Archive for the ‘BPD and Recovery’ Category

BPD Coach and Peer-Therapist, A.J. Mahari, who recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder in 1995, has a new website that focuses on holistic and alternative as well as some aspects of traditional treatment for BPD. Mahari was the child and later the adult-child of 2 Borderline Parents. She is the Ex of person with BPD/NPD that she was in a relationship with and that she ended and then had to recover from as an Ex-Partner of someone with BPD/NPD, years after her recovery. She has been coaching clients since 2000.

• 3 Non Borderline Ebooks
• 6 Non Borderline Ebooks
• 5 Core Wound of Abandonment in BPD Series of Ebooks
• Inside The Borderline Mind For BPD Loved Ones
• 3 Audio Bundle for BPD Loved Ones

Treatment for Borderline Personality needs to be holistic, can be alternative to traditional psychotherapy or in tandem with it, and need not include dangerous and highly ineffective psychiatric drugs. In fact, it is the psychiatric drugs, not mental illness, that causes a “chemical imbalance” in the brain and that can have other dangerous to lethal side-effects.

Resistance to treatment in Borderline Personality Disorder is very common. There can be as many reasons for this resistance to treatment on the part of people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) as there are individuals with BPD. As someone who recovered from BPD in 1995 I can honestly say that knowing what that resistance is about from the inside out because, I too, often, in the process of my recovery, when I was in therapy, would present resistance and defense that blocked my learning, gaining insight, awareness, and my taking personal responsibility.

One of the biggest issues of resisting treatment in those with Borderline Personality Disorder, which I also had to work through in my own recovery, has to with the rigid all-or-nothing black-and-white thinking patterns which are largely negative, caused by and built on by the maladpative defenses created by the Borderline False Self that are the legacy of the Core Wound of Abandonment in Borderline Personality Disorder.

Another major reason for resistance in treatment for people with Borderline Personality has a lot to do with the dissociative nature and the reality of triggers. Triggers which cause the re-experience of emotional dysregulation that is intense and overwhelming that most with BPD are unable to cope effectively with until they actually get enough treatment to learn how to cope – treatment that is often blocked by fear, negative thinking, resistance, fear of triggers, shame fear of abandonment and the maladaptive coping mechanisms built up over the course of life of the person with BPD. The major challenge of the reality that people with Borderline Personality, often consciously unaware of what they are actually thinking that leads to their intense feelings, are often trying to escape those feelings at all costs. Magical thinking, believing that what one feels is really real and what is, along with not being aware of the cognitive disortions in thinking that are causing their feelings most with untreated Borderline Personality end up feeling helpless and hopeless and can’t cope with those feelings either. What anyone with Borderline Personality will greatly benefit from is learning to become more aware of his/her thoughts and way of thinking and then engaging in some process of treatment that helps them learn to Change Thoughts and Change Their Feelings and gain new healthier perspectives on their styles of relating to self and to others.

There is often both a strong desire to get out of the pain that is experienced when one has Borderline Personality and an equally strong need to protect against the very treatment process being undertaken to create relief, to build coping skills, and to find the lost authentic self. I, as a BPD Coach and Peer-therapist who has been there, from the inside out, totally understand this duality. It is not a duality that most with BPD can be fully aware of in the beginning of treatment or coaching with me or any therapist for that matter. I do, however, have a specific methodology of working to help people with BPD with is very crucial paradox of desire to get well and the need to block that process which presents as resistance to treatment. I have developed this methodology from my own experience of this very painful and primal struggle that I too have been through and that I was able to get beyond to recover from BPD.

People with Borderline Personality will benefit from gaining more awareness about what is required in the first steps of recovery from BPD and from learning more about how to begin to find Hope for relief from pain and for recovery.

