Recovery is Possible: Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder

if you guys would help me welcome Karen Hall she is the founder and director of dialectical behavioral therapy center dr. hall has been in private practice for over 20 years and is the foundation and director the founder and director of the DBT Center in Houston Texas the center offers both standard and intensive DBT treatment she focuses on working with treatment resistant depression chronic anxiety trauma suicidality self-injury eating disorders and borderline personality disorder an expert in dialectical behavioral therapy dr. Hall is a licensed psychologist and a certified coach she has served as a speaker and trainer for both private and public schools on a national level and has served as a consultant for the implementation of DBT and residential treatment and mental health centers she is a DBT trainer with the treatment implementation collaboration collaborative and has presented workshops on both a local and national level she blogs for Psychology Today and psych central she is the co-author of the power of validation an author of savvy mindful extra - exercises the emotionality emotionally sensitive person and she is on the board of directors for the NEA BPD and the founder of healing hearts of families annual conference so if you'll give me a round give her a round applause and help me welcome her ah good I can walk under the projector good evening everyone I am so impressed that you're here you can't go anywhere in Houston right now so thank you so much for being here I'm I'm happy just to have this slide up there four years ago five years ago even I don't know that I could have that slide up there do you know why recovery because some years ago no one believed that anyone could recover from borderline personality disorder they didn't talk about recovery it talks about minimizing symptoms but they didn't talk about recovery and even today if you google borderline personality disorder it scares me what you will find and breaks my heart too because when people get the diagnosis and they look it up it's a horror story part of that horror story is true you know they years ago we didn't know how to treat borderline personality disorder and we as clinicians did not do a good job and sometimes we made things worse but today we know how to treat it we know what to do and recovery is absolutely possible it's even likely so let's talk let's see if I can hit the right button nope so borderline personality disorder is a serious mental illness and you can see some of the reasons that is considered so serious the rate of suicide is between 8 and 10 percent that's high 33 percent of completed suicides have been shown to have borland personality disorder 60 to 70 percent of people who have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder make suicide attempts it's the highest risk for females and the second highest for males treating borderline personality sort of used to scare clinicians fact many clinicians didn't want to treat and I think that's partly because we didn't know how and clinicians want to help people and when it's hard to know what to do it makes us feel bad too and that the importance of treating borderline personality disorder effectively it's very high as you can see as the people who are living with borland personality disorder and their families and the people that come in touch with them the suffering is so high the pain is so high because the disorder is so disabling it's important that we get it right I'm not going to spend a lot of time on symptoms because we're talking about recovery but I do want to just give an overview what is borderline personality disorder to have borderline personality disorder you need to have five of these nine symptoms what I want you to think about though is the many combinations that you can have if you have five of these nine people with borderline personality disorder can present in so many different ways and the symptoms can be so different so it's often very hard to diagnose it's a fear of abandonment people with borderline personality disorder really want to fit in they want to be a part they want to be connected and one of the biggest fears of all that they have is that people will abandon them the problem is that that abandonment gets really blown up and so they may call you and say okay call me back and you don't call back in ten minutes and they're furious at you and I said you hate me why don't you get back to me don't you care about me don't you care about my feelings because that's a band them that can kick in that fast so the fear of abandonment is one of the things that goes through relationships that makes them chaotic and makes them hard for the people who love someone with borderline personality disorder as as the individual who has been or done personality disorder what I want to say here is that individuals who have borderline personality disorder in my experience are some of the most loving and caring people I have ever met they are so tuned in to other people's emotions and they are very tuned in to what is rewarding for other people how to make them happy what's important to them the problem is that can be angry as well inappropriate intense anger and so when they get triggered with the abandonment or they get scared then they can go into that anger that it can be destructive in families and that they can't control the way they express that