a question for you based on that though because earlier you were talking about for somebody with really strong borderline tendencies how receiving any nurturance at all can actually almost activate a sort of spiraling where they search for more and more and more nurturance how do you give this in good ways without feeding into that kind of a paradigm it's a really tricky business and i early on in my you know therapeutic career was in situations kind of like a death spiral in which um yeah yeah i know the more i was trying to feel about present and and apologetic and acknowledging my part of the matter you know it just got worse right marsha linehan who created uh dbt and is one of the great heroes in clinical psychology in the 20th century now still on the 21st what she would do is establish boundaries pretty early on we're starting to slide into what can a person do when they're in a relationship with someone who has pretty strong borderline vulnerabilities let's say and so in the boundary setting the person who's providing the nurturance let's say from the outside basically says you know i'm i'm sincere i'm offering this but i'm not offering more and marsha would be really blunt you know someone like me you wanna you feel like you're walking on eggshells you gotta walk on those eggshells you can't create a disaster she would just crash through the eggshells and she'd basically say to people you know essentially things like uh you know as my supervisor a long time ago you know said to me one time about his attitude about things if you the client are making me crazy i can't help you right and so i'm not going to be manipulated i'm not going to be freaked out by your phone calls at two in the morning i'm just not going to pick up the phone now i'm not saying that we should do that as a hard and fast rule but it's it's a setting of boundaries so to specifically speak to your question with that acceptance aspect that you named initially in dbt there can be a growing capacity to tolerate the distress of the emotional hunger for a relationship for love broadly right and to tolerate that the distress of that then the person can become much more able to actually take in the the food for their heart that they need um even if it triggers intense longings for more because now they can tolerate that distress so in the beginning there can often be a fair amount of just education matter of fact yep walks like a duck quacks like a duck you're a duck you're or who you are is a whole being and in the totality of the wholeness of you there's a really important point there you know there's some there's a duck in your inner zoo right there are other things too beautiful caring being someone who um has been wounded desire for a better world they're all these animals all these energies ifs right all these inner personalities ourselves and there is this very intense powerful duck in you too that we're learning about we're accepting there it's not your fault there's a duck there inside you this is really really important and that duck as well intended as it is is the source of a lot of trouble for you in your relationships your jobs and your your sense of yourself and maybe that darkness is also a driver in a related so-called dual diagnosis of substance abuse sure yeah so it helps to kind of have that understanding normalize it and then we roll up our sleeves and we start to deal with it yeah not to be a parody of myself here or anything but the longer that i've hung out in mental healthy environments or psychology or whatever else the greater belief i guess i've gained that pretty much everything starts with acceptance on one level or another accepting where we are accepting what's true about us accepting the nature of our condition if we have some kind of a condition that we're trying to change and then alongside that the desire to change in some way because if you either don't accept it or you don't have the desire to change you're just not going to get very far here and i think that particularly talking from the perspective of partnering somebody with borderline tendencies whether that partnering is is a friendship or romantic or a family partnership or whatever is going on um it's can be really helpful to be clear-eyed about whether or not that person has a desire to change or whether or not that person is willing to accept this aspect of their nature yeah and it can save you frankly probably a lot of pain and suffering along the way if you get clear about the reality of oh yeah this person just does not see this fact about themselves and it's going to make their lives potentially really challenging when i listen to myself here i can just feel a kind of grief a subtle background of sorrow really and a kind of tenderness about this and nobody wakes up in the morning and says ga i want to have a borderline personality disorder today you know and there's a lot of suffering in this territory and there's been a lot of pathologizing a lot of gendered mistreatment of people and even misunderstanding because just because for example someone is dramatic and intense and their mood tends to be somewhat volatile and they're sensitive that does not necessarily mean that that person has a personality disorder oh yeah for sure really important to be to be thoughtful about that uh and it's useful to realize that there's certain aspects of this these tendencies that are adaptive in certain conditions it is a way to insist upon and get social supplies and i can just feel my kind of i have phone numerous people who've really grappled with this inside themselves or had a partner uh who's grappling with those you know it's it's not easy and so i i just kind of want to own a certain compassion and sorrow i guess or sorrow and compassion in me about it yeah well i i think that that's actually very positive and very sweet for starters and kind of a good thing to bring to this conversation as a whole because this is really tender territory because what we're really talking about here is uh extreme sensitivity right yeah and sensitivity in many ways is a beautiful thing and we certainly don't want to tell people that they shouldn't be sensitive