For so many who seek treatment with BPD it is this resistance paradox that both sees therapists (mental health professionals of all different disciplines) often give up on patients or clients with BPD or get stuck in their own frustration and counter-transference with the Borderline client, over-medicate them, and/or simply refuse to treat them any longer. It is also this Borderline resistance paradox that is not well understood by those who have never been where I have been, had BPD and made it all the way through to recovery – all the way back to know what this paradox actually is, to identify it as I have done and to then figure out how to work with people with BPD without allowing frustration to interfere with compassionate care and a dedication to loyal supportive and validating continued work with BPD clients.

This resistance paradox is very confusing and not well understood by many with BPD who seek treatment and then feel failed by therapist after therapist. It is also a method of self-sabotage on the part of those with BPD though it rarely is a very conscious process.

I have learned in the last 11 years of my work as a BPD Coach and Peer-Therapist with thousands of BPD clients that it is crucial to understand and to know how to support clients though this resistance paradox because treatment no matter the methods or modality or combination of said cannot be successful without this paradox. This paradox is a part of the process of unwinding the defense mechanisms of Borderline Personality Disorder which is one key part of the recovery process and which borderlines resist the most out of fear and mistrust and an inability to cope emotionally. It can be for some the most formidable aspect of treatment and often what drives them out of treatment that fastest.

This is why I believe it is so important for people with BPD to come to understand what this resistance paradox in BPD represents, why it happens, and with my clients, in the way that I work to treat and coach those with BPD to wellness and recovery it can be a central and on-going theme that must be re-visited many times over. I don’t see this as a negative or a reason to give up on someone. I see this as a natural part of the process of what it truly takes to recover from the actual cause of Borderline Personality Disorder because it is not a “brain disorder” or a “chemical imblance” in the brain and it cannot be cured with any medication. Psychiatric medication is not the answer to recovery from Borderline Personality. I will have an in depth audio available soon at Phoenix Rising Publications about this treatment resistence paradox in and of itself as well.

© A.J. Mahari, January 12, 2012 – All rights reserved.

Price: $30.99

Please click on this link to purchase this package, 1 Video, 2 Tracks Audio, and a 20 page Workbook about the
Inner Child and BPD Recovery

© A.J. Mahari, December 12, 2011 – All rights reserved.

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BPD Coach A.J. Mahari, in this 1 hour and 47 minute audio talks about the first steps in recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder. The first steps that are key to getting on the road to what makes recovery possible. There are two very formidable beginning steps that pave that way for the climbing of the mountain that is recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder.

This audio also comes with a PDF Journal and Thought Record Exercise to help you examine what you are thinking and believing about the first steps of recovery from BPD.

You can empower yourself today by becoming more aware of these steps and by being willing to take action on them in your life. Recovery from BPD is so very possible but you have to do your part and you cannot be rescued, but you can be supported, validated, taught, and educated along the way that is the process of recovery from BPD.

However, without these first two steps, the beginning steps to get on that pathway, without learning more about what they are and how to implement these steps you may well remained blocked in the pain and suffering along with the confusion and woundedness of Borderline Personality Disorder.

A.J. Mahari recovered from BPD in 1995 and she knows what that process entails. Despite individual differences or different therapy approaches, notwithstanding that Mahari does not support the notion of BPD as a “brain disorder” that requires psychiatric medication – she was not on psychiatric medication before, during, or after her recovery from BPD – there are so many common steps that need to be taken to be able to actually recover. Mahari’s recovery does not involve symptom management. She is and has been BPD-free for 16 years and so too can you be.

To purchase this audio please CLICK HERE

© A.J. Mahari, December 11, 2011 – All rights reserved.

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Life Coach, BPD/Mental Health and Self Improvement Coach, A.J. Mahari has a 63 minute audio available called, Embrace Mistakes & Roadblocks – Learn To Overcome Challenges in Your Life .

Designed to help you to learn more about effective coping with change, growth, and continue self improvement as well as changing worry, anxiety, and depression, into goal-setting, task setting, journaling, to learn and grow in ways that will create more opportunities for you to identify and achieve your goals.

We really do create our reality by how we think. Learn how to change negative self-talk into positive self-talk and negative thoughts into positive thoughts so that you can learn to ask yourself the questions that will help you gain awareness and confidence in facing whatever is challenging you in your life.

