Archive for the ‘News’ Category

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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Posted By GRANT LAFLECHE, SUN MEDIA

The state of children’s mental health programs in Ontario is in decline, according to a new report by the Canadian Pediatric Society.

The report on public policy and children, released Tuesday, says funding for mental health programs for children and youth has shrunk over the last two years.

At the same time, the number of mental health cases among youth is on the rise.

“The decline in funding is a serious issue,” said Dr. Robin Williams, Niagara’s medical officer of health and a member of the society’s board of directors.

Williams is more concerned with the drop in funding, highlighted in a 2008 Ontario auditor general’s report, than other parts of the society’s report including a lament that the role of pediatricians in children’s mental health is not well-defined.

A decline in funding for mental health services has a more dramatic effect than in other areas of medicine, she said.

“The problem is that mental health is very complex,” she said.

“Often when we talk about mental health what we mean is mental illness and how that is dealt with depends on the specific issue and person.”

Unlike other health problems, there are no vaccines or pills for mental illnesses, Williams said.

“If a child breaks his arm, he goes to the hospital, maybe has surgery and gets a cast and the arm heals. The kid goes back to their normal life in a couple of months,” said Ellis Katsof, executive director of Niagara Child and Youth Services.

“That is not how it works with mental health.”

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Medication for mental illness at the alarming rate it is being prescribed is nothing more than dangerous mind candy. Mind candy that cannot effectively address most challenges in mental illness. If one pathologizes mental illness in the narrow and rigid ways of psychiatry and its pseudo-science then one might want to fall in line with the illusion that pills are the long-sought after cure-all. However, they are not any cure-all whatsoever. When mental illness and its suffering are viewed from a different perspective it becomes much more clear that human beings do experience pain and suffering and that what is at issues is to what extent, and what can be done to help people to find balance and to find middle-ground from which they can find new ways to understand themselves and to find healing, growth, and transformative change.

The rise in the prescribing of medication by many in the psychiatric profession has turned psychobabble: “writing or talk using jargon from psychiatry or psychotherapy” (dictionary.com)  into biobabble: “knee-jerk biological determinism” (Kathleen H. Dockett, G. Rita Dudley-Grant, and C. Peter Bankart – authors of the book, Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community (International and Cultural Psychology) What do you think? How can you find your way to effective and safe treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder or other forms of mental illness if you don’t stop to consider the pharmaceutical agenda that drives biobabble? Can you? Who do you believe? Are you aware of the shift in psychiatry from analysis to medication? What are the ramifications of this? On the line is the mental health and well-being of millions of people. Underneathe it all what is the true quest – to treat and to cure or to make money?

According to the Polly Young-Eisendrath in the book, Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community (International and Cultural Psychology),

“In the last two decades of the twentieth century, our popular and scientific accounts of human suffering have been inching their way toward a new form of scientific reductionism: a knee-jerk biological determinism that I call “biobabble,”

This is the widespread tendency to use terms (e.g. adaptation) that come from various aspects of the biological sciences to attempt to explain human actions and moods without even a reasonable understanding of the term, the science, the associated theory (or lack of it), and/or the target of explanation.

Biobabble names biological, evolutionary, and physical processes as the primary causes for many human traits and behaviors from the undesirable (like alcoholism and schizophrenia) to the sublime (like altruism and happiness). In my view, biobabble confuses and harms us in our attempts to understand and alleviate human suffering, on both an individual and a communal level.

By the term “suffering” here, I mean specifically the Buddhist notion of dukkha, which is typically translated as “suffering” in English. Dukkha literally refers to a state of being off-center or out-of-balance, like a bone slightly out of its socket or a wheel riding off its axle. I will use the word “suffering” to mean a state of being in which we are out of kilter because of a subjective disturbance that may be as mild as a momentary frustration or as severe as a depressive or psychotic state.”

• Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES or 3 Non Borderline Ebooks packaged together with audio.
• Purchase A.J. Mahari’s 5 “Core Wound of Abandonment” in BPD series 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
  

As Polly Young-Eisendrath makes clear in the above quote, suffering, and much of what can be pathologized in being labelled mental illness as narrowly defined by the bible of psychiatry – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V), can be viewed in a different way, in a different context. Suffering if thought of as being out of balance or being “off-center” can be understood to be part of the spectrum of human experience. When you stop to think how much of that experience is individual and spiritual the idea of a pill to fix everything seems even less credible than it may seem in the face of sophisticated jargon thrown around to pathologize human experience in its more extreme forms.

The labelling of many mental illnesses as “brain diseases” in the last 10 or so years has led to what many professionals are countering now as pseudo-science – an ideology that isn’t anymore supported, proven, or documented than older ideologies that maintain that much of mental illness has more to do with emotional/psychological and psychosocial elements of human experience than anything biological and literally physically brain-based or genetic.

So much money that need to go directly to patient treatment and mental health delivery systems may well be instead going – flowing really – to not only pharmaceutical companies but also to the studies, professional papers, books etc., that they fund. A vicious circle of  profit that has little to do with actually helping the mentally ill get well.

In the book,   Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community (International and Cultural Psychology),  Belinda Siew Luan Khong clarifies the, “synergy between the concept of human responsibility in Heidegger’s philosophy, existential analysis, and the notion of dependent origination in Buddhism.” “… One of the many interesting points that Khong makes is that both in Buddhism and in daseinsanalysis teh individual’s journey of discovery is make possible by the faithful companionship of a teacher, a teacher who may largely be a silent partner whose attentiveness supports the client’s efforts towards mindfulness.”

Daseinsanalytic Psychotherapy

The word Dasein has been used by several philosophers before Heidegger, most notably Ludwig Feuerbach, with the meaning of human “existence” or “presence”. It is derived from da-sein, which literally means being-there/there-being, though Heidegger was adamant that this was an inappropriate translation of Dasein. In German, Dasein is the German vernacular term for existence.

According to Gion Condrau, International Federation of Daseinsanalysis “Daseinsanalysis owes its origin and development to the spiritual renewal in the wake of the two world wars. In the realm of psychiatry, a movement began in the twenties which was partly triggered by the discussions around Freudian psychoanalysis, partly by a scientific unease with regard to the traditional, systematizing, clinical psychopathology, and which was searching for a new understanding of the basics of human existence and its disturbances. The one-sided, natural-scientific orientation of psychiatry and psychotherapy, in particular, was the subject of heated criticism. This gave rise to the so-called “anthropological” psychiatry, initiated by renowned researchers such as Ludwig Binswanger, Viktor von Weizsäcker, Viktor von Gebsattel, Eugene Minkowski, Erwin Straus, Rollo May, R.D. Laing, and others.”

Condrau concludes, “lt is obviously not correct – as occasionally is done – to put existential analysis as ‘philosophy’ in contrast to psychoanalysis as ‘science’. They both are sciences of the human being, both so-to-say ‘anthropologies;’ they both belong to psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy. This still is so in a time when the more narrow meanings of the medical terms ‘disease’ and ‘health’ have been expanded by the sociological point of view. Today, psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists are not satisfied with merely formulating theories. Increasingly, they ask about the sense and meaning of what is sick and has to be healed. To clear the relationship between body and soul, and to try to escape the blind alley of the dualistic way of looking upon life, they are forced to consult philosophers in order to perceive better the existence of the human being. Every attempt at explaining and acting of human beings, including the psychological and medical sciences, relies on presuppositions that are philosophical and pre-scientific.”

The question of note at this point, in my opinion, would be, to what extent is “the one-sided, natural-scientific orientation of psychiatry and psychotherapy” and its roots in a reliance upon, “presuppositions that are philosophical and pre-scientific” clouding the judgement that has psychiatry in the opinion of many forwarding a phamaceutical money-making agenda that is polarized and whose biobabble is more ideology than fact, more pseudo-science than exact science?

This polarized and increasingly-pathologizing point of of view that everything and anything to do with mental illness being a “brain disorder” or “brain disease” clearly serves no one, logically, but those in cohoots with pharma. It certainly isn’t about curing people now is it? After all, if people were cured, where would that leave the pharmaceutical companies and the psychiatrists invested in this new-age biopsychiatry? To say nothing of the fact that their entire premise fails to acknowledge the human spirit, the soul, the aspect of life that is not scientific or tangible and proven but that is faith-based and not subject to the advertised necessisity of medication intervention.

