On Tuesday June 29, 2010 at 7pm Eastern Standard Time A.J. Mahari interviewed Merri Lisa Johnson, author of Girl In Need of Tourniquet – Memoir of a Borderline Personality, who read a few excerpts from her book and talked about her experience and thoughts about Borderline Personality Disorder. You can listen to the archived show or download it on the pagePsyche Whisperer Radio Show with your host A.J. Mahari

Girl in Need
of A Tourniquet

Memoir of A Borderline Personality

An honest and compelling memoir, Girl in Need of A Tourniquet is Merri Lisa Johnson’s account of her borderline personality disorder and how it has affected her life and relationships. Johnson describes the feeling of “bleeding out” — unable to tell where she stopped and where her partner began. A self-confessed “psycho girlfriend,” she was influenced by many emotional factors from her past. She recalls her path through a dysfunctional, destructive relationship, while recounting the experiences that brought her to her breaking point.

In recognizing her struggle with borderline personality disorder, Johnson is ultimately able to seek help, embarking on a soul-searching healing process. It’s a path that is painful, difficult, and at times heart-wrenching, but ultimately makes her more able to love and coexist in healthy relationships.

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Life Coach and BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari, talks about the reality of life on the other side of someone with Borderline Personality Disorder. A.J., in her role as a Life and BPD Coach helps loved one of those with BPD – non borderlines, bpd family members, to understand not only the difficult challenges they face but how to cope and how to take care of themselves. Mahari is also an expert at guiding loved ones out of the trap of codependence.

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The adult child of a borderline parent or parents also knows the pain of unresolved abandonment. He or she also knows a profound emotional suffering, often on the other side of Borderline Personality Disorder. And, often in a dualistic way, as someone with BPD him or herself, and as someone experiencing the brokenness of trying to relate to someone else with BPD. Not all adult children (who were a child) of a borderline parent develop Borderline Personality Disorder themselves. However, many do. Forgiveness is part of what it takes to actually heal.

• 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 BPD © A.J. Mahari

I am an adult child of not one, but two parents, with Borderline Personality Disorder. I learned in my journey of my own recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder (my memoir is coming out in the fall of 2010) that forgiveness is the way forward. That forgiveness is the pathway to emotional peace and freedom. I had worked to hard to free myself from my own experience of having Borderline Personality Disorder to allow myself to remain in the clutches of the emotional pain and suffering that one lives with when one is the adult child of a borderline parent – or parents.

In a video recorded in 2008, A.J. Mahari, talks about her experience as an adult child of two borderline parents and how she knows that forgiveness is necessary for healing and recovery.

• 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

If you want to heal you need to do whatever you can to get the help you may need to actually get on the road to finding this forgiveness. Even in the face of unresolved issues with a borderline parent. Even in the face of a life-time of wanting a meaningful healthy connection with that parent - a connection that you haven’t been able to establish, may still yearn for, but that you need to learn to radically accept is something that you won’t be able to have. Even when there can be no closure with that parent.

It is only through the surrender to that loss that each one of us, as an adult child or a borderline parent or parent(s), can find our own recovery. Holding on or staying involved in the chaos of a borderline parent isn’t going to give you what you long for. It is only going to hurt you more. Trying to get what you’ve never been able to get, emotionally, from your borderline parent, only keeps you stuck in the pain of that most profound unresolved abandonment and loss.

Having a parent with Borderline Personality Disorder often means a legacy of codependence in your life that can mean you may well be or have been in a series of unhealthy relationships in your adulthood – all in a subconscious search for the bond that you long for from your borderline parent. Toxic relationship patterns often have their roots in the pain of your unresolved abandonment The adult child of a borderline parent, whether or not you developed BPD yourself, needs to resolve the pain of that abandonment – of the unmet needs and of the lack of a healthy and meaningful bond.

It is only by radically acccepting that loss and the pain of that loss, facing it, feeling it, grieving it, and letting it go, that the adult child can truly take his or her life back and find emotional peace and freedom.

