Archive for the ‘BPD Self Help’ Category
Personal Change – Face Your Fears and Gain Control of Your Life
Personal Change and facing your fears to gain control of your life and/or recover or get well from challenges in your life means learning to cope with the process of change and the how to stop fearing your fears. It involves learning how to soothe yourself, be kind to yourself, take good self-care, love yourself, and becoming more aware of how, what, and why you think what you think. What you think creates how you feel. How you feel determines your experience in all areas of your life.
We’re all human and therefore we all have fears. Some of us fear death, others fear being alone, and others fear social situations. If you can think of it, there’s someone somewhere that’s afraid of it. But fear is a normal part of life. It’s what protects us and keeps us safe. There are times, though, when fear can hinder us and stop us from enjoying life and experiencing new joys.
All fears have their roots somewhere inside based upon negative thoughts and association with past experience. It is how you have internalized and perceived those experiences that dictates how much fear you have right now and how you may be doing some extreme things in your life to avoid that fear. Things that really are not healthy and won’t help you but will only cause you more pain and actually increase your over-all negative experience and your fears.
When your fear starts to limit what you do in life, you need to conquer that fear. Does your fear of flying stop you from traveling to visit family members or prevent you from taking the vacation of your dreams?
What about socializing with coworkers after work? Have you turned down social invitations simply because you were anxious about not knowing anyone in the group? If your fears are stopping you from taking advantage of the new opportunities in your life, then it’s time to regain control of your life and disallow your fears from paralyzing you. After all, you can’t live in a bubble! It’s time to start living your life instead of watching life passing you by.
To help you gain control of your life, here are a few tips on how to get over your
fears:
First, identify your fears. Get a piece of paper and write down exactly what you’re afraid of. It doesn’t matter how long the list is, whether it has one thing or 15 things on it. And it doesn’t matter if these fears sound irrational. No one needs to see the list other than you. This is about you taking control and getting over your fears.
Next, figure out why you have the fear. Try to remember a specific incident that might have caused the fear. Maybe your fear of flying intensified because you’ve been on a turbulent flight. Or maybe your fear of dogs stemmed from being bitten as a child.
If you’ve blocked out these memories because they’re too painful to remember, a professional can help you reach those memories and decipher their meaning. A professional can also advise other forms of treatment, such as hypnosis or the emotional freedom technique (EFT).
Now the hard part begins: overcoming or conquering these fears. Be patient and be prepared to do some work because, just as the fear took time to manifest, it will take time to
conquer.
- Personal Change and Coping Audio and Workbook
- Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises – End Negative Thought Patterns
- Developing Self Awareness and Creating Personal Life Change
- A.J. Mahari’s Coaching Guide/Ebook/Workbook – Quest For Self Awareness & Creating Your Story of Success Audio
- LONELINESS – Its Challenges, Lessons, Purpose and Meaning Ebook
- The Power of Gratitude – Nurtures Healing, Recovery, Self Improvement – Ebook and Audio
- The Importance of Observing The Moment Mindfully – Effective ways to Cope with Stress
- Unresolved Abandonment
- 1 – 60 Minute Life Coaching Session
- Audio About Borderline Personality
- Audio For Loved Ones of Someone with Borderline Personality
All content of all Ebooks, Video, Audios, and Workbooks are © A.J. Mahari and Phoenix Rising Publications/Life Coaching
Take Baby Steps
In the movie What About Bob? there was a therapist who had a patient who was afraid of everything. The therapist used the baby step approach with this patient, which simply
means taking small steps, one at a time, to gain more confidence and eventually overcome the fear.
What would your baby steps be? It depends on your fear.
- If you’re afraid of social situations, slowly start going to different events. Start with small groups, perhaps in very open environments, then transition slowly into larger gatherings. The purpose here is to prove to yourself that there’s nothing for you to fear.
- Socialize with a small group of friends you already know. Polish your social skills among people who already know you. You have less to lose and won’t feel as if you must say the right thing at all times.
- If you’re afraid of dogs, take this same approach by visiting a friend who has a dog. Small dogs are much less intimidating (although they might bark more frequently). If your friends don’t have dogs, ask your local vet’s office or animal shelter if you can visit.
- Fear of flying is much more difficult to conquer because of the expense, but you can look into hypnosis. Also, some airports or flight schools might have classes in airplane simulators that help you feel like you’re in an airplane. That type of plan will take more research but will open the world to you.