anger they don't have the skills to do that it's also true that that contributes to those unstable relationships that you see up there and it's like a roller coaster many people use that visual that having a relationship with someone who has one personality disorder can be like being on a roller coaster but I also want to let you know that for the individual who has BPD it's like a roller coaster for them to now they will describe to me I don't know why I do this I just called her and told her to leave me alone and they were what talk to her again and that's the tenth time I've done it this year and then they're so regretful later but the behavior keeps going on and on and causing destruction and unstable relationships a lot of times individuals that borderline personality disorder don't have a clear sense of who they are so they try to fit into different groups and they may go be Buddhist for a while or they may join a hippy colony or they may be gonna be a rock singer that they try on different identities because they they are looking for that place to belong we all want to belong we all want to fit in and they can't find it they feel very different on the inside so they keep looking for a way to belong impulsive and destructive behaviors self-harm drinking eating disorders drugs cutting quitting jobs impulsively in dean relationships and the their emotions control them and so a lot when their emotions get very strong then they do behaviors that aren't helpful or effective and they it's a cycle that they get angry and start hating themselves unstable mood it can change very quickly they can be in a really positive mood and then suddenly its rage and that's exhausting for them and for you chronic feelings of emptiness emptiness is hard to describe if you've never felt it and it seems to be different for different people for many of the people I talk with who have one person who's sort of that feeling of emptiness is about not having feelings that they dump they try to numb themselves out and avoid feelings and then the other part of emptiness is that there's no sense of self and no sense of connection it feels chaotic on the inside and they describe that as a filling of emptiness but it's different for different people so I'm not sure we have really defined that well yet so [Music] what we're coming to is basically that borderline personality disorder is a disorder of dysregulation this regulation of self interpersonal dysregulation cognitive dysregulation behavioral dysregulation and emotional dysregulation the key to treating and working with borderline personality disorder is to recognize that it is all of what we're talking about comes from a difficulty regulating emotions that they have very intense emotions and that they're they don't have the skills and tools to manage those emotions and so it causes dysregulation in other areas that we talked about like sense of self and behavior and the way that they think so what is emotion regulation if you don't have borderline personality disorder your emotions would be much like this they build they come up to a peak and then they start to go back down to baseline and you have kind of a baseline feelings actually don't hang around very long they come and they go like waves when you have emotion dysregulation we're not talking about something that's different than what you and I have but what we're talking about is that that emotion is so strong it goes so high it stay on stays around so long it's more reactive and it interferes with their ability to make decisions you can be angry you could be sad you can be scared but most of the time that doesn't interfere with your ability to make a decision that is reasonable and effective dysregulation it's when you can't do that and my guess is most of us have been there too it's just very infrequent someone that someone of you have probably been so angry that you destroyed something maybe maybe you've been upset enough ah see I heard it maybe some of you this is me I used to be really impulsive with email I get really upset with something somebody did and I would send an email and I pushed in and I want it back right away okay how do I get that email back having have you ever done that that's dysregulation on a smaller level if you've ever called an ex over and over and over if you've ever destroyed a Nexus close that's dysregulation that's when our emotions control us and that's the issue that happens with people with BPD only it happens over and over and over so what I want to make sure is that emotion dysregulation is not just being upset emotion dysregulation is when it really does get you so upset that you can't think straight so here's the model that I want this is a very very scientific model of Neurology that I want you to understand about emotion dysregulation so think of the brain as being like an elephant okay a two-ton elephant the elephant is the emotional part and the rider on that elephant is the cognitive part the reasonable part the logical part right so everything is hunky-dory as long as the rider and the elephant want to go in the same direction right we're good to go now what happens if the elephant is sighs he wants to go in a different direction than the rider who's gonna win the elephant for someone who has BPD this is us actually because our emotional brain is very strong and they if it wants to take over it can it just doesn't very often that's our survival system you know sometimes