Even if you have Borderline Personality Disorder, are in recovery from Sexual Abuse, or depression, anxiety, other forms of mental illness or just wanting to know more about yourself and what you want in your life this audio will inform and inspire you to empower yourself to get into action and create the change you want and need in your life.

To purchase this audio and the worksheets and checklist please CLICK HERE

                         This audio also includes with it an overcome your challenges checklist and worksheets PDF’s.

© A.J. Mahari, December 4, 2011 – All rights reserved.

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It is very important to remember that study results are just that – results based on the sujbects studies and results can be skewed, manipulated, and misinterpreted. Even if somewhat accurate and I think to be more sure of what they claim they need much wider numbers of study subjects, what a study finds does not necessarily make it so in everyone’s experience. If you haven’t been studied how do you know if you would have fit the conclusions of any give study.

What is first troubling to me about this study is that the term “remit” is used. What is meant by that? If you have Borderline Personality Disorder, they still don’t want to tell you what getting well really is and means. “Remit”, in my opinion, is some next-t0-meaningless term. There are more people writing books and some professionals, albeit in vague language talking about recovery from BPD being much more possible now. Yet they continue to use a word like “remit”. I know myself, I recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder in 1995 and it had nothing to do with remission. I also don’t agree that I had “lingering social functioning”. What do they even mean by that. I think there is a distinction to be made here between what they, Gunderson et al, mean by “remit” versus what I know and mean recovery actually is having achieved it and lived it all these years.

From the study: “Symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD) often remit over a 10-year period, but patients continue to experience severe and persistent impairment in social functioning.

That was the finding from a follow-up of patients with BPD in the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study, a report of which appears in the August Archives of General Psychiatry. The analysis found that the 10-year course of BPD is characterized by high rates of remission, low rates of relapse, but severe impairment in social functioning.

The report extends and confirms previous reports about the long-term course of BPD, which have suggested that therapies for the disorder tend to work well for the most acute symptoms—such as self-harm and emotional dysregulation—but do little to address impairments in social functioning.”

Firstly, I take issue with the idea that BPD symptoms just remit. As if they just get better without treatment. If some traits or symptoms can get somewhat  better for some people over time without the process and work of therapy and/or BPD Coaching with someone like myself, then I can see that other issues would remain because the underlying unfinished and unhealed and unaddressed childhood woundedness of abandonment that results from insecure bonding, unmet needs, and/or neglect, abuse, and trauma, and that causes emotional arrested development would remain untouched and would still be actively in play. So, this remission sounds rather surface. Also, in my over 10+ years as a BPD Coach it has not been my experience that people with BPD report to me that as they get older they experience any such remission. In fact, quite the opposite. BPD, left unaddressed and untreated usually worsens for those diagnosed with it as they get older. I have, and have had, many clients with BPD well into their 40′s, 50′s, 60′s and beyond that report getting worse – not better. Where’s the remission? I hope they aren’t basing this notion of remission on the “biology of BPD” because as many professionals also argue, not just my personal opinion, BPD has but a biological component but is not a biological disorder or a brain disorder. It is a psychological disorder born out of early childhood woundedness and therefore there can be no miracle of aging that shifts biology enough to “remit” the symptoms of BPD without treatment and/or coaching. It doesn’t make sense.

So they claim that the “report extends and confirms previous reports about the long-term course of BPD…” If one is give adequate and competent knowledgeable and comprehensive treatment (and this can be received via my BPD Coaching in and of itself or in tandem with therapy as well) to people with Borderline Personality Disorder it will help them make tremendous strides and shifts in much more than “acute symptoms – such as self-harm and emotional dysregulation” which equally means increasing awareness, shifting, changing, and healing in social functioning and relating to one self and to others.

Is it just me, or do you notice how little sense many of these studies actually make. Where’s the actual proof in the pudding? There really isn’t any because of the nature of and often biased agenda of most studies in the first place. There is no there, there. Publishing this study, in my estimation, like so many others, seems to be an attempt at justifying psychiatry and at maintaining its ever-growing (biopsychiatry) strangle-hold on the hopes of those with BPD that they can actually recover.

