The trigger flag, in deference to Pomegranate...

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... but being flown at half staff because I'm not sure this is going to be all that triggering.

Let me start with a digression; sometimes that's the quickest way to the point.

R.D. Laing describes a patient (schizophrenic, I think, but I'm not certain) who sometimes experienced himself as only "a cork bobbing on the ocean." Laing comments that on the ocean, what safer thing to be than a cork?

Personally I'd be honored to have coffee with Marsha Linehan, though I imagine she has much more pressing things to do than have coffee with me. Unlike Pom's steak in the lion cage, I'd expect to feel much more like a cork on the ocean. Not like a fish in water, which is how I've been known to feel in other extraordinary situations -- I simply don't consider myself in Linehan's league.

I just figured out that when I was growing up the rule in my family was, "Don't you dare do anything to trigger us!" It wasn't reciprocal; my parents could, and did, do plenty of stuff that triggered me. I carried that rule around with me for a while afterwards but it seemed as though who was and wasn't allowed to trigger whom, depended chiefly on who had the most power in a particular situation. I think the "mind games" that Elysium refers to, must include a lot of what went on in my family, that I later found myself ill-prepared to cope with when I encountered it elsewhere.

When I went to those encounter groups I mentioned, I was already working on the question, "What is and isn't OK, really, for me to say?" Not, "What's likely to trigger the fewest people?" -- the answer to that would have been simply to tell the blandest lies, to say nothing, or not to be there at all. I was more interested in what was and wasn't OK with me: how to tell the truth as I saw it, let the chips fall where they may, and walk away confident that I'd done no real harm. One key element seemed to be to stay in the "first person": if I said that something was true for me -- that I was or wasn't angry, that I did or didn't trust someone -- there was no way anyone could contradict me or successfully mind-game me.

A few years later when I went into that workshop, I knew very little about what to expect but I had a good many misgivings. Based on previous experiences, I expected that at some point I'd be expected or required to lie -- perhaps to pretend something was working for me when it really wasn't, or to offer someone a "warm fuzzy" when I felt neither warm nor fuzzy. By way of defense against whatever they might do to me there, I was determined to stay true to my own experience no matter what: for instance, to say nothing that I wasn't satisfied was true for me personally at the moment I said it.

The joke was on me, because the workshop turned out to be about training us to do exactly that. Only, I'd always feared there were limits on what I should allow myself to experience lest I get into some unspecified kind of trouble, but in the workshop we explored way farther beyond my previous limits and I kept finding that, despite whatever fear and other stuff happened to come up for me, I still felt perfectly safe.

Linehan says, in one of the page snapshots Orange_Blossom posted, "The therapist communicates '********' to responses other than the targeted adaptive response." One of the points of the workshop was to teach us to draw the distinction between our experience -- what was so for us at any given moment, "I feel fear" (or anger, or whatever) "and it reminds me of..." (whatever) -- and the stories we'd often make up about it, such as "I feel like there's a curse on me and nothing I do ever turns out right". The workshop leader would indeed actively welcome communications of the former kind and call "********" to the latter.

-- Bob Lind, of Elusive Butterfly fame.

Several years ago I had a brief and stormy relationship with a gf who, in retrospect, was showing some BPD traits. One thing I noticed about her after a while was that she didn't seem to like to ask me for anything she might want from me, such as not to talk to her about something just then. Instead, it seemed to me that she was constantly looking for ways to make me do what she wanted: she'd snap at me or derail a conversation if it started to go in a direction she wasn't comfortable with, or not show up for a date when we had a lot of loose ends in need of talking about. I'd try to coach her: "If you don't want to talk about something, the magic words are, 'I'm not willing.' Just say that, and I'll respect it. When you say, 'Cut that out!' or 'Quit analyzing!!' I haven't a clue what you mean."

[The astute reader may note a certain resemblance between the situations described just now and the "Don't you dare do anything to trigger us" ones referred to earlier.]

People with BPD seem to have acquired, quite likely unfairly, a reputation for being "manipulative." I can see how someone might easily come across that way if (a.) they don't expect to get what they ask for; (b.) they do expect to feel frustrated and to get triggered by it -- reminded of lots of other times they asked for something and were denied or squashed; so (c.) they've learned ways, often maladaptive, to get around ever having to ask. I can see where in DBT, part of the lesson plan might be to get the client to (a.) ask instead of gaming, and in the process, (b.) to confront whatever stuff the act of asking may trigger for her.

I can also see where, if someone weren't ready to let Linehan walk them through the Valley of the Shadow this way, they could experience fear and/or anger just thinking about it.

Great observation by Elysium, earlier. It makes perfect sense to me but I don't recall ever seeing it brought up before: Pom, I love you for your honesty and there's no way I'd ever fault you for saying that. Furthermore, I'm almost positive that a good DBT therapist -- OR a good workshop leader -- wouldn't, either.
Connections, connections! Follow the trail! lol Don't look now, but you're doing DBT already

Dare I suggest... that it might be neither with the therapy nor with the woman, but with what you wouldn't want either one to trigger for you right now?