Archive for the ‘Self Harm’ Category

Power and control struggles are at the heart of much of the relating of those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The underpinnings of BPD are firmly established in dysfunctional and polarized distorted and magical thinking that, in relationships, results in power and control struggles with others.

Often these power and control struggles do not take place on a conscious level. They are rather the by-product of the loss and dissociation from true self that leads those with BPD to feel helpless, powerless, and hopeless ? essentially lost and often very angry about that too.

The reason that so many with BPD feel the need to struggle for power and control stems from what is essentially their trying to live for or through others. The lack of known self drives the kind of projection (the attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others) that blurs the boundaries between where a known self would end and others begin. Without personal boundaries those with BPD often end up feeling helpless when they relate to others because essentially they ascribe everything about how they feel and what they think as taking place in others. (And often what they feel and/or how they may judge others those with BPD then believe that others are judging them.

• 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
• A.J.'s Audio Programs For Non Borderlines

It is this very process of projection that leads to untold feelings of helplessness and varying degrees of experienced regression that leaves many with BPD feeling (on a conscious of sub-conscious level) as if everything in their environment is somehow connected to them. This is the futile defense of narcissism that raises its head when the Borderline without personal boundaries feels literally like they have no emotional skin separating them from others and the world.

What is meant by Power and Control Struggles?

Power, in a paradoxical and healthy environment and personality, is best described as the ability or capacity to perform, behave, or act effectively and appropriately.

The misuse of power that is often seen in those with BPD is usually the borderline over-compensating for feeling powerless or helpless and/or hopeless.

When one feels powerless one then feels that others have power over him or her. This is a distortion which often has its roots in unmet childhood needs generally and an invalidating environment specifically. (Or an environment in which one that is then later diagnosed with BPD experienced and/or perceived invalidation.)

Power that is exercised in a maladaptive and defensive presentation as seen in BPD often results in abuse and punishment, manipulation of others and the environment to try to re-assert a sense of safety and personal control. Personal control can often only be felt to have been regained when one (with BPD) intimidates or exercises control and/or power over another. This is often seen, for example, in the dance of ?get away closer? wherein the Borderline struggles with a desire for closeness and intimacy while feeling annihilated by it at the same time.

This personal control is lacking and that is what causes the borderline to react in ways that are transgressing boundaries and age-appropriate behaviour and causing him or her to overtly or covertly control those around them and the environment.

Power and control struggles of many with BPD are reenactments of very young childhood attempts to individuate that for most with BPD failed (or they didn?t feel, perceive or understand this sense of development) leaving behind enmeshed styles of relating.

Audio Programs For Those With BPD and Loved Ones ? A.J. Mahari

• Emotion Dysregulation in BPD
• 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
• Rage Addiction in Borderline Personality Disorder

Control is really about regulation. Emotional regulation, personal regulation, thought regulation and the ability to be centered and grounded within one?s self. For many with BPD, in the absence of a known authentic self they project most, if not all, of what should be their inner-reality onto those around them. Therefore, when they feel out of control it is others in the environment and/or the environment upon which they exercise the kind of intimidating, invalidating, self-absorbed and often abusive dominance that they need in order to feel that they have protected themselves. What they are actually protecting themselves from in the here and now is the past and is also their own inability to regulate themselves internally.

This control can be insidious. Often is it is presented with the kind of manipulative skill that leaves those around the borderline feeling like they are crazy and confused as to what is actually happening between them and the person with BPD. This can be the case when, for example, someone with BPD self-harms and/or engages in or acts out parasuicide or suicidal ideation or desire which are often a cry for help, attention, and a way of controlling what they feel. (And often those around them whether they realize this or not.) In the long run these types of dominating, controlling behaviour that externalizes the internal chaos of the Borderline on to those around him/her are very distancing to others. Unchecked ?get away closer? usually, at some point, will result in the loss of others around one that is experienced and re-experienced as abandonment by those with BPD.

In order for relating to be healthy each person has to be honest and taking responsibility for his/her behaviour, feelings, and issues.

Philip Kavanaugh, is quoted by James Redfield, in The Celestine Prophecy, Pg 84, as saying, ?The need for control and the addiction quest for dominance is a universal quest aimed at avoiding the inner- void.?