I do not find, from my own recovery experience, or the recovery process of my clients, that what this study says is accurate at all. It doesn’t connect the dots. It isn’t logically cogent. One point does not logically follow or fit with the next point and the fact that it begins with the idea of BPD as something that will remit in time, versus the reality that BPD can be recovered from with the expert and effective BPD Coaching like I offer and/or competent therapy with a therapist that is an expert in BPD and that believes you can get well wreaks of Big Pharma’s behind most studies agenda. It seems to send out a truly unproven conclusion – BPD will remit in 10 years – and also it seems to simply ignore what recovery from BPD really is, means, and entails.

I can assure you that in my 16 years of having been recovered from BPD, a) It has nothing to do with remission b) underlying aspects of BPD do not exist in my life and this can be proven and has been substantiated in my case right down to the biological level and I certainly have not contined post-recovery to experience “impaired social functioning”. This type of “science” which really isn’t definitive at all continues to be churned out by professionals as justification for what? Do they know what they are really doing? Can they even begin to contemplate a recovery model for BPD when it seems they are too interested in Big Pharma money? Psychiatric drugs aren’t helping people with BPD find a way to have symptoms remit or helping them recover – quite the opposite they are holding them hostage to biospychiatry and intense on-going pain and suffering that is the result of Big Pharma and its biopsychiatrists working in tandem to hold people with BPD hostage to BPD – not help them recover.

More of us that  have recovered, we are the experts in what that means and how it is achieved – NOT the professionals who either have never had BPD or the ones who still have it and don’t even get treated or recover themselves.

Beware of money-making political footballs in mental health and don’t believe every (or really any) study that you read. They are self-serving documents by professionals and for professionals. They do not have the best interests or the actual reality, and hope for recovery of those with BPD at heart or in mind.

By the way the professsionals that disagree wtih the biology ie – “brain disorder” biopsychiatry notion of BPD and there are many, such as Dr. John Breeding, Dr. Niall McLaren and Dr. Dan L. Edmunds to name a few, have a very difficult time often just getting their work published. The professional journals don’t publish them because they are not truly really scientific. Science requires scrutiny, evidence, to be tested and re-tested in ways that replicate similar evidence. By denying those professionals that diagree with many of these studies and the geneisis of them even having the opportunity to question and debate the science of or methodology for these studies one can only conclude that these studies are being insolated from the regular avenues of real science because they won’t be able to be replicated or proven upon scrutiny and because they are in fact pseudo-science to begin with. They are simply not reliable or provable.

It is so important to remember that psychiatry knows much less than it lets on. Stop just trusting a psychiatrist because he is one. What does it mean in this Big Pharma psychiatric medication pushing world? What can it possibly mean beyond the control psychiatrists seek to have over the masses to market their medication to and make money from? It is not a system or a profession that truly has the humanity, and the actual getting well of those with Borderline Personality Disorder at the heart of its agenda. In fact, is that even a part of that profession’s agenda? They perpetuate the negative and continue to refuse to explain or map out recovery or even lend it credibility by continually firing out these “studies”. Studies are just not proven science. At best they are theories floated out there with power, lack of ethics, and often hidden agendas attached.

© A.J. Mahari, December 4, 2011 – All rights (except quotes from study) reserved.

Source of Study: Psychiatric News | October 07, 2011
Volume 46 Number 19 page 19-25
© American Psychiatric Association
Clinical and Research News
Written by Mark Moran

Ten-Year Course of Borderline Personality Disorder: Psychopathology and Function From the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study

Life Coach, BPD/Mental Health and Self Improvement Coach, A.J. Mahari in this original Radical Acceptance Meditative Practice audio for people with Borderline Personality Disorder offers an unique and practical way to actually begin or continue to practice radical acceptance while learning how to build some new coping skills that will help people with BPD take breaks from the pain, negativity, suffering, rage, and emotional dysregulation and reactivity that is at the heart of so much of their daily experience.

