[objtrbit]

Hey there,

I'm a student planning to focus on personality disorders once I'm a therapist. I don't like the idea that you guys don't get too much help or turned away a lot, not cool, so I'm wanting to ask a ton of crazy questions to see if I can improve therapies and attitudes. Sometimes I do have crazy ideas, so I would love to bounce them off of you guys and see what you think.

A little info that might help, I donno...I am aiming to have a psychoanalytic/dynamic concentration, and then learn everything else
so my main ideas are gonna center on your past experiences, especially parent or authority figures, and in general I'm honing in on relationship issues-in everyway.

Sooo, to start thing off, thank you for being on PC and giving me this oppurtunity!

Question number one....

In what way do you feel being borderline affects you most?

Thanks, take care,
-obj

[shezbut]

Feeling overwhelmed by my emotions is number one for me.

My moods are extreme, and I have to frequently remind myself that the mood will pass...just keep holding on!

[smileytown]

I feel like I will never connect with anyone and that everyone will leave me, and that I am alone.

[sugahorse1]

I feel I depend on other peopel too much. For love, security, to feel whole... I am just generally insecure in who I am

[yagalada]

I have a pull/push dynamic with people. I really try to pull people toward me because i feel so alone. I'll do anything to get attention when I feel ignored, yet once I get that attention I angrily push it away and isolate again. Then try to pull the same person back in and the cycle keeps going on. I do this not just with intimate relationships but with family, friends and therapists/doctors.

Like many people with BPD, I have other mental health d/o as well. I think this also makes it hard to know what's going on with my behavior. I am also bipolar so sometimes I don't know if me crying at my husband that I want to hurt myself because of something stressing me is a borderline response to stress or if I'm feeling overly stressed because of a bipolar episode. I know labels don't matter all that much, but it can be very confusing to know how to help myself at a given time.

[bpd2]

Uh, from what I've read, psychdynamic/psychoanalytic is not all that helpful for borderlines.......
Also, while past experiences with parent or authority figures is interesting, it's a pretty depressing route for a borderline to go. We have relational conflicts, instability. Period. So when we interact with people in power, not only are we unstable and insecure, but we feel that we are treated unfairly, misunderstood, etc. and the emotions are all heightened because more is at stake.
And, you might do well to look at the biological components of the disorder and neurological characteristics and how therapy might "re-reroute" that wiring, change the pre-fontal lobe--which seems to be susceptible to change through meditation.
We tend to want to blame people a lot. What good does that do? Unless we've actually experienced abuse and need the validation that what we know happened really did happen (even though we've been threatened and warned and so on to believe it didn't). The issues are more our (over?--debatable)-sensitivity, our lack of an intact ego--hence our need to absorb others completely so that we, actually, "use" their egos as our own------so the threat of their leaving isn't just normal grief and loss, it is experienced as a loss of ourselves and leads to a kind of breakdown---and we damn well know it, it hurts like hell, and we will do anything we can to avoid it...........uh...stuff like that.
We can rehearse our pain all you want. But what can you do for us? What are your crazy ideas that you want to try out on us, that we can verify or criticize?
Thanks for wanting to help us, but let's get to it. The DSM will tell you the symptoms, and there are personal accounts to read that give you as good a stories of the inside out experience of the disorder and therapy. There probably aren't any shortcuts you should take...
Valerie Porr's new book--Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder is a good place to start for an idea of what is needed in altering the attitudes toward and treatment of borderlines.
There is more literature about borderline personality disorder than about all of the other personality disorders combined (even though it affects a small percent of people)-because it is the most difficult to treat. So there is information out there.
What we might be able to do for you is give you an opportunity to interact with borderlines--not as a therapist or a student--but as a plain ol' person. That's what therapists are afraid of: the intensity of our interactions (my post is, perhaps, a case in point?). So, the one-way-street-thing is of no interest to me. If you want to practice the "therapist stance" with me, uh....yuck.

[ECHOES]

Just want to pop in and say that I am in psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapy and it's so helpful. Learning where the feelings (that drive the perceptions that drive the behaviors) come from is helpful to me. It isn't enough (for me) to know, for example, that I feel like I lose myself sometimes; understanding where identity issues originate means there is a reason for it happening and it isn't that it's an inherent flaw.
Knowing, another example, that my frustration is out of proportion or over the top isn't enough. Squelching it with tricks doesn't fix it; understanding my fears and what is happening in me when I'm horribly frustrated means that over time, that horrible frustration lessens, because I know what my fears are that kick the frustration up about 2,485 notches.

So, this therapy does help me a lot. I wish so much that I'd been in it when I was much younger, but so glad for having it now

[sneaker_pimpin101]

"In what way do you feel being borderline affects you most?"

I feel that since being diagnosed that I have noticed a lot of instability in my relationships. I have noticed a pattern of becoming overly dramatic when things don't go my way or I am not getting the attention that I feel that I deserve.

In relationships I have noticed that, while I am not the jealous type per se, I am extremely territorial... (not quite sure how to put it). I love wholeheartedly and I expect that love to be returned and when I feel it isn't I can withdraw, feel like love isn't worth it and become depressed.

I have also noticed that I cannot handle stressful situations well, but at the same time I thrive on chaotic situations. Example: I missed a day of school this week. Then I forgot my project the next two days forcing me to do other projects. I needed to get these other two projects done while at the same time finishing my project that was done in class on Monday/Tuesday. On Friday I ended up presenting the finalized project started on Wednesday/Thursday, finishing the project that was done on Monday and finishing the project that was done on Tuesday. All while helping a classmate do her hair (cosmetology school) and having my hair done. I also had my daily lab assignment of cleaning the back room and making sure everything was put away. I felt great by the end of the night. I was also so stressed out and relieved at the same time that I ended up getting into a small spat with my boyfriend over something extremely trivial on the phone.

