How to help a "difficult" person

so do you want to start okay so see let's see if the mic is working because lots of people will listen to this question and so okay okay so you said on a recent livestream that you were to you didn't have enough energy to answer this question but you said it was intriguing so I was wondering if you had the energy to answer how someone might help someone that has borderline personality disorder by example by example no no no I don't I don't mean that precisely I mean that the let's not take borderline personality disorder precisely as is the example okay I understand the question the question to some degree is how do you help someone that's lost and the answer to that is if they aren't willing to not be lost you cannot help them and I would also say that as a clinician you see I mean it's an it's a statement that's informed I would say by my mythological knowledge but also by straight clinical wisdom not mine particularly I mean one of the things that Carl Rogers pointed out was that there were necessary preconditions for entering into a therapeutic relationship and that that would be really any relationship where the mutual flourishing of the two people involved was the Paramount goal and one of the preconditions was that both people had to want that to happen and Rogers believed he didn't know how to get the horse to drink when she had brought it to the water and I've thought about that a lot because when people are really lost sometimes they're so lost that that they can't be found and I think the only thing that you can do in a situation like that is get your life together and she and manifest the reality of an alternative mode of being that's what you've got and so that's the only way I know of to solve an intractable problem and I would say the reason that I went down that direction with regards to borderline personality disorders because it's one of the most serious of the personality disorders very difficult to treat and so I'll generalize from that to situations that are very difficult to deal with and you know there's a statement to and this has nothing to do with borderline personality disorder per se there's a statement in the New Testament that's really vicious in fact there's a number of them but this is a particularly vicious one and that is don't cast pearls before swine and what that means is if you're trying to help and it doesn't work then stop helping it's not helping right it may be just wasting your time it might be making things worse no if you're if you're offering something and it's not taken then perhaps you should be offering it somewhere else and sometimes if you offer hand and the person won't take it you have to stop offering the hand and then what you do is you go off and you have your life and sometimes that means in people's lives for example that they have to leave their family members behind there's a scene in the New Testament this is another very harsh scene where Christ is walking down the road with his disciples I hope I've got this story right but I've got it essentially right and his mother calls to him and says I believe that he's supposed to come back to the home because his uncle has died and that there's going to be a funeral and he turns to his mother and says something like let the dead bury their dead I'm about my father's business it's something like that and you read that you think huh that should have been edited out no but it shouldn't have been added it out because it's exactly right because sometimes the thing you do is walk away because there's no other solution and if you are trapped in pathological relationships and you see no way out of them if you if someone who is sinking has their hands around your neck and is pulling you down you're not obligated to drown with them you know there's a rule to if you're a lifeguard you know some of you have had lifeguard training how do you approach someone who's drowning and panicking in the water feed out right like it's like I'll save you but that doesn't mean you get to drown me while I'm doing it and if it's you drown or both of us drown it's you drown and that's wisdom that's not cruelty right so yeah

Channel: Pragmatic Entertainment

Views: 550,133

Rating: 4.9375315 out of 5

Keywords: borderline personality disorder, how to help people, Jordan Peterson, psychology, mental health

Id: CdSaUVldSjc

Length: 4min 47sec (287 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/WrittenByNick]

Insightful and helpful, thanks for the link. It took me a long time to understand that I was drowning too with my pwBPD. Now that I have some distance, it seems more realistic that she's actually in the shallow end of the pool - no matter how much it looks like she was drowning, she wasn't in real danger. I don't say that to dismiss her pain. Just now that she's living without me, her habits haven't changed. I'm just not there trying to save her from herself.

[u/justaskingbluesky]

"Manifest the reality of an alternative mode of being*

I didn't even know there were alternative realities until about a year of her nearly constant screaming interspersed with some calm lucid seeming moments. Then it began to sink in that she was having a different experience of reality and hadn't registered most things I said in the way I meant.

Her growing proof of my culpability (to everything what was wrong in the relationship) was like a proverbial snowball rolling. If I agreed to some accusation, the snowball grew. If I disagreed, it was taken as dishonesty and the snowball ALSO grew.

The only place I could recover a saner train of thought and "manifest the reality of an alternative mode of being" was somewhere away from her aggression.

The problem with going away was that since she couldn't harass me directly now, she started harassing other people with weirdly constructed accusations against me.

There was no safe way out of the situation.

[u/Yuna_a]

When I saw him initially not have the energy to answer the question about borderline personality, I knew he understood how fucking awful this disorder is.

He also states the awful, brutal truth - sometimes, you cannot help a person who will not be helped.

[u/Concibar]

I think this is exactly where I am right now

[u/[deleted]]

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