Improving: we have a chat on the calendar, every week, called: Borderline Personality Disorder Support: Positive support for the challenges and successes in living wth this disorder.

I lead it with a topic --usually focused, but open for comments and questions all along the way. It's focused around one idea, or one or two techniques and how those work for us--or how they don't work for us and how we might be able to use part of an idea that others want us to try.

Some of the ideas, in particular, are familiar--but when we've been told them before, or hear other people say them, those ideas and suggestions don't take into account our condition. Other helpful people don't know how debilitating the emotional pain really is, that we are already trying the hardest we can--and now they want us to try something new!--that our emotions most commonly revert to shame, that our triggers are nano-hair triggers (micro-triggers), that we need praise, not bribery; that we need reassurance, not punishment; that we need the helpful person to know how commonly we avoid previously "aversive" experiences (like being asked to do too much too soon, failing, feeling shame and wanting never to go near that technique--and maybe that person--ever again. And we need people to realize that neutral to us...is not neutral. Instead, neutral is almost always interpreted by us as judgmental or untrustworthy, manipulative! It's hard for us to even recognize a comment or a facial expression as neutral--What IS neutral???

So, the environment is ours, the topics are chosen because of our needs--things we borderlines face as borderlines.

The last few chats have been on communication: how screwed up it gets for us, and a couple of ideas about how to get control of that. Ideas that sound simple, but that are incredibly difficult for us--most people would never understand how difficult--because of our heightened emotionality.

When something triggers our emotions, it is incredibly difficult for us to think, right? Many people don't realize how much time we need to be able to get that back, and most people don't realize how much guidance we need in untangling our thoughts so that we can get back on track.

I think of a counselor who was trying to get a depressed patient to write to his son, so that he could re-connect to some sort of community outside of the hospital. She kept asking him how that was going...day after day. She would give him little pointers of things she might say, and so on.............I don't think that works for us. When we're depressed and/or trying to overcome the shame that is an impediment to our even feeling brave enough to reach out in a letter, we're doing well if we can even find the energy to gather an envelope and a stamp. Or find the right pen! And failing in being able to write the letter snowballs for us, and the idea of the letter ends up making us worse!

So. This week's topic may carry over--into our forum, into future weeks. It's "loving ourselves". Because most of us don't. Or, if things are going well, and we're thinking we're pretty cool, we also feel this cliff right behind it--somewhere in the dark, and we might be getting really, really close to it. So, "loving ourselves" is a different topic for us than it is for other people.

All of us have ideas and experiences to contribute to these chats--we help each other with our presence. Just like activity on this forum helps us. The connections we can have with each other make a big difference in my ability to tolerate situations in my life.