By facing your fears and finding a way to overcome them, you will open up your life to many more opportunities. Take control of your life and take action and change what has you depressed, change why you aren’t in a relationship or a healthy relationship, change how you feel about yourself and others. Facing fear, in and of itself, is the way to make a new choice for personal change and learning to cope with it today. The only thing there is to truly fear is fear itself. That can take over your life if you let it. If you feel like fear has taken over your life, like you are blocked and stuck and want more out of your life, then it is time to embark on a journey of personal change.
© A.J. Mahari and Phoenix Rising Publications/Life Coaching, February 4, 2012 – All rights reserved.
Thought Changing Affirmations A Major Part of Recovery From Borderline Personality Disorder
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.
Affirmations actually reprogram your thought patterns. They change the way you think and feel about things, and because you have replaced dysfunctional negative beliefs with your own new positive beliefs that will bring positive change naturally as you practice replacing old negative thoughts with new positive ones. This will start to reflect in your external life. You will start to experience seismic changes for the better in many aspects of your life.
Positive affirmations, using them and practicing them, will create permanent change in how you think and therefore in your the way that you experience your life.
READ MORE and Purchase by CLICKING HERE
? A.J. Mahari, May 14, 2011 – All rights reserved.
NAMI Reveals Pharma Funding
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) until recently was reluctant to reveal the source of its funding. But thanks to Sen. Grassley we now can learn NAMI?s sources for Major Foundation and Corporate Support, which you can find here. I downloaded the list of ?funders? for 2009. Fortunately, unlike pharmaceutical companies who have revealed monies paid to physicians (see, for example, ?Transparency Vs. Translucency in Reporting Physician Payments?), NAMI?s numbers are easy to copy into Excel spreadsheets and analyze.
by John Mack Pharma Marketing BlogIn 2009, NAMI received 84 payments over $5,000 from different sources. Payments total $4,737,610.00 of which $3,836,750.00 (81%) came from major pharmaceutical companies. The following pie chart shows how the $3,836,750.00 was divided among major pharma funders (click on the chart for an enlarged view).
The biggest pharma funder in 2009 was AstraZenca (AZ), which donated $1,255,000.00. Recall that AZ is forced to pay about 400X that amount ($520 million) to resolve allegations that it illegally marketed the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel for uses not approved as safe and effective by the Food and Drug Administration (see HHS press release here). I guess you might say AZ got a large NEGATIVE ROI for its NAMI investment!
Lilly was next on the list having donated $750,500.00 to NAMI in 2009. Recall that Lilly markets Cymbalta and that it recently received a warning letter from the FDA about misleading a Cymablta print ad ? ie, re: ?omission of risk information.? Cymbalta is indicated for treatment of depression among many other things these days (see ?The Cymbalta Buzz Machine is at Full Throttle!?).
The third biggest NAMI pharma ?funder? for 2009 was BMS, which donated $506,250.00. Recall that BMS markets the drug Abilify for bipolar disorder. Some time ago, Andy Behrman ? BMS?s patient spokesperson for Abilify ? went on a campaign against the very product he endorsed for money (see ?Andy Behrman, Now an Anti-BMS Spokesperson, Says ?Ask Your Doctor If Abilify is Wrong for You??).
It?s a crazy, crazy world out there in the marketing of mental illness drugs!
BPD Recovery – Finding the Middle
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.
While there are many pieces, steps, and elements of what recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder is and means and how it is achieved, central to the process of BPD recovery is finding the middle.
BPD Recovery – Finding the Middle
This 68 minute audio program gives the listener a lot to think about when it comes to ?borderline focus? and to what the on-going negative impact is to people with Borderline Personality Disorder continuing to try to compare with each other ?what it feels like to have BPD?. A.J. Mahari asks the question, among others, ?Why is it that so many with BPD are so focused on comparing with another how it feels to have BPD and also focused on expecting those who do not have BPD to have any way to truly understand what BPD feels like?? What, if anything does this accomplish? What if anything does this help for those with BPD or their loved ones?