Psychiatry, psychotherapy, and their rigidly defined ideology of pathology do not have any authority or knowledge of the soul. To the extent that one is out of balance or off-center, who can really say that in each and every instance of that way of being everyone is the same and that the labels given can only be addressed by medication and then, according to the bible of psychiatry not even (usually) to any point of actual balance or return to center – recovery and healing. The biological argument of our time about mental illness is simply not a logical one. It is not a proven one. It could well be considered an unethical and corrupt misuse of trust, authority, and power.

In this month’s Lancet Medical Journal includes a very readable essay on the history of psychiatry written by Andrew Scull, who is a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego.

Susan Perry of Minnpost.com, offers this summary of Andrew Scull’s essay:  ”Scull talks about how psychiatry has revolutionized itself during the span of his career. The Freudian movement dominated the field through the 1960s — a period, he notes, when mental illnesses like schizophrenia were often attributed to such now discredited causes as the “refrigerator mother.”

Then, “more swiftly and silently than the Cheshire cat, psychoanalytic hegemony vanished,” writes Scull. Its replacement: drugs, the “new Holy Grail of the profession.”

But has this Holy Grail turned out to be yet another false icon? Here’s Scull’s scathing conclusion:

The US National Institute of Mental Health proclaimed the 1990s “the decade of the brain”. A simplistic biological reductionism increasingly ruled the psychiatric roost. Patients and their families learned to attribute mental illness to faulty brain biochemistry, defects of dopamine, or a shortage of seratonin. It was biobabble as deeply misleading and unscientific as the psychobabble it replaced, but as marketing copy it was priceless. Meantime, the psychiatric profession was seduced and bought off with boatloads of research funding. Where once shrinks had been the most marginal of medical men, existing in a twilight zone on the margins of professional respectability, now they were the darlings of medical school deans, the millions upon millions of their grants and indirect cost recoveries helping to finance the expansion of the medical-industrial complex.

And so to scandal. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and to a quite extraordinary extent, drug money has come to dominate psychiatry. It underwrites psychiatric journals and psychiatric conferences (where the omnipresence of pharmaceutical loot startles the naive outsider). It makes psychiatric careers, and many of those whose careers it fosters become shills for their paymasters, zealously promoting lucrative off-label uses for drugs whose initial approval for prescription was awarded on quite other grounds. It ensures that when scandals surface universities will mainly turn a blind eye to the transgressions of those members of their staff who engage in these unethical practices. And it controls psychiatric knowledge in multiple ways.

Read Scull’s Entire Essay 

© A.J. Mahari, April 15, 2010 – Except where others are quoted.

Whatever the source of information about mental illness what is becoming more clear to me is that not all professionals agree with what is now known as biopsychiatry. The problem with the argument being put forth by NAMI and biopsychiatry citing studies largely paid for by pharmaceutical companies that attempt to provide the proof for, you guessed it, why the mentally ill need to buy, buy, medications, is a confusing assertion that seems to be corrupting too many mental health care delivery systems. Is biopsychiatry a threat to traditional therapy?

What do you think?

Do you think to that mental health consumers are being mislead here, or not totally informed in a balanced way? People with mental illness have enough on their plates already and having to navigate this confusing mine field doesn’t help.

Is it ethical for advocacy organizations and mental health organizations to be funded by pharmaceutical companies? Why aren’t they more forthcoming and open about this? What’s being hidden?

How can you educate yourself?

I would recommend keeping an open mind and thinking about the ‘unwholly alliance’ of mental health advocacy and Pharma and studies that provide supposed evidence that mental illness is biological and therefore needs to be treated by drugs.

© A.J. Mahari, April 7, 2010

Please visit: mindfreedom.org

Below is an article from seatllepi.com

No proof mental illness rooted in biology

By KEITH HOELLER
GUEST COLUMNIST

What is “the mental health movement?” Its proponents claim that millions of Americans are afflicted with a mental illness, which is a disease “just like any other” and that the mentally ill suffer from a chemical imbalance in the brain that is corrected by psychiatric drugs.