you may be running before even know why you're running it's basic survival for someone who had BPD though this is an even bigger elephant it's a four-time elephant and it's not helping us survive it's not helping them survive it's getting in the way individuals with BPD are born with what we call an emotional vulnerability to emotions and what that means is that they are quicker to react biologically than people who don't have BPD that there is something happens and they're going to react faster their emotions going to fire quicker than mine they're also going to have a more intense reaction so it's going to go up higher it's going to be the red there - the blue there's this the red it happens faster so you see something that upsets you you see a friend of yours who said they couldn't meet you because they had a class and you see them out drinking coffee with someone so I'm going to get upset the person with BPD is gonna get upset faster it's gonna go up fast and it's gonna be more intense and it's gonna take a longer time to get back to baseline you guys with me so if you had emotions that were getting you in all kinds of trouble you were acting in ways that you didn't like and you always regretted you were making decisions and why did I decide that afterwards it feels out of control my guess is you would try to find a way to tame those emotions and that's what happens with BPD they're just regulated and they're trying all kinds of ways to manage those emotions to numb them to avoid them they start to be afraid of their emotions because their emotions get them in so much trouble and they hurt so much and so they may try alcohol and may cry drugs they and then they start to judge themselves and then it's like okay I behaved this way everybody's gonna abandon me and so it all starts feeding back in and becomes a vicious like a tornado you know the more I do something to try to regulate myself the worse things get you know I try to drink it up myself I feel better and then I get a ticket and then I wreck the car and then life is in chaos and then people are angry at me again so their efforts sometimes make things worse so when you avoid emotions all kinds of things happen and I want to play a little video for you that I this from the act people and I think it sort of shows part of what happens when you learn when you're afraid of your emotions and you start to avoid them [Music] imagine that you're steering a boat that's far far out at scene below the deck of your boat out of sight lies a vast horde of demons and they've all got enormous claws and razor-sharp teeth and they've made a deal with you as long as you keep your boat drifting aimlessly now at sea and they'll stay beneath the deck so that you don't have to look at them but if you ever decide to start heading towards Shore then they immediately rush up on the deck and they'll flap their wings bare their fangs and threaten to tear you to shreds not surprisingly you don't like that very much so you say sorry demons I didn't mean it please go back down below you turn the boat around and drift back out to sea then the demons disappear beneath the deck out of sight again so you breathe a sigh of relief and everything seems okay for a while and problem is so you'll get fed up drifting aimlessly we'll start to get bored lonely miserable resentful anxious depressed see all those other ships heading towards Shore and you know actually that's where you really want to be going so one day you pluck up the courage and turn the wheel and start heading towards Shore again but the moment you do those demons swarm up on the deck again and threaten once again to rip you into pieces but here's the interesting thing although these demons are very good at threatening you they never actually cause you physical harm why not well because they can't all they can do is growl loudly wave their claws and look terrifying but physically they can't touch you the only power they have is the ability to intimidate so if you believe they're going to do what they say they're going to do then they've really got control of the boat but once you realize that can actually do any physical harm well then you're free as long as you're willing to accept the demons presence all you have to do to reach land is lit the demons get around let them scream at you all they like and keep steering the boat towards Shore the demons make how the protests but they're powerless to stop you like but it's look what it's like for someone who has BPD to try to get into recovery it's terrifying we're asking them if you could imagine something you're terrified of doing we're asking them to do that we're asking them to take a journey that is painful and see scary you know but I went into psychology I was naive because I loved this idea of therapy and helping people and it was it was a mission for me and so it was was a big shock when I realized everybody didn't want to just come down to me what and by a dawned on me finally therapies painful and for someone if you go back to the part where the emotions are so intense more intense than than we have experienced except at our peak moments and we're asking them to sit here and talk about the very thing that scares them and to experience to let go with the alcohol to let go of the drugs to let go of the spending or the restricting or the overeating or whatever it is they're using to try to numb themselves we're asking them to let go of that and feel fear and