or and i think that sensitivity has gotten a bad rap inside of the culture by and large the ability to be deeply touched is actually a beautiful thing i mean who doesn't want to be deeply touched right and then the question is that aspect of regulation and part of sensitivity is distress people who are sensitive get distressed more and get distressed more easily than those who aren't and one of the things that um gets emphasized certainly in dbt but also another behaviorist approaches to um to change is working with distress tolerance of different kinds and that's something that people with this sort of borderline-ish structure that we're talking about tend to struggle with they tend to not have a lot of what we would typically refer to as distress tolerance which is itself a bit of a complicated conversation but maybe setting some of the complexities of it aside for the moment um have you seen some practices or techniques or ways of thinking whatever you think would be helpful here that can help people develop a little bit more more tolerance of painful emotions being able to label them verbally tends to turn down the heat also maybe counter-intuitively really feeling them and staying with the direct raw sensations of them and the direct feeling of them rather than going up into the head to analyze them or make excuses yeah yeah but to just feel it it kind of grounds it out if you are able to just feel it then often it just kind of flows through you and you're not you're not fighting it you know what we resist persists and so forth that's that being able to um really feel centered in a place inside of being you know a place inside that feels stable and has an inherent kind of well-being in it and from that refuge look at the painful horrible disruptive feelings that is incredibly helpful that's one of the main fruits of meditation because we come home to that home base and then we gradually build out that refuge so we can find it more readily and stay in it more lengthily even when the storms come so that's that's really helpful uh social support certainly reaching out to other people important if i were uh really upset about something you are one of the first people i would call oh that's very sweet dad thank you yeah likewise you're on my short list i guess i'm the speed dial next to my bedside table anyway so that's all really important um finding a way to ask for what you need without being overwhelming yeah and take it in big one get it yeah yeah that if i were to if you said okay rick you get three wishes for people who grapple with these these tendencies and what would they be it'd be with these tendencies and what would they be it'd be one learn how to ask for what you need without being overwhelming number two really really take it in when you got it and number three really remember no matter how volatile it feels inside that you are a fundamentally good person because there's a lot of shame a great list yeah it gets in the mix here yeah i think that all of these things are kind of a spectrum right where on the one hand we have people who have no real feeling for their feelings they're cut off from them they're super repressed they're excessively controlled and regulated on the other hand we have people who have a uh deeply intimate relationship with their feelings perhaps even a little too intimate of a relationship and we want to be an authentic relationship with the way that we actually feel um suppression is a losing strategy but there is this space here where we have enough space between our emotions to be able to see them call them what they are feel them fully and then to steal some language from terry real here take their hands off the wheel of the car um and i think that that's that's where all the magic is here can we create enough space so we're able to take the hands off the wheel of the car as we kind of approach an end here yeah maybe it would be helpful to talk about gee what can you do when you start to get that feeling that this new person you've been dating sure there's something different going on tendencies yeah yeah what to do about that so it often can happen that you meet someone and they're functional they're not conspicuously someone who would tick those some of those nine boxes that we went through in the very beginning and then you're with them for a while and it all seems to be going just fine and then something happens and their reaction seems really way out of proportion to what happened so you check yourself hey am i in denial am i being defensive you know maybe you ask another person or two what do you what do you think and you start getting more and more of a sense of wow there's something going on here beneath the surface so you start having those feelings and you begin to ask yourself wow is there something going on here it can be really helpful to think to yourself when it's true oh i'm dealing with a someone who's high functioning who also when you're in that particular channel you know nine out of ten of their channels are wise wonderful charming loving and then there's this one channel especially when they're vulnerable maybe you know then you can start to recognize oh i see i see increasingly what i'm dealing with here and then what's really helpful is to do things which for me are the sweet spot where you find this combination of two things in which you are rested in an authentic goodwill for them you see the good in them you're not leaving the relationship prepared to stay in the marriage let's say you're rested there while at the same time you have boundaries and you are not going to get caught up in these scripts of placating them or proving to them that you really do care as they escalate you know the proofs that they require you're just not going to do that you're just not going to do that and you can be really quite straightforward about it you could just say look the truth is i i know how i feel about you and i'm not going to try to prove it to you i like you i respect you i'm glad we're working together on these things that's all really really true for me and i'm checked out after six o'clock i'm gonna eat dinner i'm gonna relax i'm just