Mental illness is said to be the cause of many of our society’s social ills, such as suicide, murder, divorce, child abuse, sex offenses, depression and various addictions. If only mental illness could be cured, mental health supporters say, all of these ills could be prevented.

Because the mentally ill often are unaware of their disease, treatment must be forced on the mentally ill. All 50 states have laws that allow involuntary treatment if professionals deem they are a danger to self and others.

Psychiatrists, we are told, can now accurately diagnose mental illness and have safe and effective treatments. Psychiatry is considered a valid medical specialty, like cardiology, and the claims of the movement are based on scientific research.

The largest lay group is the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI). The media routinely refer to NAMI as advocates for the mentally ill, although its membership consists almost entirely of family members and not the mentally ill themselves. NAMI ascribes to the “biological basis of mental illness,” and endorses forced treatment of the mentally ill.

The movement’s major source of funding is the highly profitable pharmaceutical industry, which funds the drug research; which funds psychiatric journals, and even the American Psychiatric Association itself; which funds advertising to doctors and the public; and even funds lay groups such as NAMI (at least $11 million) and Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (at least $1 million).

Yet many professionals claim that the mental health movement is not a legitimate medical or scientific endeavor, let alone a civil rights movement, but a political ideology of intolerance and inhumanity. Numerous psychiatrists and psychologists have examined the psychiatric research literature and found it to range from smoke and mirrors to quackery.

Psychiatrists have yet to conclusively prove that a single mental illness has a biological or physical cause, or a genetic origin. Psychiatry has yet to develop a single physical test that can determine that an individual actually has a particular mental illness. Indeed, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders uses behavior, not physical symptoms, to diagnose mental illness, and it lacks both scientific reliability and validity.

On Aug. 16, eight members of MindFreedom (www.mindfreedom.org), an umbrella organization of mental patients who call themselves “psychiatric survivors,” began a Fast for Freedom “to press for human rights and choice in psychiatry” and to “demand that the mental health industry produce even one study proving the common industry claim that ‘mental illness is biologically-based.’ “

Dr. James Scully of the American Psychiatric Association responded to the hunger strikers by claiming the evidence was so vast one need only look at “Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General” (1999) or a recent psychiatry textbook.

An expert panel for the strikers, made up of members (like myself) of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology (www.icspp.org), quickly responded by pointing out that neither of these works contains any such conclusive proof. Actually, the surgeon general’s report on mental health states that “the precise causes (etiology) of mental disorders are not known” and “there is no definitive lesion, laboratory test, or abnormality in brain tissue that can identify (a mental) illness.” The Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry (1999) states: ” … Validation of the diagnostic categories as specific entities has not been established.”

In its reply to the fasters, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill did not cite any scientific evidence at all.

In 1784, a similar debate raged in Paris about the scientific validity of the latest psychiatric nostrum (hypnotism) and its inventor, Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, who claimed to have discovered a physical mechanism he called animal magnetism. The Academy of Sciences formed a panel, including American scientist Benjamin Franklin and French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, to assess the movement sweeping the city, and concluded that Mesmer’s “cures” had no scientific basis. They were due entirely to the power of suggestion, now called the placebo effect. The Royal Society of Medicine issued a report with similar findings on Aug. 16, 1784.

Let us hope the Fast for Freedom has a positive outcome for all involved.

If not, let us insist that the American Medical Association (or similar body) form a panel of objective, non-psychiatric scientists, without any ties to drug companies, to examine whether psychiatry should continue as a medical specialty or if it should join the historical ranks of alchemy, astrology and phrenology as a pseudoscience.

Life Coach, Mental Health and BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari, video, describing her coaching/peer counselling services, background, experience, and philosophy. A.J. Mahari has written 10 Ebooks on the subject of Borderline Personality for those with BPD and for loved ones as well. Mahar also has over 20 audio programs available at Phoenix Rising Publications

Both those who have Borderline Personality Disorder and those who are a loved one – non borderline – with someone with BPD close to you or was in your life can benefit from life coaching. Life and BPD coaching with A.J. Mahari, for many of her clients, is an adjunct to professional therapy. Many of Mahari’s clients work with her and see a mental health professional simultaneously.