feel sadness and feel the emotions cuz that's the path to get him well we're asking them to do a lot and we're asking we when we ask them to do that we need to be able to give them other skills to manage those they can't just stop they're doing the best they can who would destroy their life on purpose they're doing the best that they can and what we our job is to say I can teach you how to manage these emotions and that's part of what we have to do as clinicians and that's the part we didn't know for a long time and so now we teach skills for how to manage very intense emotions so recovery as possible is a painful painful journey it's a tough one but what is recovery what is recovering from borderline personality disorder there's something called dropping out of the symptoms that we talked about in psychology dropping out the symptoms means that those criteria that I shared with you the nine that they no longer meet criteria that's called dropping out of the symptoms so they don't longer have the symptoms of borderline personality disorder in a way that interferes with their life is that recovery I would say no recovery is more than that recovery I believe is having a life worth living a life that they want to live and we can do that we can help people with online personality disorder create not only drop out the symptoms but also create the life that motivates them to keep going through that journey that's painful does it mean that they'll never have any symptoms again or never have any really intense emotions again and you if you're a family member if your person if you love someone borderline personality disorder and suddenly they're yelling about something and you say you've been through therapy what's up with this did you take your medication it doesn't mean that they're still going to have emotions they're still going to have a really tough times and so I challenge us that we don't hold them to a microscope that perhaps we wouldn't hold ourselves because we have moments and I think sometimes it's our fear that you're feeling sad don't know are you headed for depression and that makes us avoid emotions and then we're communicating to them it's not okay the transactional model is very simple and the transactional model is where you come in because the transactional model says the interactions with people that people change based on what the other person says so let me give you an example if you have a 20 year old daughter who comes in at 3:00 in the morning and you were expecting her at 11:00 she lives with you there's a storm going on when she walks up on the end of the living room are you gonna say hi honey do you have a good time no you're gonna wear that heck have you been hey did you don't you get your skin don't you care about anybody but yourself because you're upset and you love her but now if I come at you and say where the heck have you been I don't you know I have to go to work tomorrow I've been waiting up for you I couldn't you pick up a phone as your hand broken okay what's her response gonna be anger back anger back we our job is to stay regulated I'm not saying you let her off the hook but our job is to stay regulate because transactions people react to us and individuals with borderline personality sort will react stronger and longer and more and and faster I am extremely grateful for Jaime Jamie is is recovered and I think that her voice says more than mine ever could so I appreciate always that you're willing to share to help other people so I'm gonna turn it over to Jamie can you hear me ah good evening how is everybody I'm pepping myself up because I'm feeling a little tired so bear with me for a second if I totally brain fart every now and then cuz it's probably gonna happen and I'll just kind of blankly stare at you for a second uh my name is Jamie and I struggle with borderline personality disorder it still even recovered and ago back into a little bit of what that means for me now but before I do that sort of go through how I got to where I am I'm here from Houston born and raised proud of my my city that I love especially these last couple of weeks I was a very sensitive child a very very sensitive child I cried about everything I got angry about it especially if he went near my food I was a gem phobe you went through of my food like you would hear it for hours right everything was just really intense for me and I think what started to happen because the people around me didn't really know what to do with that mainly like my parents my family and you know siblings and such is is sort of it became this oh she's overreacting again or she's she's being overdramatic again or she just wants attention or or what have you and so i think i IE thurr well one of two things would happen either I I would sort of throw a fit and everybody was just and just kind of carry-on or whatever or or they would tell me to just kind of move on with it so then I I learned different ways to cope with those emotions what they would flare up like if you can't hear me then I'll scream yeah maybe you'll hear me and so that became a communication tool that didn't serve me well through the rest of my life up until you know DBT and such and and even even still at times I without going too much into it as a child I did experience childhood trauma and abuse and and and now as you will hear about BPD there is often a case where somebody with BPD has experienced trauma and abuse but that's not necessarily