Archive for the ‘Inside BPD’ Category

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.

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Loved ones, family members, partners or ex-partners of those with Borderline Personality Disorder are often confused, in pain, and struggling to cope with a loved one with BPD. Life Coach, BPD and Mental Health Coach A.J. Mahari was interviewed on the healthyplace.com Mental Health TV Show on the subject of BPD Loved ones and Coping with someone in your life with BPD. This interview has been broken up into three parts to fit on youtube. You can watch the there excerpts of this interview below or by going to my YouTube Channel

• The Puzzle and Mystery of Hope on the Other Side of BPDli>
• 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 Loved Ones of BPD © A.J. Mahari

• Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES or 3 Non Borderline Ebooks packaged together with audio.
• Purchase all 5 Core Wound of Abandonment in BPD ebooks
• Non Borderlines – You can purchase 6 ebooks packaged together without audio or 6 ebooks bundled together with 2 audio programs 6 ebooks packaged together with 2 audio programs
• Those with BPD and/or Non Borderlines can purchase A.J. Mahari’s 3 “Core Wound of Abandonment” series ebooks or Mahari’s 3 “Core Wound of Abandonment” series ebooks with From False Self To Authentic Self In BPD – The Inner Chid Audio Program

• 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

Please be sure to visit healthyplace.com where they now feature blogs including one written by someone with Borderline Personality Disorder.

&copy A.J. Mahari

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.

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Tips To Curb Emotional Overreactions

Psyche Whisperer Radio Show Interview

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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 compaines 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 …

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Are you normal? Do the concepts of Mental Health and Mental Illness serve any purpose other than to divide people arbitrarily and cause people shame that alienates them from themselves? Does psychiatry today, and more specifically biopsychiatry even believe that anyone is or can be normal? What is normal? Many argue that biopsychiatry – the direction the psychiatric profession is taking in defining mental illlness as “brain disorder” or “brain disease” and then seeking to treat it with all kinds of medications, many that do way more harm than good, is predicated on labeling almost everyone with something which calls into question just what disordered means.

Dr. John Breeding Ph.D. was my guest on The Psyche Whisperer Radio Show, Wednesday August 4th, live at 3pm EST. You can now listen to the archived interview here. Dr. Breeding talked about, among other things, psychiatric oppression and what mental health consumers really do need to know and think more about when it comes to what mental illness is and how it can be most effectively treated and coped with if it even is what it is thought by so many people to be. What are the implications of biopsychiatry for people given the label and diagnosis  of Borderline Personality Disorder?

LISTEN HERE

The Psyche Whisperer Radio Show & A.J. Mahari – All rights reserved.

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On Tuesday August 3, 2010, at 7pm EST, on the Psyche Whisperer Radio Show Life and Mental Health Coach, A.J. Mahari, will be interviewing Letricia Hendrix who is the author of  “Behind our Faces: Thoughts and Reasonings of Suicide”. In her book,  Letricia Hendrix writes about her own experience with clinical depression and being suicidal. She writes about how no one is really alone with these feelings – how you don’t have to be alone with these feelings. She also writes about hope and also focuses on how the ways that we treat each other can often have a profoundly negative impact on people and for some, to the point where they feel so bad about themselves, they just want to die. The author also stresses that many people with clinical depression who may not understand what they are feeling and why often think that the “problem” is everyone else and aren’t aware of how they feel or why they feel what they do.

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© A.J. Mahari & The Psyche Whisperer Radio Show, August 2, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Is it possible to get beyond Borderline Personality? What does that even mean? Am I just aiming this at people diagnosed with Borderline Personality? No! It is possible to get on the path that is the journey beyond borderline personality if you’ve been diagnosed it with – there is hope for recovery and all that means and more. It is also possible to get on the path that is the journey beyond borderline personality if you are a loved one of someone diagnosed with BPD.

Want to know more? CLICK HERE

©  A.J. Mahari, July 24, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Have you heard that mental illness, according to some in the profession of psychiatry (mainly in the United States) is “brain disease”? What do you think? Is it a coincidence that many studies aiding in these theories of what is known as biopsychiatry are being made on the basis of the outcomes of studies that are largely funded by pharmaceutical companies in the United States? Do you think that all psychiatrists or even all psychologists agree with this un-proven conclusion? Many do  not agree. One very well known opponent of his own profession’s all-too-common practice in recent years is Australian psychiatrist, Dr. Niall (Jock) McLaren. On Friday July 23, 2010, 7pm EST on The Psyche Whisperer Radio Show on blogtalkradio, A.J. Mahari will interview Dr. McLaren on this topic and talk to him about the two books he’s authored and the very courageous stance he has taken that has not left him popular in the profession of psychiatry.

Niall (Jock) McLaren, MD, is an Australian psychiatrist, author and theoretician. His work opposes the mainstream view in psychiatry to the extent that he argues modern psychiatry has no scientific basis whatsoever. However, he insists that he is not “anti-psychiatry,” but a committed scientist following his duty of criticizing the prevailing models in his field in order to improve it. He is the author of the two books, Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences. 2007; and Humanizing Psychiatry: The Biocognitive Model. 2009. He is working on another book due out later this year.

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© A.J. Mahari and The Psyche Whisperer Radio show

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Author, Life Coach, Mental Health and BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari has written 6 Books specifically about Borderline Personality Disorder and 4 Books specifically for Loved Ones about Borderline Personality Disorder.

A.J. Mahari has also written and narrated 12 Audio Programs about Borderline Personality Disorder, along with 4 Audios about BPD Recovery and 13 Audio Programs specifically for Loved ones with someone with BPD in (or who was in) their lives.

A.J. Mahari also has Books and Audios about various topics under the category of Self Help that can be of help to those with BPD and/or to their loved ones as well.

You can also purchase coaching sessions with A.J. Mahari

© Phoenix Rising Publications and Touchstone Life Coaching Services – All rights reserved.

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