To purchase this audio please CLICK HERE
A.J. Mahari recovered from BPD in 1995, she knows what it takes, how it is done, what it means, and how recovery from BPD is a process that unfolds both uniquely for each individual with it and in some universal ways as well because across the individual differences are the main themes of BPD which are shared by those diagnosed with it. Mahari talks about how and why finding the middle is at the center of the process that is recovery from BPD.
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
BPD is not a Brain Disease and You Can Recover – BPD Memoir and Autobiography
I now have a new site where I will be sharing much more about recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder. This site will include video, audio, blogs, and coming very soon – excerpts from my up-coming memoir about my recovery from BPD in 1995 and my audio autobiography which is a prelude to the memoir in which I share the impacting and noteworthy aspects of my “borderline years” along with some childhood experiences that were central to all that I had to get through in the therapy that was my process of recovery. There is so much hope for BPD recovery – hope that is being negated by systemic stigma and hidden agendas within many areas of the mental health delivery system these days. What do you need to know more about? Why do so many say you can’t recover from Borderline Personality Disorder? Why do they say that? What is BPD really, anyway? Remember, what you think creates your experience, so be very careful about what you think about what BPD is, how it is treated, who knows what, and what causes it and much more.
There is too much being said these days by too many about all that is negative about Borderline Personality Disorder. Too many people focus too much on the stereotypical, limiting, devaluing, pathologizing of human beings who are living their lives with BPD – in an out-of-balance way. That’s not something entirely pathological at all. It is a reactive-response to unaddressed and unhealed woundedness. People with Borderline Personality Disorder are not all the same. People with BPD, especially in a relational context, exhibit what it means to be human in very intense and polarized ways. Not pathological, but out-of-balance ways.
The traits that psychiatry as used to define Borderline Personality Disorder are human traits. How is it that they took what are human traits and twisted them into a pathology that they named Borderline Personality Disorder and then abandoned anyone diagnosed with it saying that you can’t get better. Can’t get better from what? Being human in intensely polarized ways? Say what?
And to further complicate that reality that people with Borderline Personality Disorder can get well, in the last decade or so, now these (not all but a lot) psychiatrists have created, yes created, what is now known as biopsychiatry. Biopsychiatry, essentially came out of what is not being referred to as “the decade of the brain” – the 1990′s. “Decade of the brain” – what? Did the brain need a decade? What does this mean? What was the focus on the brain about and who was doing the focusing? What was the purpose of this focus? These are important questions to keep in mind when you consider what BPD really is versus what biospsychiatry says it is and what that means for recovery and what that means to the process of actual recovery versus being kept stuck in what psychiatrists and the mental profession continue to claim is such “pathology”.
The “decade of the brain” saw many studies be reported, actually, marketed to the public. Studies that made all sorts of claims about Borderline Personality Disorder, and indeed, mental illness generally, as “brain disorder” or “brain disease”. Do you like science fiction? I personally, don’t really. It’s a lot of fantasy and illusion with high-tech special effects. Oh, wait, rather just like the studies of the “decade of the brain” and beyond. What most people don’t know or realize, unless they question the mass-marketing of supposed study-findings that conclude Borderline Personality Disorder is a “brain disorder” is that these studies were largely funded – if not entirely funded – by Big Pharma, mainly in the United States to begin with. The big money of Big Pharma (pharaceutical companies – drug companies) looked for a more effective way to market their products. That’s what is behind biopsychiatry. A “marriage” of sorts between Big Pharma and its marketing machine and big dollars to advertising in all forms of media meets “mental health professionals” who also want to make more money. Where is the actual mental health consumer/client/patient in this “relationship”?
If you believe that biopsychiatry, which is also known as the “medical model of psychiatry”, has the any proof of their claims – claims that they put across about mental illness as a “brain disorder” to sell drugs to people that actually, in the long run, obfuscate recovery and make it more difficult for people thus meaning they will be more reliant on the drugs and the prescribing mental health professionals – I hope you will think again, do some research and do your best not to get caught up in or trapped in their smoke-and-mirror pseduo-science. A “science”, this “brain disorder” junk they say their “studies” back-up as if it were proof when at best it is only theory, if that, takes your humanity out of the equation. It doesn’t look at you, the mental health consumer/client/patient as a whole person at all. But then, should that be surprising given the fact that the traits they list, for example, in the DSM-IV as “pathological” as “mental illness” as “personality disordered traits” are human traits that they themselves have defined as pathology?