© A.J. Mahari, May 7, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life – 19 Coaching Exercises To Help You Change Negative Thought Patterns by Life Coach, A.J. Mahari, is a 102 page Ebook chalk full of information and 19 coaching exercises to help you change negative thinking into positive thinking. This Ebook stresses how much you will benefit from focusing postively on the here-and-now so that the decisions you are making today will help you create a positive, successful and productive future. And this Ebook doesn’t just tell you that, it provides you with practical exercises that will show you how to create positive change and how to not only stop focusing on the negative, stop worrying, but also stop feeling so stressed and stop ruminating on intrusive, negative, and unwanted thoughts. Not everyone can afford Life Coaching. This Ebook gives you exercises to do that I use with many of my clients and now you too can get this help and at a fraction of the price.

Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life - 19 Coaching Exercises to Tranform Negative Thoughts Into Positive Thoughts

Determination and belief are the starting points for the shift from negative thought patterns to positive thoughts that create success. Learning to lay down defenses and open your mind to new, positive, thoughts can and will help you create needed and wanted change. 

Determination and belief will open you to new opportunities to get to know who you really are and/or more about who you authentically are. Thoughts are energy. Your energy effects all areas of your life.

You can quickly and easily learn how to plant the seeds of  positive thoughts and positive energy in your life. How can you do this?

This Ebook is based on exercises that will help you to realize real answers that will help you shift your thoughts and energy from negative to positive by getting you in touch with questions that will teach you more about yourself, what you want and how to get what you want – what your goals are and how to achieve those goals.

Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life, will walk you through 19 exercises that will provide you with the steps to realizing real answers and teach you to start asking the right questions. By learning how the mind works, you can understand how to break the cycles that keep you on the outside looking in, instead of where you truly want to be. Learn to ask yourself questions that will shift your energy and help you to achieve your goals. What you feel comes from what you think. Are you aware of thoughts that lead you to feel bad?

By Changing Your Thoughts you can remove any illusions or feelings of what you think is lacking in your own life. You can remove the unnamed need that eats away at you day after day. By Changing Your Thoughts you can walk away from a life that is chaotic, codependent, or constantly needing repairs. You can learn to set boundaries, value yourself, and create healthier and happier relationships. You can re-shape your reality. Shift your focus. Create positive, healthy, and lasting change.

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© A.J. Mahari, March 27, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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The difference between helping and enabling is explored. Life Coach and BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari talks about how this applies to those with Borderline Personality Disorder and often their loved ones as well. Enabling is a feature of co-dependence. Codependence is at the heart of much of the toxic dynamic that often unfolds in relationships for those with Borderline Personality Disorder and the non borderlines in their lives.

 ”I’ve been trying to help a friend of mine but I think I’m making matters worse instead of better – since I still don’t understand co-dependency maybe you can help me? Can you explain, to me, the difference between enabling and helping somebody?

This problem I’m having really messes with my own self-esteem. I beat myself up when things go badly for others. If I have anything to do with their hardship I’m especially hard on myself. Then I neglect my own needs and I start coming apart.” — Brooks

This is a very good question. I believe from my own past experience and what I’ve read that many who have been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) also have many co-dependent issues to work through. What Brooks is describing above sounds familiar to me. In the past, when I had no boundaries, and the only kind of relationships or friendships I understood were enmeshed ones, I too, at that time, 15 years ago or more in my life now, did not understand the difference between enabling and helping others, or when someone else was helping me versus enabling me. There is often also this dynamic of pulling to be rescued on the part of people with BPD. It is not something that people with BPD are consciously aware of. Just as a borderline will pull for you to meet his or her needs, enable and/or rescue them – which really cannot be done anyway, so too will he or she push you away at every turn. This makes for a crazy-making experience for the non borderline.