always the case if if you have a loved one with BPD it doesn't mean everybody thinks that you abused them maybe there were other things that were going on and I'll leave that to Karen to kind of give more clinical kind of ideas about it but for me that was the case I had very intense emotions was very sensitive like a raw nerve and I was going through that and and I'm Yellin and screamin hey there's stuff going on and people are like oh she's just you know how she is and oh you know kids or kids and all of these things it didn't go well with me I couldn't take even the slightest pain I I like to tell this story just to kind of give an idea of how intense that is just naturally for me when I was 8 years old there was a situation my uncle lived with us he brought home this kitten I am a huge animal ever I prefer animals over humans anything I have to be honest nothing personal I spent hours with that kitten and I loved it was my best friend and you know what didn't validate me I didn't care about my mood didn't judge me didn't ignore me didn't tell me not to be overdramatic so like this kitten was my buddy and my mom would let me keep it and I couldn't handle that so somewhere in my little eight-year-old mind that pain that idea of that loss was too much and I made my first suicide attempt I tried to overdose with over-the-counter medication and then you know after you already do that you're getting sick and these things are happening and I don't want to tell anybody because I'm gonna get in trouble because I'm being overdramatic right and I'm looking for attention and and all of these things so I just I know now just in case anybody wonders I've had it all fully checked out I'm okay so I just got really sick for a couple of days and I didn't tell anybody and I just held on to that but then something was planted right then there was this new option in the back of my mind when I couldn't handle things and that's where that suicidal ideation started to kind of take place and something I would refer back to you throughout life the the abuse that I was going through ended right around puberty and adolescence when all the hormones and everything are going crazy anyways and so you know you're this emotional raw nerve you've got all these hormones going on this abuse situation has stopped and all the numbing and avoiding and everything that you've been trying to do just to cope with that all of a sudden everything goes calm and I freaked out and I went nuts I had I I think I was in the sixth grade and I don't I don't remember exactly what triggered it but I had decided that I wanted to try to kill myself again and I had tried to cut on myself and it hurt so that wasn't the way for me to do it so I went to school the next day and I told my best friend that I didn't want to live anymore and of course she was terrified and she rented the counselor's office the counselor called me and when we called my mom oh gosh you know again I'm terrified and and she's angry and I loved my mother she didn't know she didn't know she didn't understand what was going on again I'm this overdramatic child right this emotional child who just can't seem to get over things or get past things she she told me that you know she would talk to me about it when she got home from work you know and so that that was those were very long hours waiting for her to get home between school and when she got home from work and she got home and said get in the car we're going somewhere she took me to a hospital in the neighborhood and in the parking lot she said I want you to tell me everything or I'm gonna check you in here and I'm terrified because again I don't want to be abandoned I don't understand I don't understand I think at one point as a kid I just said I must have an invisible sign on my head somewhere that this stuff keeps happening or maybe there's something wrong with me because nobody else seems to to get it you know I don't think they could see past that emotional intensity so anyways I became a very rebellious teenager I started getting into a lot of drugs and drinking self-mutilation by the time I was 14 with cutting on myself or burning sometimes I was a punk rock girl so like you know I had a hippie mom I had to go the extreme to totally rebel against that so it was really angry and that did well with that kind of style you know and I got to hang out with all the other misfits that were just angry but I was miserable and I was sad and my interpersonal relationships with others were terrible I've always been a very I think articulate person this was one of the words or animated or well spoken or funny or all of these things and people tend to like me and be drawn towards me you do unless I just have a straight face which I have the rest dating scary face we'll just call it that and then I have to correct that sometimes because I'm not always away or what my face is doing which is something it is also sometimes with borderline so I I you know would do well with people in situations and then they would see me have an outburst so they would see me get upset and then they would backpedal and they would sort of like me from afar or talk about me I would hear that people thought it was crazy or a hot mess and I I went through a lot of struggles where I lost a lot of people that I loved and cared about a lot of friends I would you know hear all kinds of things about the trauma I've been through you know like because we just always