You can recover from Borderline Personality Disorder. I did. What can block your ability to get well and to recover is being fooled by biopsychiatry into believing that you have a “brain disorder” and that only those who create the “illness” can cure it. But can they? NO! Do they even try? NO! That’s right – biopsychiatry, largely backed by, created by, and funded by Big Pharma has a different agenda other than treating people with BPD and mental illness – they are serving themselves, not you!
Sound controversial? Sound crazy? Sound impossible? Well, if you want to know more about where I am coming from with this please do visit my newest site at bpdmemoir.com where I will be talking more about recovery and what kind of thinking supports recovery and what kind of thinking will keep you stuck in the pain of Borderline Personality Disorder.
I’ll also be speaking to Loved Ones of those with BPD about what types of misinformation you need to pay more attention to so that you have all the information you need to make decisions in your best interest. Many books in the last few years targeted at BPD Loved Ones, BPD Family members, partners, and ex-partners, co-workers, etc., of those with BPD have mislead you also in terms of this “medical model of BPD” that is really not about supporting wellness or recovery and is more about an industry making money and yes, exploiting people’s pain.
? A.J. Mahari, December 21, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Feeling All Alone ? Borderline Personality Disorder
People diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder often feel all alone. They are often triggered, when relating in various types of relationships and relational dynamics, back to what is their core wound of abandonment. BPD Coach, author, and herself someone who recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder in 1995, A.J. Mahari, talks about how and why people with BPD struggle with feeling all alone – so alone – so often, and what they can do about that. The goal is recovery.
You can become aware of the way to find the road to recovery by being fully present in the moment.
People diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder often feel all alone. They are often triggered, when relating in various types of relationships and relational dynamics, back to what is their core wound of abandonment. BPD Coach, author, and herself someone who recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder in 1995, A.J. Mahari, talks about how and why people with BPD struggle with feeling all alone – so alone – so often, and what they can do about that. The goal is recovery.
You can become aware of the way to find the road to recovery by being fully present in the moment.
The intense and often overwhelmingly sad and empty feeling of loneliness and being alone for those with Borderline Personality Disorder has its roots in a primal disconnect from authentic self.
A self lost to the arrested emotional development that strengthens BPD as one grows up and over those years is giving way, increasingly, to a false self a protective “borderline” false self. People with BPD often have fairly thick layers of defense between themselves and others that are needed to protect them from the emotional battlefield of landmine triggers that are everywhere.
Sadly, for those with BPD, the defense mechanisms that worked in younger years, in childhood, are now more deterimental than helpful. In adulthood they still serve a protective function. However ,they also wall-off the person with BPD from others. They keep the person with BPD stuck inside of what is an empty shell of a lack of self – a rock and a hard place that keeps them stuck the more and the longer they continue to abandon their pain.
Fear of being attached, fear of being connected, fear of abandonment keeps those with BPD walled off, walled in, behind a myriad of defense mechanisms that only perpetuate the false self and widen the gap of disconnection that exists between the borderline and his/her wounded inner-child. The size of that inner-disconnectedness is the measure of one’s outer-disconnectedness which is in direct proportion experienced as feeling alone, being alone, being misunderstood and so forth.
This is the source of feeling so alone, so empty, so unsure of who one is. It is often what drives patterned negative rumination and an out-of-balanced and unhelpful “self-focus. A focus that, in the absence of a known and stable sense of self isn’t connected to the here-and-now. It is a focus that is often perpetuated subconsciously and rather automaticlly serving as a scapegoat, in the absence of being fully connected to your feelings, for what feels like and is perceived (misperceived) as the reason you are alone – why you may believe you aren’t good enough, why you may think and subsequently feel like you are unworthy, helpless, hopeless, and destined to always feel alone in so much pain. This is your abandonment depression and your abandonment fear (Masterson) and the shame of your abandoment pulling you back via triggers, in the here-and-now, to re-experiencing the emotional dysregulation of what I call your unresolved core wound of abandonment. This fear coupled with the actual core wound of abandonment that is what initially required so much defense against, if you have been diagnosed with BPD, still requires incredible defense today unless and until you successfully address this in therapy and/or in working with a BPD Coach like me.