The core root of the problem of enabling rests with one’s own inability and or refusal to help him/herself. When one is not helping oneself often he/she may get over-involved in someone else’s problems in what they believe is an attempt to help the other person. More often than not, when one is co-dependent and not able to meet his/her own (emotional needs), what appears to be helping is not only enabling it is also using. It is using because what many are seeking to do in the “helping” of someone else is to avoid their own problems, issues and or avoid meeting their own needs. This is a pattern that often develops from being raised in a co-dependent and or dysfunctional family. A family whose system of relating wasn’t healthy. Rather than support healthy individuation dysfunctional family dynamics support enmeshed styles of relating that are quite painful and that lack boundaries.

                     Ebooks © A.J. Mahari

• The Abandoned Pain of BPD Ebook
• The Legacy of Abandonment in BPD Ebook
• The Shadows and Echoes of Self – False Self In BPD Ebook
• BPD and Rage Ebook
• Loneliness Ebook
• The Other Side of BPD – Mindfulness and Radical Acceptance for Non Borderlines 
• Non Borderline Dilemma – Can Borderlines Love? Do they feel love?
• Full Circle – Lessons for Non Borderlines
• Non Borderlines – You can purchase 6 ebooks packaged together with or without audio.
• Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES packaged together with or without audio.

• 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 © A.J. Mahari

So firstly, it is important to make sure that you are meeting your own needs and taking personal responsibility for yourself. In order to meet your own needs and to be responsible for yourself you will need to develop boundaries. As you one begins to develop boundaries and a healthy sense of the difference between self and others then and only then can one begin to truly learn the difference between “helping” and “enabling”.

There are many different definitions of what enabling means. What I have come to understand through my own recovery is that enabling refers to doing anything for someone else that they “should” be able to do (and need to do) for themselves.

For example, if someone suffers from agoraphobia, and or anxiety attacks, and has difficulty or feels unable to go to the store – a friend may think that going to the store for this person is “helping” them out. Truthfully, this is an example of enabling because when you go to the store for your friend (something that he/she “should” be able to do for themselves and really need to do for themselves) you are helping them only in so far as you are enabling them to stay stuck in maladaptive coping mechanisms which are not healthy for them. Someone who can’t go to the store on his/her own (who is otherwise physically healthy) due to anxiety or fear, is not able to meet his/her own needs. If you continue to try to meet this need for someone, for example, you only continue to reinforce his/her sense and or feelings of (and belief in) helplessness. After a time, it is also likley that the person going to the store for the one that feels they cannot go for themselves will, over time, get angry.

Enabling plays itself out even more subtly in the emotional arena. If someone has emotional difficulties, a personality disorder and so forth and you try to control them, direct them, tell them how to be, act, or what to do (no matter how well intentioned) chances are much of what you say will apply to what you, yourself, need. It will largely be projection. It will serve the purpose of you avoiding yourself and your own issues and pain and it will simulate some false sense of safety or security to the person who is not yet able to be there and to take care of themselves. This is also a situation, which over time will end up with both parties quite angry with each other. The person who is enabling, “trying to help” will end up being too controlling and the person that is being “enabled” – “helped” will feel controlled and told what to do. No one can change anyone but themselves. The reason and the way we can get so wrapped up in others has all to do with how much we refuse to know ourselves. So, in effect then, for all intents and purposes, the result of enabling is manipulating dishonesty on the part of both the person being enabled and the person who is enabling.

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Herein lies the enmeshment. If you are in this situation with someone else you do not have healthy boundaries, nor does the person you are in any enmeshment with. This is a recipe for a lot of pain as two people try to live through each other instead of living their own lives.

Enmeshment is a painful and complicated tangling of identities, wants and needs that is not healthy for anyone. Enabling is providing an atmosphere within which another person does not have to take personal responsibility – it is parenting someone who is old enough to parent themselves and who is not a child of yours anyway. It is an over-stepping of what would be considered healthy boundaries. It is a lack of boundaries to be more the point.