• 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

While this inner-void is likely to some degree felt by all humans who are alive, it is the intensity and unwavering experience and acting out of this experience by those with BPD that make their style of power and control struggles like an addiction onto themselves and so devastatingly divisive, defeating and often abusive.

This inner-void is prominent in most with BPD. (until they receive enough therapy to begin to invest in getting to know who they really are versus just protecting all that they are not.

Those with active BPD are enmeshed. Enmeshed with their pasts. Enmeshed with family of origin issues. Enmeshed with trauma. Enmeshed with all that results when people born with a proclivity toward being very sensitive meets with (what seems like or is) an invalidating environment and/or unregulated emotions projected onto others and for which many with BPD abandon all responsibility.

For many with BPD this void, this lack of a known authentic self, coupled with unresolved abandonment trauma leaves borderlines often reacting in highly sensitive and instense ways. Borderlines often feel the Shame of Abandonment that creates dysregulated emotions that stress them to the point where their first reaction to so many things relationally is rage. Rage is often seen as an abusive effort to control, and while there is this facet to it, borderline rage is much more complicated than that. It is often a protective reaction to thwarted needs, feeling or being rejected, abandoned, or invalidated. It is an emotionally immature response to unresolved abandonment trauma from the past that causes emotional dysregulation in the here and now. This emotional dysregulation fuels the narcissistic and protective borderline false self as it feels out of control and as a result exercises (often) abusive control in an attempt to overcompensate for vulnerability often not realized consciously by those with BPD and for which the borderline lacks the inter-personal skills to cope with.

Those with BPD are enmeshed with others because they lack any known sense of self. This enmeshment is often seen in the projection that those with BPD inflict upon themselves and others. They are essentially so enmeshed with their polarized thoughts, unmet needs, unresolved emotional conflicts that stem from the core wound of abandonment that they can?t see you (other) for who you actually are – as someone separate from them – because they have to see you for who they think they are, or more classically, for who their mother or father was (or abuser was).

Both those diagnosed with BPD and anyone in or who has been in a relationship with them will greatly benefit from gaining as much understanding of
BPD and the Impact of the Core Wound of Abandonment so that they can gain much needed insight and awareness into the power struggles that covertly or overtly are a part of this relational dynamic.

Borderlines (again until they do considerable healing work in therapy) have not individuated. They do not have much, if any, working understanding of the true self within that needs to mature past the point where emotional development was arrested for whatever reasons.

Philip Kavanaugh is quoted by James Redfield, in The Celestine Prophecy, Pg 84, ?Individuation begins when we look inside ourselves for answers when we stop blaming others for our feelings and begin relating to our emotions and intuitions as our teachers?.

In order for anyone diagnosed with BPD to individuate it is essential that he or she learn to take personal responsibility for how they feel, how they think, what works and doesn?t work in his/her life. This process of individuation is a huge part of the maturation beyond arrested emotional development. The kind of arrested emotional development one has experienced and subsequently been stuck in the self-defeating cycle of perpetually.

Healing and recovery from power and control issues demand that those with BPD not only individuate but also take responsibility for choices made. No matter what happens to us in our lives or what needs are or aren?t met, whether or not we are abused and so forth, each one of us has to choose to stop investing in the blaming of others (or blaming ourselves for things we couldn?t control as children) and the continuing to invest in being a victim of our pasts, our parents, our lives, and/or our life circumstances.

• 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 or Non Borderlines
• A.J.'s Audio Programs For Non Borderlines

Power and control struggles are no longer necessary when one actively assumes responsibility for him/herself. What emerges then with an individuated known true self is an open non-polarized thinking person who makes an active choice to mature, to heal, to recover, to learn and grow ? to be open as opposed to the polarized Borderline choice to remain closed and protective seeing and experiencing everything and everyone as threatening. It is these perceptions that cause those with BPD to remain entangled and enmeshed in the power and control struggles that are essentially the roots of normal development throughout childhood to individuate and create and support one?s own true identity.

