Manage Self-Contempt in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

hi it's dr vox licensed psychologist at the native texas and in this video i'm going to talk about bpd and self-contempt and i think that this is so central to a lot of the issues that individuals with bpd deal with but also people that don't have bpd deal with this as well and i think from from the bpd perspective i think what happens is that individuals of dpd feel like their self-hatred is so intense that no one else could ever feel this way and if you fall into that category i want you to know that you're not alone in that experience that a lot of my clients hold a lot of that self-contempt and in many ways that self-contempt can feel like this giant hand that's wrapped around you right where you're kind of locked in and it has you caught and stuck and you feel like you know it and the more it squeezes the less you can breathe and if you can't get a breath then what can you do and it becomes more intense and you feel like the stronger it holds you the less you can fight back and self-contempt puts itself on this negative feedback loop and what happens is something happens right that you didn't expect and you can't plan and expect everything in your life and i think that sometimes folks with epd believe that their life should go a particular way and it's part of the split it's that split tendency which is that either it's all good or all bad but the majority of life is in between and i know that that's difficult to conceptualize and it also is very scary but your bpd takes advantage of that your bpd wants you to believe that the split is safe that the split causes life to be safe and predictable and that's a fallacy it's just not true because we operate in the middle and self-contempt and that negative feedback what happens is is that something in life happens right because stuff happens that you didn't expect that causes intense anxiety and fear perhaps it ignites your core content that's the things inside you right that are sometimes about abandonment sometimes about rejection sensitivity right sometimes it's about the sense of invisibility that you're not being seen you're not being recognized perhaps by your partner by your employer by someone in your life and that activation then starts the chatter and the chatter is that inner critic that family in the head that is driving home all of this verbiage and the verbiage is stuff that you may have heard from people that were supposed to take care of you people that were supposed to look after you people that were supposed to help stand you up and lift you up in your life to do things differently but for whatever reason they didn't we don't know why we have to radically accept where we are today and the issues and consequences of the life that we're living and that self-contempt and that verbiage that's in your head is so loud and a lot of my clients you know when they first start with me it's like going to a rolling stones concert right and those massive speakers and it's just whoa right all of this self-contempt and all of this hatred and all of this shame and all of this belittling and all of this intensity that causes you to feel smaller less than weaker and as that happens over time you feel like you have less power to push back and that's the trickery of bpd because it uses that self-contempt to convince you that you don't have the energy to push back that you can't push back that you have to live with this external expectation that the rest of the world will tell you what it wants what it needs and how it's supposed to be and then when you do it then it'll give you what you want which for most of my clients that have bpd is love acceptance reparations understanding and compassion well regretfully the world doesn't work that way and i think that we have to learn to give it to ourselves first and that sometimes causes folks to feel lonely and feel like well see i have to do it myself so it makes it not fair so i'm not gonna do it or or they're afraid to do that because what if they can't succeed in that what if they don't know how to do that and that's a really common fear for folks with with bpd and i get it and i work with a lot of my clients in order to challenge that recognize it push back on that and i'm telling you right now you can do that you can be successful in doing that and pushing back in getting control of that inner voice of those inner critics of that family in the head that is those intense amplifiers of those statements of self-contempt that feed that core content that is that giant's hand that's holding you in place well let me tell you you can push back on that hand and you can release yourself and the way that you start doing that is first catching those thoughts of self-contempt you want to catch them right just just grab them and when you grab them what i want you to do is i want you to look at them i want you to say is this true and you have to look at it objectively because the odds are if you look at it objectively it's not true now what your bpd is going to do is that it's going to start flooding you with all of these examples with all of this information saying well you did this well you did this and then this happened and then this happened see that validates this and you made these bad choices and then you did if that happens to you what i want you to do is say hold on a minute and we have to radically accept the choices we made yesterday because we don't have time machines right we have to radically accept where we are today and the influence that we can have going forward and that's what this is about it's going forward letting go of that self-contempt and doing things differently doing things so that you have a sense of self love and compassion and that you don't need to look externally for that sense of safety because you can create it yourself because i'm telling you the world is sometimes this paradoxical thing that if we can give it to ourselves and we have a sense of security we have a sense of safety we can then be in a relationship that actually provides those things that helps us feel better about those things and intensifies those things problem is is that when your bpd is in in control you don't have opportunities for those things you don't because you tend to get into relationships that want to put something inside you that you feel you don't have and you can't have so that creates dependency and dependency in a relationship is problematic i know there's this false sense of safety i understand it i know that there's this this sense of comfort in self-contempt sometimes and comfort doesn't mean it's good and cozy what it means is something that we're used to that has occurred time and time and time again but you can push back on it and you can do it differently and it starts first catching those thoughts of of self-contempt looking at it then pushing back on it and what is your value knowing your worth knowing that you can build the things in your life that you want and we have to turn down that volume of self-contempt you can do it it is possible i've worked with clients all along the bpd spectrum and they have been able to do it and they have instilled this intense steadfast belief in me that bpd is treatable the research supports it too right and you can overcome the things that keep you stuck you can do it i know you will do it and i hope you enjoyed the video take care of yourself catch those negative thoughts and kick its butt have a good day bye

Channel: Dr. Daniel Fox

Views: 22,483

Keywords: Identifying and Managing BPD Self contempt, Manage Self-Contempt in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), borderline personality disorder, bpd, bpd relationships, depression, dr fox personality, mental health, depression and BPD, ptsd, cptsd, major depressive disorder, major depression, anxiety, daniel fox personality disorders, dr fox bpd, mental health awareness, dr daniel fox borderline personality disorder, bpd emptiness, complex BPD, complex borderline personality disorder

Id: UryW04T-35Q

Length: 8min 43sec (523 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022