attributed to that we didn't realize there would there were other components that were affecting things there so I heard a lot of why can't you just get over it you know if I had an outburst or acted out in some sort of way well lots of people have problems and not everybody acts like this what's wrong with you there was no body around that recognized the emotional sensitivity in me and knew that there were skills to teach me because professionals didn't even really at that point in time either which was only like you know five years ago because I'm very young so so anyways I want to get more into the recovery part but I don't want to leave out some of this I have been in and out of different modalities of therapy since I was 12 when the abuse stopped but then that year I started therapies I would go we'd start digging into the trauma and I would leave also here you know it's very common I couldn't deal with it I didn't have the skills to deal with the intensity of the emotions that would come up to even face that trauma and then I you know throughout these therapy the year I would hear things like Jamie you just have to find a way not to get so upset and I'd be like great tell me how you know uh I would get diagnoses like you know depression and anger management you know you're angry oh no kidding what do I do about it take these meds which I'm not against meds I'm just saying that for me it took more than just that more than a band-aid I guess I'm not gonna go into that I feel like I'm discounting that and I'm not so I I couldn't figure it out all I know is that I it was getting worse and worse and worse and sort of like you know Karen was talking about for a while it would seem like I would find something and maybe it was a good thing and I started to feel good for a while I went through adolescent 12-step programs I got into doing alternative spot type things and just anything that I could throw at it to try to feel better and it would work for a little bit and then I would explode and then I would get the rejection we thought you were better why are you still struggling with this and this went on and on and on well into my 30s and you know a failed marriage all kinds of things that I wanted to do in life that I hadn't been in a healthy enough place to do like have children like have a family like focus actually I focused on my career a bit and I've been pretty lucky there but I am an activist gives me somewhere to put all that intensity and I kind of get to do that for a living so that's really cool that works for me um but I I had been seeing the same therapist for three and a half years and I was still getting that you know Jamie you just have to try to find a way or Jamie if you could just this or Jamie if you could just that I was in a relationship that was very intense and I don't break up well not even kind of even if in the moment I'm the most reasonable person of the world give me an hour oh my gosh you're gonna have a letter this long about everything and not only not only are you gonna hear all that you're gonna hear about everything I went through and how could you abandon me this poor wounded person you know so there's there's sort of without I think even intending to a manipulation that would come into my relationships as well you know I'm very loving I'm very caring I'm very generous and I show people this and then well they don't understand me and my vulnerabilities you know how could you do that I've done all this you know and just really not good at interpersonal relationships this relationship I was in ended and I went down into one of the darkest places I've ever been in in my life I got to the point where I was thinking about suicide all day every day I was sitting outside smoking cigarette I was looking around me and you know what was there what could I use if I was driving I was looking at what I could jump off of this I was researching what if I did these sorts of ways or these combinations of things and if I fail what's gonna happen because I don't want to fail you know that's the worst and my head in that moment so I had come up with a plan to check out it was going to be the day before this person who had broken my hearts birthday I wanted them to know how much they'd hurt me and it wasn't just about them it was also something I realized every time I had gotten suicidal was I wasn't that I wanted to die is that I couldn't stand the pain I didn't know what to do I've been trying things it wouldn't go away clearly I was fundamentally flawed and broken I should just give up right and it'd probably be better off for everybody else around me anyways and it's real it's real hard when you get to that point to kind of reach out and see beyond that I had a few months before started going to meetings for adult survivors of the type of abuse I'd gone through again all this stuff started coming up I became unraveled and didn't know what to do with all of it this partner the product were three months later a lot of the brunt of that night terrors you know they did pretty well with me waking up on a regular basis and screaming and punching my pillow so I have to give them that credit they had a psychology degree so they thought that they could deal with me but I didn't work out it's okay I'm in a better place now so and it pushed me to a place that I needed to go to to get help so anyways I was coming unraveled I was doing on this research online and I kept coming across PTSD and