- The Puzzle and Mystery of Hope on the Other Side of BPD
- Inside The Borderline Mind
- The Shame of Abandonment In BPD
- Breaking Free of The Borderline Maze – Recovery For Nons
- Facing the Facts of BPD – On The Other Side For Nons
- Overcoming Denial About BPD and Love
Audio Programs For BPD Loved Ones ? A.J. Mahari
Peeling back the layers of those defense mechanisms, false self defense mechanisms, is necessary, with support, in order to find the road to recovery, get on it, and stay on it. The first step that you can take, right now in this moment, if you haven’t already, is to radically accept where you are right now and all that means for you in your life right now. It is a first step toward accepting yourself as you begin or continue to discover more about who you really are.
Radically accept who you are, where you are right now, with an attitude of gratitude and you will be amazed at how much you can will begin to create much wanted and needed change in how you think and feel in your life. It’s a process. Change is created by increasing your awareness. You can Change Your Thoughts and Change Your Life. Radical acceptance in a mindful way and being present in each unfolding moment is the way to begin to get unstuck.
? A.J. Mahari, December 19, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Borderline Personality Disorder In Men ? The Myth of High/Low Functioning in BPD ? BPD is not a Brain Disorder
Borderline Personality Disorder may still be diagnosed more in women than men. What does this mean? It is unlikely that fewer men have Borderline Personality Disorder. It is likely that the numbers aren?t as skewed as many believe, or as stereotypes and stigma forward. There is a bias among most who diagnosed mental illness. Many men who may in fact have BPD can end up being diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) instead. I have many clients who are men with Borderline Personality Disorder. What is often over-looked is that young children have needs. Needs that must be addressed sufficiently in order for psychologically and spiritually healthy emotional development regardless of gender.
I also think it is high time that we seriously start to do away with labels like ?high functioning borderline? and ?low functioning borderline?. The internet is replete with what is actually the very inaccurate and not at all meaningful labels everywhere, of late, it seems. Ask yourself, what do these sub-labels, if you will, actually mean? How do they help anyone? These labels have their origin with an author who is not a mental health professional. These labels have not been introduced by responsible mental health professionals.
The label of Borderline Personality Disorder, in fact, of ?personality disorder? of any kind has long been debated by those in the anti-psychiatry movement which is made up largely of people who now, in growing numbers, oppose what is known as biopsychiatry and the erroneous forwarding of mental illness generally, and Borderline Personality Disorder, specifically, as ?brain disease? or ?brain disorders?. There is no independent, reliable, scientifically proven or known ?brain disease? for mental illness at all. Studies that are put out by media, some professionals and then quoted by some book authors are not proven and are largely funded by pharmaceutical companies looking to make money off of and by disempowering the mentally ill.
- The Shame of Abandonment in BPD
- From False Self To Authentic Self In BPD ? Getting In Touch With Your Inner Child
- BPD and Abandonment
- Finding Hope From the Polarized Reality of BPD
- Preparing For Recovery From BPD
- Emotion Dysregulation in BPD
- Rage Addiction in Borderline Personality Disorder
Audio Programs ? A.J. Mahari
Whether you are a man or a woman diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, the reality is that you are not character flawed. You are not broken beyond repair, and, you cannot be cured or find recovery by taking dangerous psychiatric medications. Biopsychiatry?s forwarding of these dangerous medications as treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder disempowers those with BPD ? male and female.
As a BPD and Mental Health Coach, and as someone who recovered from BPD 15 years ago, I know that medications are not the answer. No one is held prisioner to BPD by his or her brain ? no one! I recovered and I was not on psychiatric medication. At best there is a combination of some neurobiological issues and environment ? early childhood experiences and perception that set the stage for the arrested psychological, emotional, and spiritual development of those who go on to be diagnosed with BPD. The brain and the mind are not one in the same.
There are many ways to learn how to empower yourself. Take back your own power to find healing, recovery, and wellness. This is what I help my BPD and mental health coaching clients do each and every day. Be careful what you believe. If you think that because the pharmaceutical companies, mainly in the United States, foward the notion of what is really pseudo science, not proven science at all, that BPD is a ?brain thing? please do some more research. Please listen to three professionals that I?ve interviewed on my Psyche Whisperer Radio Show Dr. Niall McLaren, M.D., Dr. John Breeding, Ph.D. and Dr. Dan L. Edmunds founder of the International Center for Humane Psychiatry.