Borderline Personality Disorder is complex, complicated, and often confusing. It is very painful for those who have it and for loved ones on the other side of BPD. Both borderlines and non borderlines need their own recovery. Need to work on their own goals. Need to spend time learning more about what has caused them so much pain and why each, in their own way, continues, often, to invest in the same choices that create and fuel so much pain and suffering.

© A.J. Mahari, Phoenix Rising Publications & Touchstone Life Coaching Services, December 16, 2009 – All rights reserved.

Self help for managing the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder in the experienced practice of life coach and strategist A.J. Mahari offers those with BPD the opportunity to gain an increasing awareness validated and supported by A.J. Mahari’s eclectic, dynamic, and compassionate approach to life coaching those with Borderline Personality Disorder.

A.J. Mahari has been recovered now for 14 years. Mahari has not merely recovered from the symptoms of BPD – she has recovered from BPD entirely. She has been online writing articles, ebooks, audio programs (and being the speaker in those programs as well) and doing video and audio podcasts now for 14 years as well. Mahari has been life coaching those with BPD and their loved ones, family members, and relationship partners for 6 years now. That’s a lot of experience!

Mahari offers support for those with Borderline Personality Disorder who are ready to begin to explore how they can help themselves change their suffering into manageable pain. Support for recovery and healing from BPD that is multifaceted and tailored to the needs and goals of each individual client.

• 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 Loved Ones of those with BPD © A.J. Mahari

Mahari not only can help explain the language of Borderline Personality Disorder, a language that is a pervasively emotional one, to those with BPD and to their loved ones, but she can also understand the dilemmas that loved ones are grappling with because she has been there too. Mahari’s parents both had BPD. She has also had a relationship with someone who had BPD/NPD. She doesn’t just know the language of those with BPD, because she had BPD, she also knows the confusion, pain, heartache, and need for understanding on the other side of BPD from first hand life experience.

Self help for managing the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder cannot take the place of therapy but it can, and in Mahari’s life coaching it does, augment the process of therapy. A.J. Mahari offers her life coaching clients an unparalleled 360 degree full circle understanding of BPD and all of its challenges and complexities.

A.J. Mahari’s life coaching has helped and continues to help her clients change their lives. Mahari is a compassionate and supportive life coach. A very knowledgeable and incredibly aware force for change in the lives of those she coaches.

• 30 Minute Life Coaching Session
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Just read what a few of her many clients have to say:

“A.J. has been so helpful to me as a life coach. She understands so much about BPD. She understands so much about me. In working with A.J. over the last few months I have really found myself in a much more even and calmer emotional place. My relationships are getting better. I am relating better. I am more able to listen to what people are actually saying than I’ve ever been able to before. A.J.’s compassion has reached me in a way that no one else in my life ever has. We continue on the journey but I know that I wouldn’t be where I am today without A.J.’s continued support and guidance.” — Timothy Tanner

“A.J. is such a powerful teacher. Sometimes, in our sessions, it isn’t even what she says that teaches me so much. I have come to realize it is just as often what she doesn’t say as what she does say. I find that amazing. A.J. is a gifted woman. A very wise woman. A very compassionate woman. You may know that from reading her work online or from watching her videos or listening to her audios but when you work with her as a life coach all of what you see and hear from her online is multiplied to the positive 10 times over. I can’t even describe it. My life is changing. I am changing. I am learning to connect to myself in ways I never thought possible before. It is that connection, so fostered and supported by A.J. as my life coach, that is helping me to finally learn how to really connect with others. I am so grateful and so glad I have A.J. as my life coach.” — Meagan S.