Power and control struggles and the manipulation and deceit that accompany them will give way to limits and boundaries, goals, known beliefs, ethics, values and choices. This can only happen when those with BPD make the choice to invest in recovery rather than continuing to invest in staying lost, enmeshed, and protective of what is a very self-absorbed and annihilated place and way to be.

Polarized thinking keeps the need for power and control struggles alive also. Learning to think in rational, pragmatic age-appropriate ways that make paradoxical thinking and living possible will extinguish the need to try to have control over anyone but yourself or to try to take power from anyone else.

Power and control struggles are only made necessary in the absence of age-appropriate maturation that is a direct result of the arrested emotional development of those who are diagnosed with BPD. Choice is everything. Choosing to recover must be an active choice to stop engaging in self-absorbed, self-protective regressed behaviour that does not and cannot serve one in adulthood. Power and control struggles are made necessary by the absence of true self and by a lack of boundaries, limits, goals and age-appropriate honest assertion of one?s needs and desires.

? Ms. A.J. Mahari, June 20, 2005 – with an addition July 3, 2008 – All rights reserved.

A.J. Mahari is a Life Coach who, among other things, specializes in working with those with BPD and non borderlines. A.J. has 5 years experience as a Life Coach and has worked with hundreds of clients from all over the world.

Borderline Personality Disorder is a breading ground for self harm. Self mutilation and all forms of self harm make up the borderline language of pain. Cutting, burning, impulsive sex, impulsive shopping, overeating or under eating are all examples of self harm that many with Borderline Personality Disorder engage in.

Click Here To Purchase A.J. Mahari’s 3 Core Wound of Abandonment Ebooks packaged together, with or without audio programs.

To purchase all 3 of A.J. Mahari’s Ebooks for Non Borderlines packaged together with or without audio programs.

You can purchase other ebooks about Borderline Personality Disorder and/or Audio Programs on various aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder by A.J. Mahari as well.

Self-mutilation, for many who have Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), is a learned language of profound pain. It is a primordial scream for help. It is the apex of needing to be heard, validated, and soothed. It is one of the most prolific and anguished expressions of borderline pain. It is self-defeating and holds you hostage to the pain of the false self — to the pain that you can?t heal by further wounding your body and your precious soul.

It has been said by many, borderlines and professionals alike that those with BPD lack emotional skin and are for a myriad of reasons far more sensitive than the general population.

Many with BPD struggle with the intense and unrelenting agony of self-hatred. This self-hatred (false self which has emerged to protect true self) and accompanying pain is more repressed more often than not.

This pain of self-hatred on top of a stockpile of pain generally is way too much pain and is often felt with little to no conscious understanding or awareness of the origin of it. Reasons for the pain may widely vary but clearly most with BPD (until they get sufficient therapy)do not have the skills to apply to the soothing of that pain other than to self-mutilate, act out, or make a whole host of unhealthy choices that while protective are primitive and self-defeating. Choices that keep you stuck and cause people with BPD (and those who love them) more and more pain.

While not all who have BPD cut or burn themselves or harm themselves in other direct ways, most with BPD do engage in harmful behaviour that doesn?t always mean the immediate physical consequence of pain. For example, compulsive overeating, shopping, drinking, drugs and so forth. All of which can be about self-harm but is not self-mutilation though the impetus to engage in these behaviours is largely driven by the same impulses to be soothed and relieved of what hurts, to distract from what hurts, to avoid one?s feelings and are often the result of distorted black-and-white – all-or-nothing thinking.

Those Borderlines who do self-mutilate, however, in more cases than not, find that the need to hurt themselves is not only very impulsive but that it also continues to grow in frequency and severity. Self-mutilating is the way that your body cries in what are unhealthy and unproductive ways to relieve pain, anger and/or rage.

Self-mutilation is all about externalizing your pain. This externalization of pain likely goes back to a time in childhood when a source of great pain to you (from outside of yourself) left you feeling helpless – annihilated – totally shamed. The pain was so great that you couldn’t process it inside or take it inside of yourself because to do so (even if you could have) would have surely meant death. What overwhelms a child in a painful and negative way can seem like a very real impending threat of death.

You can and do need to learn how to deal with it internally and age-appropriately. Your pain is not some monster that sits outside of you waiting to devour you. You pain is a part of you and you can learn to manage it in healthy productive ways.