I thought I had that I had already been diagnosed with you know major depression or clinical depression before so I went and I sought out a trauma specialist who had experience working especially with women that had experiences like me I went to her she agreed with my self diagnosis of PTSD and of course again major depression and she said something it totally threw me off and she said that I had a trauma based personality and that she also thought I had borderline personality traits because they can't call it disorder the first time you know it's very serious and I thought that's crazy crazy right that word crazy I had known of one person ever that I'd heard had borderline personality and oh man she was really out there and I couldn't be that bad right whew it was that stigma that you see that you hear about online you know they're hot mass stay away from them better off they might be nice now but just wait just wait so here's all this new information she tells me about a couple different types therapy about what she really stresses to me is I like to call behavior therapy which just happens to be great for all three of those diagnoses just tell me about a couple places I I came across not endorsing it just happens to be although I don't mind endorsing but I found the DBT center of Houston and went on to their website and they were like if you've been recently diagnosed with these things or suffered from these things and I was like that's me that's totally me like all the things so I called and I I made an appointment well in between that call and the appointment I got dumped I got into that suicidal place and I'd made this decision that I was gonna do it Thursday night well my intake evaluation of the DBT Center was Wednesday and with any little bit of anything I had in me I went and I was numb but I found out later on DBT therapy is an emotion that's an important one to know I was numb and the therapist could tell she could see it in me she told me I can see it on you I can hear it in your voice have you been thinking about it I said oh yeah you know she said well you know like how would you do it I'm not going to give away my secrets I don't want her to know because for me at least if I'm talking about it I'm not ready to do it if I stop talking about it I'm in a really really really dangerous place and I say that because a lot of people still view if you're you're reaching out or you're crying out you know that your attention sinking well yeah you are you need attention you're crying out for help so that that should be taken seriously I was past that point she the therapist looked at me was so much concerned and said you know I really think that I can help you but I need you to be here next week and I went home ooh I'm gonna get a little choked up here hmm good emotion it is a good one because I know where I've come from it's a good one so I I went home and I went up to my room you know they had a lot of roommates and I got my computer out on Netflix and just kind of completely zone out not have to think of anything and windows decided to do like 35 updates right then now I'm there having to think and I'm thinking about this person I'm still very much in love with you know and what I'm wanting to do and what that would do to them because I've always been able to think about other people I'm not wanting to hurt them so even in that point it was like well maybe I'll just continue to suffer so that they don't have to hurt but then I then something happened and I started to think about me and I started to think about my activism and how I'd had success in that and that that for me was like the whole plane of it all you know like that's whether given or chosen was what I believed to be my purpose and I didn't know if I was ready to quit doing that because it worked you know I had a good voice I could stand up I could be heard and I could make an effect I hadn't had children yet I didn't let this continent more than once you know and just really lucked out of that one you know I wanted to travel and do things and I knew that this was it knew I didn't want to be in pain but I knew this was it and I knew I wouldn't ever have a chance to do any of that if I went through with it so I decided to give DBT a chance and it's hard that next day came exciting right there everything knowing the next day this person was gonna have a birthday party and I wasn't gonna be there right you know I message anybody I could have my support group I'm like you know six Facebook windows open yeah yeah I don't know what to do you know uh and people carried me through it then one friend said something really important and she said do you love them enough to let them do what they need to do for them oh oh that's a really good question so I went with that midnight came and I sent instead a letter of acceptance towards that person an acknowledgment of them doing what they needed to do that was best for them and happy birthday and so I stayed and I was there the next week to see my therapist and I you know I was awkward at first you know sit in this room full of people with the skills group but I'm like I'm probably crazy but then I realized that I'm not really crazy unless we just like that word sometimes sometimes it can be fun I guess um I was really against it for a while and then that time that sort of took away from what I was saying to people so I did it I started learning skills I struggled a lot I had my you know my