“I did a lot of searching online for a life coach before I decided to give A.J. Mahari a try. I choose to work with A.J. – try her out as I said, at first, because she has been around for a lot of years. She has a proven track record as someone who has been recovered for over a decade. She’s solid in her recovery. All I had to do was read her articles, ebooks, watch some videos, it was all there – it is all there for anyone with BPD (or someone who has someone with BPD in their life) to see. A.J. Mahari is the real deal. It was only a try at first. That’s all I was prepared to do. I wasn’t sure that I trusted the whole concept of a life coach. Little by little I began to open to up as I realized how much A.J. was there for me and how much she cared to help me to help myself. And that’s the key thing here, for me, in working with A.J. Mahari as my life coach, as much as she knows and I know she knows a lot, she is helping me to find my own way. She is helping me to really help myself. It is one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had.” — J.W.Z.

“I am a much improved human being emotionally since working with A.J. Mahari has my life coach. I still have BPD but I am, as she says, making my way down that road to recovery. It only took 2 session with A.J. to really start to see the possibility of making changes to make my life better. Another few sessions later that possibility was reality. It was happening. It continues to happen. I am really changing, finally. And, I know that I am the one doing the changing. A.J. is so clear about empowering me to help me and as she says all the time, it’s my journey, I’m in charge of it and A.J. is just my mirror. What an incredible mirror and mentor she is.” — Rosanna R.

• 30 Minute Life Coaching Session
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If you have BPD and you would like to read more about A.J. Mahari’s Life Coaching because you are wanting to help yourself (whether you are in therapy too or not) please do visit her website at: touchstonecoaching.ca 

You can also check out her Video Podcast, her Audio Podcast, Ebooks, Audio Programs, and/or her Video Lectures as well as her videos on YouTube.

A.J. Mahari also life coaches family members, loved ones, relationship or ex-relationship partners of those with Borderline Personality Disorder.

© Touchstone Life Coaching Services March 13, 2009 – All rights reserved.

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A.J. Mahari has recently launched her new website, Phoenix Rising Publications where you can purchase her Ebooks, Audio Programs, Life Coaching Services, Self Help Courses, and Educational Videos.

Phoenix Rising Publications is a very user-friendly website that makes not only purchasing Mahari’s products and services much simpler but also makes the electronic delivery and download of those products and services very straight-forward and very convenient.

Along with all that is available now for purchase at Phoenix Rising Publications Mahari has many new Ebooks, Audio Programs, Self Help Courses, and Educational Videos on a wider variety of topics coming very soon and of course offers her life coaching services and life coaching programs as well.

© Phoenix Rising Publications – October 10, 2008

A.J. Mahari has 5 years experience as life coach working primarily with family members, loved ones, ex and relationship partners of people with Borderline Personality Disorder as well as those who have BPD.

Why would a love one – a non borderline – of someone who has BPD want or need or benefit from life coaching?

The answer is simply-complex. The short answer is because you are in pain and you need to find more effective and healthier ways to cope with that pain and with the complicated challenges of caring about someone with Borderline Personality Disorder.

In my work as a lifecoach many non borderline clients have given me the feedback that they experience the support, understanding, and validation of their own challenges to be central to finding their way to the kind of change that they need to work to create in their lives, whether they are staying in a relationship, or in contact with the borderline in their lives or not.

While there are many avenues of support when one is in a confused and emotionally painful and difficult situation it is important to confide in someone with a deep understanding of Borderline Personality Disorder.

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• A.J.’s Ebooks and Audio Programs

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Borderline Personality Disorder is a very complex mental illness that profoundly effects not only those who are diagnosed with it but anyone and everyone that cares and/or loves them.

As a life coach I am a change-agent. I have found my way, personally in my own life, through the many mazes on both sides of Borderline Personality Disorder. I understand the pain and the process that must be navigated in order to win the emotional freedom, whether one remains in relationship and contact to the borderline in their life or not.

Family members, loved ones, parents of adult children with BPD, adult children of a borderline parent, ex or relationship partners of those with BPD all have one thing in common – the pain that is living on the other side of someone with Borderline Personality Disorder.

You can claim your emotional freedom. You can get back in touch with a yourself, a self that you may feel you are either losing or that you may have already lost. You can find your way back to the you that you were before the pain of the enigmatic roller-coaster toxic relational dynamic with someone with BPD in your life.