If you self-mutilate you need to realize that you are doing the best you can. You are responding to what you know feels like an immediate need to rid yourself of any unpleasant to overwhelming or mortally distressful feelings that you do not have the personal skills to cope with or the ability (presently) to tolerate.

For many (as was the case in my experience years ago) it is important and helpful to figure out in therapy why you have not only the feelings that you do but the matching inability or lack of skills to cope with them. However, in some cases, the reasons why are evasive and not known for whatever reasons. If you self-mutilate and/or feel like you hate yourself and you don?t have any conscious idea why it is more important to find the help you need to intervene in your self-destructive behaviour than it is to figure out why. Why may come later. In the meantime though you need to learn how to tolerate the distress you often feel so that you will still be alive to acquire more understanding over time.

You can and do need to learn how to deal with it internally and age-appropriately. Your pain is not some monster that sits outside of you waiting to devour you. You pain is a part of you and you can learn to manage it in healthy productive ways.

If you self-mutilate you need to realize that you are doing the best you can. You are responding to what you know feels like an immediate need to rid yourself of any unpleasant to overwhelming or mortally distressful feelings that you do not have the personal skills to cope with or the ability (presently) to tolerate.

For many (as was the case in my experience years ago) it is important and helpful to figure out in therapy why you have not only the feelings that you do but the matching inability or lack of skills to cope with them. However, in some cases, the reasons why are evasive and not known for whatever reasons. If you self-mutilate and/or feel like you hate yourself and you don?t have any conscious idea why it is more important to find the help you need to intervene in your self-destructive behaviour than it is to figure out why. Why may come later. In the meantime though you need to learn how to tolerate the distress you often feel so that you will still be alive to acquire more understanding over time.

Click Here To Purchase A.J. Mahari’s 3 Core Wound of Abandonment Ebooks packaged together, with or without audio programs.

To purchase all 3 of A.J. Mahari’s Ebooks for Non Borderlines packaged together with or without audio programs.

You can purchase other ebooks about Borderline Personality Disorder and/or Audio Programs on various aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder by A.J. Mahari as well.

What feels so urgently horrific to you emotionally that it causes you such unresolved and repetitive pain or unrelenting pain and leaves you feeling so helpless in the face of your own often alienated feelings causing you to choose to mutilate yourself in the experience of most with BPD is not really about the things that you react to in the here and now?s of your life. While this is what you may tie your feelings, distortions, reactions and fears to with regard to your emotions you are likely carrying a stockpile of unresolved feelings from your childhood that get triggered in the here and now by daily things. Thus what you react to has such a profound intensity.

The first step in dealing with self-mutilating behaviour is to find professional help. This is often very difficult depending upon where you live and how much money you have and then also depending upon the degree to which your local mental health delivery system ostracizes and ascribes to the stigma that borderlines can?t be treated or don?t get better anyway and are more trouble than they are worth. This is not true and don?t let encountering that attitude shame you or keep you from continuing to reach out to get help. Borderlines can and do get better.

That attitude is out there and encountered way too frequently by people with BPD who really need help and who can and will benefit from that help when it is delivered justly, timely, with limits and boundaries, effectively, and non-judgemental way with an attitude of empathy and care and a belief that borderlines can and do get better ? in other words professionally. There are many therapists out there who either specialize in Borderline Personality Disorder, or who know enough about it to be able to effectively treat it. Many work very hard. I personally was very lucky in my therapy travels years ago. I don?t want to lump all therapists together. So, keeping that in mind, search until you find someone and/or the information (books, self-help) that you need to learn the skills necessary to cope with your feelings and to tolerate the distress you will feel as you transition from cutting and burning (etc) to feeling and dealing with your emotions.

Self-mutilation is chosen behaviour. You have chosen it to help you because you don?t feel competent to do anything else emotionally and/or you don?t have the developmental tools that others have that helps them to cope with life in age-appropriate and healthy non-destructive ways. Don?t be hard on yourself about that.

he catch-22 to stopping self-mutilating behaviour is that while you use this method of coping with your emotions, feelings, cognitively-distorted thoughts and stress you will initially encounter a new type of formidable stress in making new choices. I have done it. It has been done. Many have done it. Know that you too can do it.