Many people that I coach who have Borderline Personality Disorder, just like the many clients I coach who are loved ones of someone with BPD or partners or ex-partners of someone with BPD, the challenges for all have more in common than more that is wholly different. The challenges of those diagnosed with BPD, male or female, do not include having a ?brain disorder? or ?brain disease?. People who forward this inaccurate information do so to cash in on the disempowering of human beings who look to them for help. Educate yourself about this.
- Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES packaged together with or without audio.
- Non Borderlines ? You can purchase 6 ebooks packaged together with or without audio.
- A.J.?s Audio Program The Shame of Abandonment in BPD
- A.J.?s Audio Programs For Borderlines and Non Borderlines
Life Coaches, BPD and Mental Health Coaches, forwarding the agenda of biopsychiatry are not doing so to truly serve you. You risk being disempowered by these people, whether they are well-meaning or not. In my life coaching practice and philosophy the focus in on empowering the client, and not on forwarding the agenda of any mental health professional or association. Life coaching, BPD and Mental Health Coaching, in my philososphy and practice is not about the methods and means employed by mental health professionals and has nothing to do with the agenda and money-making machine of psychiatry today ? most of which ascribes to biopsychiatry.
Men with Borderline Personality Disorder, like their female counterparts also diagnosed with Borderline Personality are individuals who often have successful careers but great difficulty in interpersonal relationships. There are many ways of being in this world and the black and white definitions that so many use to denote mental illness from mental health are also faulty and self-serving.
There are different levels of functioning in both genders and for many with BPD their are more obstacles to succeeding in work as well as interpersonal relating. There is nothing about this, however, that need be or that can even scientifically (in any proven way) be ascribed to the biology of your brain. Choose to empower yourself and educate yourself about the role of the money-making machine known as Big Pharma and the funding of studies that are being misrepresented as proven science and all of which conclude that men or women with BPD should be medicated and often heavily medicated with dangerous drugs that they don?t give you full disclosure about. It is these drugs that cause chemical imbalances in the brain, not the diagnosis or presense of the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder in your life.
Whether you are male of female recovery is possible. That recovery will hinge upon you educating yourself and freeing yourself from the misinformation of organizations like Nami in the United States who are over 56% funded by Big Pharma. Big Pharma and psychiatric drugs mean big money for many mental health organizations ? claiming to advocate for those they claim to serve. Big pharma means big money for many psychiatrists who practice from the model of biopsychiatry.
Some say there are positives to having Borderline Personality Disorder. I don?t agree. I think that people who are diagnosed with BPD, again whether male or female, have many positive qualities, talents, and passions, not everything about you needs to be attributed, one way or another, to Borderline Personality Disorder. In fact, I would challenge you to re-think how much you relate most things in your life good or bad as having some relation to what it means to have been diagnosed with BPD.
And, I?ll add, are people with BPD really ?too sensitive?? I don?t think so. I think that sensitivity is an individual thing. So is temperament. Psychiatry with the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder labels you, stigmatizes you, de-humanizes and pathologizes your experience in life, and your feelings and to what end? To convince you that you are so ?flawed? and (many still say) beyond help that you need drugs for the rest of your life. NO, you don?t. And that way of treating you is abusive. It is not help. It is not support. It does not contain compassion. It does not recognize you or care at all about who you or what you have experienced in your life.
In my BPD and Mental health Coaching caring about you, having compassion for you, validating your experiences and/or perceptions - your ways of thinking about those experiences, is at the center of the process of the journey of working together to help you to learn skills that will create wellness, enhance the quality of your life and set you squarely on the road to recovery.
? A.J. Mahari, September 26, 2010 ? All rights reserved.
Stop Overreacting ? Effective Strategies For Calming Your Emotions
Tips To Curb Emotional Overreactions
Psyche Whisperer Radio Show Interview
Need Some Help? How to Choose a Counselor
Are you needing some professional help or guidance? Are you feeling stressed out? Perhaps you have been diagnosed with a mental illness and what does that mean?
Before you assume you know or that the diagnosing psychiatrist knows or has your best interests in mind in an ethical way you will benefit from reading this essay by Dr. John Breeding who is a psychologist in practice in Texas.