So while chaos makes me feel alive it also stresses me out and I end up getting overly emotional and take things out of context when I shouldn't.

It makes me feel like I am stuck between a rock and a hard place all the time.

[bpd2]

This sounds like good therapy. The concern with psychodyanamic/psychoanalytic, I think, is that it looks at the ego/id/superego as the source of identity, and events are interpreted in terms of the subconscious. I hope I have that right....maybe I'm off-base on that? So, the problem with that is the location of "conflict within the self" within that construct is that it does locate "issues" within in conflicts. That would be so helpful for abuse situations, when so much is sublimated and made unconscious. The cognitive/behavior group are going after what is in the subconscious--things we can choose to remember. For borderlines, the trend in treatment toward focusing on the conscious and the subconscious seems to be because we improve the more responsible we become for our actions and attitudes--learning to slow down our reactioins so that we have time to make a choice instead of being swept away in our emotions. Also, there's that tricky issues about the brain abnormalities....but, hard saying where those came from--right! I mean, they could have developed because of early psychodynamics, not before them....
I think it is very interesting to try to get to the unconscious, because I am very interested in subtle interpretations. I like the idea as an adjunct to my main therapy, but I'm often wrong in my interpretations myself, and my therapist has been known to be wrong upon occasion as well. I wish there were time to try all the schools. I am certain they all have something to offer. Right now, I glom onto what I can do that gets me past the extreme pain. In the lulls, though, I love thinking about what things might mean and I love insights that come from the contemplation of a much larger picture than the current events of my life--the contemplation of what it is to be human in this culture.

Originally Posted by ECHOES

Just want to pop in and say that I am in psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapy and it's so helpful. Learning where the feelings (that drive the perceptions that drive the behaviors) come from is helpful to me. It isn't enough (for me) to know, for example, that I feel like I lose myself sometimes; understanding where identity issues originate means there is a reason for it happening and it isn't that it's an inherent flaw.
Knowing, another example, that my frustration is out of proportion or over the top isn't enough. Squelching it with tricks doesn't fix it; understanding my fears and what is happening in me when I'm horribly frustrated means that over time, that horrible frustration lessens, because I know what my fears are that kick the frustration up about 2,485 notches.

So, this therapy does help me a lot. I wish so much that I'd been in it when I was much younger, but so glad for having it now

[yagalada]

Originally Posted by bpd2

Right now, I glom onto what I can do that gets me past the extreme pain. In the lulls, though, I love thinking about what things might mean and I love insights that come from the contemplation of a much larger picture than the current events of my life--the contemplation of what it is to be human in this culture.

I love this! I think it describes me and my psychological quest perfectly.

[thetheft]

Basicly, everything BPD has as its symptoms, is what I have to deal with everyday. I brought this up to my therapist but she didnt do anything.
BPD affects me in everyway. My friendships are totally never stable. i used to cut all the time. I always feel lonely and empty, and it makes me feel like no one cares about me, and that everyone who does is just going to leave me because I get so paranoid about it. Its alittle rediculous. I hate it. Its horrible feeling like this.
..i hope this helps?

[objtrbit]

Hi there,

thank you guys so much for your responses; I actually thought this thread was gonna close...I got an email from doc. john saying it's too close to research-understandable...if I had a site like this, I'm not sure I would be wanting peeps to be doing anykind of unsupervised research either. Now though, I feel like a small fish in a huge tank...where the heck are the walls lol. I'm not sure what to do...all the responses you guys gave me all lead to more questions! Not sure what do to do; if nothing else at least a few of you got to talk about the things that bother you most-alwayz fun lol.

thanks though,
take care,
-obj

[skulls_n_rainbows]

Originally Posted by objtrbit

Hey there,

I'm a student planning to focus on personality disorders once I'm a therapist. I don't like the idea that you guys don't get too much help or turned away a lot, not cool, so I'm wanting to ask a ton of crazy questions to see if I can improve therapies and attitudes. Sometimes I do have crazy ideas, so I would love to bounce them off of you guys and see what you think.

A little info that might help, I donno...I am aiming to have a psychoanalytic/dynamic concentration, and then learn everything else
so my main ideas are gonna center on your past experiences, especially parent or authority figures, and in general I'm honing in on relationship issues-in everyway.

Sooo, to start thing off, thank you for being on PC and giving me this oppurtunity!

Question number one....

In what way do you feel being borderline affects you most?

Thanks, take care,
-obj

Relationships with potential boyfriends. It's like a revolving door at times, and when I find a guy that is "good enough" I end up squeezing the fun out it (being clingy) at first and then tend to push them away, as if I'm punishing them for being in my space/ my world. I feel CRAZY and too emotional. It's really frustrating.

[butterfly_wings]

I really identified with smileytown when she said she fears she will never connect with anyone.

My fear is that I will always be empty. That, even if I do achieve anything, it will only have superficial meaning to me. That life is pointless, and I will never be brave enough to break down these defences, and become whole.

[palemoss]

borderline affects my relationships with men; it used to be my girlfriends, but i've been managing my patience with them. as for men, i tend to get pissed off/hurt over the slightest things, and instead of respectfully addressing whatever is causing me "pain," i just split or rage - which usually scares them off!