This skill-building audio is one hour and 35 minutes long and offers those with Borderline Personality Disorder an effective way to learn how to take a break from the rigors of all that BPD manifests in their lives. It is meant to be a Radical Acceptance Meditative Practice audio that you can do daily and that will help you to begin to experience the empowerment of radical acceptance and how it can provide you with positive, healthy, healing, ways to begin to create worth and a safe place inside that, with practice, will be a place that you can call on or retreat to when triggered as you continue to listen to the audio and build your radical acceptance practice.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

© A.J. Mahari, November 13, 2011 – All rights reserved.

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People diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder do not know who they are. The arrested emotional development in the early stages of early childhood development that is suffered and that persists in life until and unless it is addressed, re-felt, integrated, and healed, keeps those with BPD from having any real known identity. This lack of identity, along with a very unstable sense of self, if one has much of any sense of self, contributes to too many people with BPD taking on this disorder, their woundedness as if it were an identity. This is the false self that is being lived through in very painful ways in the absence of an authentic identity that is lost in early childhood to unmet needs and the abandonment wound, abandonment fear, and abandonment depressions as Masterson writes about in his books based upon his years of trying to treat people with BPD. In this audio, BPD Coach and recovered borderline, A.J. Mahari, talks about the need for those with BPD to stop allowing their lack of identity to be defined by Borderline Personality and how it is possible to find your lost authentic self and along with it your true identity and to build a strong foundation of a stable sense of self on the road to recovery from BPD.

This audio includes 2 tracks and is 80 minutes long. You can purchase this audio by clicking on the picture.

© A.J. Mahari, November 9, 2011 – All rights reserved.

Author, Life Coach, BPD/Mental Health and Self Improvement Coach, A.J. Mahari now has her Thought Changing Affirmations Handbooks 5 Volume Set available. Through the use of these positive affirmations, one a day, or one a week, you can learn to change your negative painful thoughts into more positive pain-neutral and/or happy contented thoughts. Whatever the mind can conceive it can achieve. If you want and need to stop suffering and to experience more peace, more calm, less to eventually no emotional dysregulation in your life than Mahari's 5 Volume Set of Changing Your Thought Positive Affirmation Handbooks will be invaluable to you in your recovery process. A natural way to help empower your own recovery. A natural way that you have control over to change your negative thoughts into positive ones. You will feel so much better about yourself. Thoughts define our experience. What you think really controls what you experience, your pain, difficulty in relating to others, in relationships, in knowing who you are and so much more. It is all generated by the rigid thought patterns you've built up from a very young age and added to over the years. Affirmations might sound silly, or hardly like a hopeful solution to improve the quality of your life, but take it from Mahari who not only knows this and witnesses incredible change in the clients she coaches but she knows this first hand having recovered from BPD in 1995.

You can use these "Positive Affirmations" – short positive statements targeted at a specific subconscious set of beliefs – to challenge and undermine negative beliefs and to replace them with positive self-nurturing beliefs. How we think creates our experience. If you are thinking largely negatively you will create and perceive your life experience through a negative lens. If you are thinking more positively the exact opposite will manifest in your life – your thoughts, experience, relationships, and your over-all life experience.

READ MORE and Purchase by CLICKING HERE

  ? A.J. Mahari, May 14, 2011 – All rights reserved.    

Borderline Personality Disorder is not a ?brain disease?. You can recover from Borderline Personality Disorder like I did. A.J. Mahari has a new audio out that features some of her experience from her own recovery as to what can keep people stuck and blocked from recovery and what is the focus, the way, and the direction to open to the process that makes recovery possible.

This Audio Program includes two tracks:

Track One: The Obsession With How BPD Feels ? It adds to suffering and keeps people stuck in BPD
Track Two: Re-Focusing on the Search For the Middle ? Opening to what the process of recovery entails

? A.J. Mahari, January 22, 2011 ? All rights reserved.

To purchase this audio please CLICK HERE