not gonna answer the phone after that time really under any conditions you know i have some boundaries there and also i know that i'm not evil i know that i'm not hateful toward you i know those things i'm not going to try to prove that to you if you feel like you really want to think that way about me i can't stop you but i know it's really true for me deep down inside i actually find that there's something it's like the good parenting the parent with a tantruming you know wounded hungry two-year-old who basically says i know sweetie i know i get it i get it i was not here i'm here now and i love you i care about you i respect you i like you i'm your friend i'm here and you can know that about me so in effect if the root issue is insecure anxious attachment when you are with someone who's being somewhat hijacked or is vulnerable to these border to these borderline qualities it's helpful for you to be the kind of parent they never had not that you're presuming to be their parent but you can rest in that combination of being loving or caring let's say while not being pushed around and it's really helpful especially if you're a kind empathic person who is exactly the kind of person as someone with borderline tendencies is drawn to because you're the kind of person that could give them what was missing when they were young if you're that kind of person watch out for this feeling inside yourself that somehow you've become a bad dad or a bad mom with this other person in i'm using that term kind of broadly loosely when you really haven't you know maybe the first two three cycles first two three rounds with this other person you sort of take it on board that you messed up but by the fourth time you start to realize no actually i haven't messed up at all and so it's important to just not identify with that and to kind of push that away sort out how to be more skillful maybe the next time but to not internalize what that borderline-ish person is projecting upon you from their own history and they can be very effective in that projecting but you don't have to believe it or buy it another is to protect yourself from situations where the other person could get into a rage it could be quite destructive extremes of this can be forms of stalking that can become violent you know particularly if it's a male borderline person so it can get kind of weird you know potentially protect yourself protect yourself these are you know sometimes you'd be stunned by a person that you thought was a certain way who turns on a dime and now they're they're in the devaluation and exile side of the coin you know just be careful take care of yourself manage your boundaries and be clear-eyed about what you're dealing with for me a big theme that always emerges in these conversations around deep personality tendencies that people have and particularly around being in relationship with somebody who has these deep personality tendencies is at times kind of a frankness around the extent to which other people are going to change and an acceptance of certain aspects of their nature and a clarity that their nature is their nature not your nature and i think that that's really really important to hold on to this is their nature not my nature and therefore if they're coming at me with a certain form of content it's really appropriate for me to be able to differentiate my actions from how they're receiving those actions now of course we want to be kind and caring and empathic people and that's how you become a good partner is by being a kind and caring and empathic person but also to be clear-eyed about like look this is the way this other person is and they're putting in efforts to change but there might be some limitations there and then you get real about okay am i am i along for the ride for this or am i not and it can be very understandable and rational to make a choice either way depending on the nature of your relationship with the person depending on their other aspects or elements that you find enjoyable or not you know whatever it is and i would just really empower people to feel like they can make their own choices about this it doesn't make you a um a bad person to not give somebody with a certain kind of tendency everything that they have ever wanted and you need to draw the boundaries for yourself here and that is a huge part of this that's so well said forest thank you i'm i'm reversing the role here by saying that's a wonderful place to end hey well there you go yeah no and um i really enjoyed having this conversation with you dad it's a subtle one talking about this stuff because we just want to be careful and respectful in how we talk about it because it is so easy for any conversation around uh mental health or disorder or personality condition or this like heavy language that people ascribe to this stuff to become very pathologizing and uh really loaded toward a view of a person as broken in some way and also unfixable we're trying to avoid falling into any of those pitfalls and so i'm just going to close here with some optimistic content maybe for somebody who struggles with their own tendencies or is in relationship with somebody who does uh two fun facts first for a long time borderline was basically viewed as untreatable this was the way that somebody was and there's nothing you can do about it that's super untrue a lot of evidence these days that borderline is actually highly treatable particularly if the person in question is invested in their own treatment and recovery second thing really interesting a lot of people just outgrow this stuff really really interesting piece of research that i bumped into is that as people age the proclivity toward borderline tendencies goes down and down and down over time um particularly the tendency toward impulsivity that really tends to drop as age kicks in so you know if you're in relationship with somebody or you yourself have these tendencies and you're going man when will this ever end or is there anything i can do there are things you can do and there is actually a pretty optimistic outlook particularly if you're 32 or 35 and thinking about this well this is one of those things