daily DBT card I would fill out and I was probably still having three to five outburst a week anger outburst I remember the first time I therapist said Jamie you haven't had an outburst in like two weeks you're right I haven't it doesn't mean I didn't get mad doesn't mean I didn't get upset that didn't doesn't mean I didn't get unreasonably joyful because there's that side to it too all those things happened I would walk a few steps trip fall down get my knees get back up limp a little bit eventually get back to walking it happened over and over again and it still does that's an important thing for me in my recovery that I finally needed to realize there's something I don't know that it's a clinical term but Karen likes to call DBT guilt you know after I I guess graduated is the word finished the DBT program I sell right on my face hmm it was not that magic pill and nobody ever told me it was gonna be except aasaiya t that's another thing I needed to learn I'm different I have a neurobiological difference I am emotionally sensitive I'm always gonna be I don't need to get rid of that I don't because I'm also passionate and loving and creative just as much as I can get angry and I can get sad it's a you know it's a little bit of both right so I'm I'm always gonna kind of be an intense person right that's okay and my emotions are gonna hit me and the normal herbs and flows of life are a little bit more intense for me and I know that and I'm compassionate with myself about it now and that's what's helped me a lot in combination with these skills I started to notice that just as time goes by practicing these skills going over them it's like it almost it sinks in a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more over time I am getting to a point with myself where it's okay if I'm not okay sometimes and it's alright if that's intense and if I fall down all I can do is get back up and put my best foot forward I don't beat myself up as much as I used to about that sometimes I do it's not a it's not a perfect score it's a practice and I think when I decided and some of this is super recent you know I just I went through a rough time recently with some very big things in life and some very big things that came up and I got really upset and people said you need to go back to therapy but I was like no wait a minute this is big stuff and it's understandable that I'm up this I'm this upset and I'm having a time and I think that's one of the greatest gifts that I've gotten out of all of this as you know what no I'm not gonna invalidate my own experience because that's kind of how all of this started in the first place is it not so I just said you know okay I've been depressed I've had rough stuff going on there are these things it's okay and with that the Depression started to lift and I started to you know it didn't you know that isn't so suck but I just want you I don't like where I'm at right now and I'm having a hard time with these things and I have health issues now I am NOT where I used to be physically you can't see most of them I understand but but I can do these things that's the dialectic right is my body doesn't work the way that it used to and I'm learning all these really cool ways that I can make things work for me where I'm at now so it's working and it'll continue to work and I'm gonna allow myself that I don't have to be perfect because you know what normals of course nobody's perfect I just a lot of people are way better than me at pretending like they are I think at least that makes me feel better so yeah recovery for me I forgive myself for not always being perfect I forgive myself for graduating from DBT and still having a rough time I'm still mostly sensitive it's okay but you know what I'm funny and I'm creative and I like to do stuff so like come talk to all of you I would say that if you're someone who struggles with BPD to you that it's okay and it's not your fault and that it gets better and sometimes it still sucks a little bit but that that's okay and that you can bounce back from that we are Weeble wobbles that's what I came up with recently I don't know if you remember but they were those blowup toy things you you'd punch them and they fall down and then come right back up weebles wobble but they don't fall down so that's that's us and and if you're a loved one of somebody with BPD I would want take care of yourself because this is an intention Ernie for you to I I've seen all my loved ones go through it I'm they've I have a lot that stuck around eventually which thank goodness for them or came back but maybe if you can hold onto the idea that it's a process and a practice and not a perfection we're still going to get upset sometimes it doesn't mean that everything failed or you know we've completely fallen back we just need a little bit of time and loving and understanding and of course you want to have your own healthy boundaries and all that and I know there's plenty of resources out there to help you find those but thanks for letting me come talk to you now I feel all that's happening [Applause]

Channel: Hope and Healing Center & Institute

Views: 190,629

Keywords:

Id: PPY82z7bXGs

Length: 58min 23sec (3503 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/not-moses]

If you liked that, I expect you may find a lot you can sink your teeth into and find support from in the Alice Miller Library. (Hint: There's a reason this woman's books have all been best sellers.)