Biopsychiatry, fronting for the pharmaceutical industry is marketing pseudo-science to you under the guise of it being treatment. Under the guise of being ?treatment? that will help you. Before you get caught up in the medication nightmare of biopsychiatry do your homework and research what?s really going on behind the marketing message of ?studies? that are ?proving? things claimed without actually having proven anything. Advocate for yourself and for your rights as a mental health consumer. Too many people believe the first thing they hear that they think they need and that they think will help them get better, feel better, find their way to wellness. The reality is that, more often than not, that first message you hear may well be the big marketing machine of big pharma that has biopsychiatry as its main advocate and messenger. Marketing, advocates, and messengers that are well paid by pharmaceutical companies. Many mental health professionals, mainly, psychiatrists - biopsychiatrists are not only well-paid in various ways by pharmaceutical companies raising questions about their lack of ethics but they are also paid spokespeople for one or in many cases multiple drug manufactures.
? A.J. Mahari, August 16, 2010 ? All rights reserved.
READ Dr. Breeding?s Essay ?
What is the Story of Your Life With Borderline Personality?
Author, Life Coach, BPD and mental health Coach, asks you to think about this question. What is the story of your life with Borderline Personality? Are you aware of that story? Is it possible that the diagnosis of BPD and the application of the words Borderline Personality to you, in your life, has resulted in more negativity in your thoughts and your experience that has resulted in you being blocked from empowering your own recovery?
The story of Borderline Personality is one that is now being held hostage to biopsychiatry and its oppression. Many people take on the ways that BPD is defined and described as an identity in what is the absence of a known self that creates a need to search for identity from the ashes of a lost authentic self that has been lost to both abandonment and the shame of abandonment.
Borderline Personality, itself, may be a story that has been created for you. That doesn’t mean your experiences aren’t very real – of course, they are. What it means is that the lens through which you have seen yourself, your life, and your relationships, and that you have felt everything so intensely as a result of has put a negative spin on the story of your life in ways that can be shifted. Shifting the paradigm of not only the story but the meaning of Borderline Personality. Shifting the paradigm of Borderline Personality in ways that will render it less and less meaningful. And, in ways that will give you your first lasting taste of freedom from its grips.
- Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises To Change Negative Thinking Patterns
- The Legacy of Abandonment in BPD
- The Abandoned Pain of BPD
- The Shadows and Echoes of Self – The False Self in BPD
- Rage in BPD
In a new BPD Coaching Program Beyond Borderline Personality that I am working with clients with BPD in who want to move beyond BPD and create a life worth living I can support your getting unblocked and teach you skills that will raise your awareness and help you to get to know yourself in new, healthier, and more meaningful ways. I have walked this walk – walked this path, 15 years ago. I can teach you skills and support you as you learn to practice these skills in ways that will help you to embrace the paradox of acceptance and change.
- Borderline Personality Disorder For Beginners
- Finding Hope From The Polarized Reality Of BPD
- Are you Stuck with BPD?
- BPD Triggers – Gateways To Recovery
- Emotional Dysregulation in Borderline Personality
If you are interested in this coaching program, Beyond Borderline Personality please email me with your thoughts about the story that BPD dictates in your life at touchstonecoaching(at)rogers.com. If you would like to blog about your story, the thoughts and the emotions of your story in relation to having been diagnosed with BPD please email me at bpdinsideout(at)yahoo.ca.
I hope you will check back to this site and join me on my Beyond Borderline Personality Facebook Page and on a journey of finding a middle path to a different way of framing what you think about what Borderline Personality is or has meant to you in your life. You can get beyond BPD. I did. You can. You really can. I am going to be sharing much more of just how I did get beyond Borderline Personality and what that means. There is so much I still want to share with you. So much I have to add to the larger converstation out there in the BPD Advocacy world. A world of advocacy that I am somewhat on the sidelines of fundamentally because I do not believe that Borderline Personality is a brain disorder or a brain disease. I do not believe that you will be or have to be stuck with it. Biopsychiatry wants you to need them. Pharmaceutical companies want you to need to purchase their drugs. Both may well lead you to a greater lostness than you already know in your life. That is not how I got beyond BPD. That is not something I view as truth. It is disempowering you, not empowering you. Join me on this journey of learning how you too can move beyond Borderline Personality won’t you?
? A.J. Mahari, August 4, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Dr. John Breeding on Borderline Personality Disorder
My Interview With Dr. John Breeding
on The Psyche Whisperer Radio Show.