Every time you cut or burn yourself you would be better served by crying. You need to cry. You need to feel. You need to tolerate what you feel. I get it that feeling for you feels more stressful and scary and overwhelming than cutting yourself and bleeding. However, the pain and the feelings that feel so huge to you and leave you feeling so small, so young, so out of control, so helpless, so intolerably vulnerable ? feelings that feel like you will just DIE if you feel them ? have their hold on you from your past and have that intensity based upon what you experienced as a child or young teen when you didn?t even have the myriad of choices available to you that are available to you now, as an adult.

If you were sexually abused, then it makes it clearer why you feel as you do. What we know about people who have been sexually abused as children is that it has very personality-changing effects. Trauma in the developmental years can and often does even change brain chemistry. The trauma of incest or being abused in other ways, of being neglected, of growing up without having your physical and psychosocial needs met and/or attempting to mature in an invalidating environment all cause us as children to stop developing emotionally. This is the case when you have BPD. You are stuck in some developmental stage. You have not fully matured emotionally. You can still mature emotionally. You really can.

For those who have been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and who weren?t sexually abused, otherwise abused, neglected or invalidated, or who presently don?t remember any abuse, and who find themselves with no emotional skin and the need, urges, and impulses to cut, burn, or in any other way harm themselves, perception is everything.

Sometimes, for reasons that may or may not be understood, those with BPD, perceive things differently from how they actually are occurring in the shared collective reality of a family for example. This does not mean that what you perceived and experienced differently from say your siblings, for example, means that your experience is weird or nuts and that you are crazy — NO! It means that you had a different experience were more sensitive and your perceptions and experience were very real to you. You need to validate yourself and your experience and have a therapist help you in that process and perhaps the process of being re-parented in a way that teaches you now how to re-parent yourself to meet the needs that you didn?t have met or didn?t experience as being met.

If you self-mutilate or harm yourself in any way to avoid your feelings ask yourself why you feel that you deserve to hurt even more by inflicting pain and wounds on your body. You don?t deserve this at all. You really don?t. You are trapped in a cycle of distorted thinking and fear of feeling and being exposed, a cycle of shame that can be stopped in its tracks when you choose to make new choices. Sounds simple and trite I?m sure. It?s not simple at all ? I know ? I?ve been there. I?ve done it though. I?ve stopped harming myself and made new choices. I?ve learned the skills that I didn?t have the opportunity to learn growing up. I?ve re-parented myself. I believe in myself and I trust myself. In fact, I love myself now. If I can do it so can you!

Self Mutilation is a Borderline language of pain. It is choosing to allow your body to cry for you. It may relieve stress and distress and momentarily feel like a high and/or give you the feeling of great relief but the very minute you hurt yourself to help yourself you set yourself back up to repeat the cycle again. Your abusing your body is taking on the role of your abuser if you were abused. It is becoming an abuser to yourself if you weren?t abused. It will only perpetuate any self-hatred that you feel. It is a self-defeating cycle that truly only adds to your pain in the long run. Momentary relief is not worth the damage that you continue to do to yourself, not only physically, but emotionally as well. You need to value yourself enough to learn how to tolerate what hurts long enough to heal it.

Self Mutilation is a Borderline language of pain. It is a learned language of pain. It is a vehicle of expression. It hurts you even more. You can learn to express your pain in a healthier and truly emotional language ? tears and words spoken that do not have to hold you hostage to the language of Borderline fear and shame. Your true self does not require or aspire to the drama of the tortured and pathologically protective false self.

As long as you continue to hurt yourself in all your best efforts to help yourself you will hold yourself hostage to the very pain you are so desperately trying not to feel. This means that you are making sure, each time you self-harm, that you will feel this pain, again and again.

You cannot heal this addicting pain that you cut or burn or otherwise harm yourself in order to avoid as long as you are stuck in this self-abusing cycle. In fact, your self-abuse is just calling to yourself more and more pain each and every time you hurt yourself.

You cannot heal by further wounding your body, your psyche and your precious soul.

? Ms. A.J. Mahari, April 21, 2005