that does tend to get a little bit better as people age today we talked about what it means to have borderline tendencies including what people can do about them inside of themselves and also how we can build healthier relationships with people who have their own borderline tendencies formal diagnosis of borderline personality disorder should always be done with a medical professional who is working directly with the person in question uh it should not be done through listening to a podcast so please really be very careful about this that said we all have different sets of tendencies and some people are going to have tendencies in this more borderline direction and bpd is characterized by two big features instability and impulsivity this includes a really pervasive pattern of instability in a person's interpersonal relationships their self-image their moods and their emotions and also a lot of impulsivity that's present in a variety of different kinds of contexts the reactions from somebody who has borderline are generally really excessive inappropriate or extreme and they're often founded on deep feelings of emotional insecurity which can include fears of abandonment uh people with borderline tendencies live in a chronic fear of real or perceived abandonment they are hyper-sensitive to rejection and criticism and they have tendency to overreact to some fairly minor slights all of our tendencies come from a combination of nature and nurture and there's some evidence that borderline tendencies fall a little bit more on the nature side of the spectrum than some of the other tendencies that we've talked about on the podcast but clearly there are nurture parts to this as well and rick spent a fair amount of time during the episode talking about what the foundations of borderline might be in a person's personal history maybe they had a parent who is inconsistent or unreliable or themselves grappling with these tendencies and over time this led the child to feel insecure inside of the relationship with the parent maybe the child was never able to truly fill the hole in the heart and this just kept on being the case as they aged now fortunately there are many different approaches for working with borderline tendencies one of the best of which is dbt or dialectical behavior therapy and this focuses on two major elements on the one hand radical acceptance and validation of a person's current level of functioning emotional state and so on and then second a real focus on change and growth so we have acceptance of the nature of reality on the one hand and then a movement towards something different on the other and this approach is really consistent with some of the recommendations that rick made during our conversation particularly his emphasis on emotional regulation on the one hand and then nurturance on the other we all need to learn how to regulate our emotions and the stronger our emotions are the more important it becomes to learn how to regulate them effectively now regulation doesn't mean repression and for many people the first tendency is to just push their strong emotions down when they experience them but a piece of advice that rick gave that stuck with me is that it can actually be helpful for people to sit in a full experience of their strong emotions for a safe period of time of course you want to be careful about this you don't want to re-traumatize yourself but really feeling your feelings can actually be remarkably freeing for people and can help those feelings move and change and transform and then on the other hand there's this aspect of nurturance of course we all want to be loved and cared for by other people at least i certainly want that and i think that most other people do as well but for people who have more borderline tendencies they have a very hard time internalizing this real feeling of security and the love and nurturance of other people they need to be reminded of it much more frequently and when it comes along they have to really go out of their way to deliberately internalize it and let it sink into them coming from the perspective of somebody in relationship with a person with more borderline tendencies there is this aspect of boundary setting that's really important you can nurture and nurture and nurture but at the end of the day you also have to be very real about the limitations of your influence on another person and you can say to them something to the effect of i am very clear about how much i love you i have said to you very clearly how much i love you but i can't make you feel loved by me all i can do is express it authentically to you and show you in real ways out in the world this is how i feel if you've been enjoying the podcast we'd really appreciate it if you would take a moment to subscribe to it through whatever platform you're listening to it right now on maybe even leave a rating and a positive review which really helps us out and you can also tell a friend about it it's probably the best way we have to reach new people if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com well podcast and for the cost of just a couple dollars a month you can support the show and you'll get a bunch of bonuses in return finally a little reminder my partner elizabeth recently started a new podcast it's titled my therapists a witch and you can find it probably wherever you get your podcasts it's definitely on itunes and spotify i think it's great stuff if you enjoy being well you'll probably enjoy listening to it as well until next time thanks for listening and we'll talk to you soon

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 74,616

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, Understanding Borderline Personality Tendencies, Borderline, BPD, DBT, dialectical behavior therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, instability, regulation, relationship, relationships, family dynamics, trauma, childhood trauma, traumatic experiences, symptoms of borderline personality disorder, how to know if your partner has borderline, symptoms of bpd

Id: 1wtMUfDwrdg

Length: 60min 57sec (3657 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 18 2022