What you need is change. What you specifically need is change in your own life. If you are in pain and suffering yourself, you need to create change in yourself. You won’t find the emotional freedom, the healing, and the relief that you seek through trying to rescue the borderline in your life.

You cannot change or rescue or fix the person you care or love that has BPD – no matter what you do or how hard you try.

© A.J Mahari, September 13, 2008 – All rights reserved.

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A.J. Mahari offers Life Coaching Programs for Family Members, Relationship partners or ex-partners of those with BPD – non borderlines.

A.J. Mahari’s Life Coaching Programs for non borderlines are available via email or phone sessions. If you would like to purchase a program for phone sessions please note that the cost of any long distance charges you might incur is not included in the cost of the program.

A.J. Mahari has been recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder and writing about Borderline Personality Disorder online for over 10 years. She has been working with non borderlines as a life coach for almost five years now. A.J. has been on both sides of this personality disorder. She has left both sides of it behind in her own personal life.

As a life coach A.J. Mahari has a dynamic, compassionate, creative, and supportive approach. Specifically in her work with the family members, relationship or ex-relationship partners of those with Borderline Personality Disorder – non borderlines, A.J., as someone who had 2 borderline parents, has recovered from BPD, and who had a relationship (after her recovery with someone with BPD/NPD) knows from her own first hand experience the obstacles that will present themselves as challenging growth opportunities in the process of change and recovery for those who are non borderlines and who are grappling with the heartache and pain that is life on the other side of Borderline Personality Disorder.

Staying in The Relationship

This 8 session life coaching program for non borderlines focuses on coming to an understanding of the process of working to stay in a relationship – or for family members – how to best stay in a an active relational dynamic with someone with BPD without compromising or losing your health or sanity.

Purchase This Life Coaching Program with A.J. Mahari

Leaving The Relationship or Relationship Has Ended

This 10 session life coaching program, with and designed by A.J. Mahari, for non borderlines focuses on developing an emotional preparedness for leaving a relationship with someone with BPD or for those whose relationships have ended or been ended by the borderline, this program focuses on coping with the crazy-making lack of closure. In this life coaching program, for those in the process of leaving or for those who have left the borderline, A.J. Mahari will help you to come to the kind of deep and insightful understanding of BPD and what has just happened in your life that can and will help you break free from what is often an on-going emotional roller-coaster of questions. This program can also help family members who are in the process of disengaging a borderline relative or who know they need to break ties with a family member with BPD.

Purchase This Life Coaching Program with A.J. Mahari

© Touchstone Life Coaching Services 2008 – All rights reserved.

• A.J.’s Ebooks
• The Shame of Abandonment in BPD Audio By A.J. Mahari
• A.J.’s Audio Programs

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A.J. Mahari, a recovered borderline, offers Life Coaching Programs For Those With Borderline Personality Disorder – This first program consists of 6 Sessions Designed To Enhance Awareness

One of the major challenges for those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is addressing a lack of awareness of the very issues that so affect their lives. This compromised awareness is a result of the split between the borderline’s intellect and emotions. Those with BPD are often very competent and strong intellectually. However, emotionally, the opposite is often the case. Those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder have suffered arrested emotional development caused largely by what I refer to as the core wound of abandonment.

In response to each of the traits that define BPD those diagnosed with BPD have an elaborate system of defense mechanisms that is a major obstacle to the emotional (and often cognitive)awareness necessary for recovery.

Enhancing Emotional Awareness

A.J. offers those with Borderline Personality a life coaching program designed to support and encourage the maintenance of your emotional regulation in the here and now as you explore the changes that you seek to make. This life coaching program for those with BPD consists of 6 sessions designed specifically for those with BPD for $350.00. This package is available either via email or phone. Unlike sessions where those with BPD seek out life coaching with A.J. from the perspective of what they may be focused on this program is one that A.J. has devised and it follows a specified method of coaching. The cost of the program does not include any long distance charges that you might incur.

Purchase this life coaching program with A.J. Mahari

© Touchstone Life Coaching Services 2008 – All rights reserved.

• A.J.’s Ebooks
• The Shame of Abandonment in BPD Audio By A.J. Mahari
• A.J.’s Audio Programs