Helping someone, on the other hand, consists of giving assistance or lending an ear, after having been asked and doing so without giving direction or advice and without having any stakes in the outcome of the choices a person makes. Helping someone is rendering assistance after having been asked. For example, your friend has to work very late unexpectedly and asks you if you could feed his cat that evening. When someone asks for help they do so allowing and prepared to respond in a healthy and mature manner to being told “NO”. It is always alright to ask for help but asking for help and not being able to hear no likley means that you are really asking for someone to enable you and not to help you at all.

Those with BPD (until they recover significantly) often have not matured emotionally to a point where they have healthy boundaries. There is an almost natural tendency to enmesh with others due to the reality that having BPD usually means that you don’t know who you really are. It is also not uncommon for borderlines to need someone else to give them a sense of safety, security and or well-being. It is equally common with those who have BPD for them to not know how to take personal responsibility and so often they will attempt to shift this to others out of their own sense of helplessness and victimization. Those who allow these borderline needs to be shifted to them are somewhat co-dependent themselves and will be enabling the borderline – not helping them.

In response to what Brooks describes regarding beating himself up if he feels at all that the hardship of someone else has anything to do with him, this is an area where one must carefully assess not only co-dependence, and enabling but also his/her own narcissism. Often, when narcissistic defenses are being used one can feel more responsible for the pain or conflict of others when truthfully, the other person’s experience has nothing whatsoever to do with you.

As Brooks describes neglecting his own needs and the toll this takes on his self-esteem he is insightful to realize the connection there. The questions that Brooks, or anyone in a similar situation (co-dependent, enmeshed, enabling and without healthy boundaries) will benefit from asking themselves are:

• What is it that I really need now that is leading me to do what I am doing with so and so?
• What am I getting out of this?
  What do I want to get out of this?
• What about what I need?
• How can I take care of my own needs instead of transferring them on to so and so and then believing that I am really caring about so and so’s needs?

When borderlines learn to distinguish themselves from others, achieve a very real sense of who they are, find their own identities and establish healthy boundaries it then becomes painfully clear just what the enabling was really all about. Once one knows who they are and where his/her boundaries are and the difference between self and others this is the place at which one will realize that no matter how much you care for someone else your own needs have to come first. And no matter how much you care for someone else his/her pain, misfortune, etc etc, while you may feel sad about it, is not something that will change your over-all mood in your own life.

Learning to distinguish between helping someone out and enabling can be a long, difficult and painful process. I have been down that road. I have climbed that mountain. I can tell you that all of the hard and painful work it took was well worth it.

Asking the questions that Brooks has asked here means that he is at least half-way down that road. Keep walking down the road to the real you, Brooks. Keep walking down the road to the you that you want to be and need to find. When you get there you will no longer feel the need to enable anyone else or to be enabled by anyone else either. This is a central part of the work required in recoverying from Borderline Personality Disorder.

© A.J. Mahari – January 10, 2001 with additions February 6, 2010 – All rights reserved.

Loved ones – non borderlines – of people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) need boundaries. Without healthy boundaries what results is codependent, enmeshed, enabling, relating. Relationships between those with BPD and non borderlines contain a toxic dynamic. It is a dilemma and a dance wherein those with BPD need too much but what you give can’t ever be enough for them. It can’t be enough because you can’t be the borderline for the borderline. The borderline needs to find him or herself and learn, emotionally, how to be who he or she really is. Borderlines, not having a stable sense of self or identity try to live through you. What does that mean for you?

In the relationship between the non borderline and the borderline there  is also a dance wherein loved ones – non borderlines – often end up sacrificing the Self inside – losing themselves to the losteness and neediness of the people with BPD in their lives. What’s the alternative? Is there another way? How can you maintain your sanity in an insane situation? How can you maintain your mental health in a toxic relational dynamic? Can you?

A.J.’s Emotional Mastery Coaching For Loved One of BPD

Boundaries and limits implemented, communicated, and up-held by loved ones of those with BPD are truly gifts that you can give the person with BPD in your life today. Your boundaries – boundaries that you have every right to and need for your own well-being will plant seeds that each borderline has the opportunity to grow from if and when he or she chooses to. Boundaries are gifts that you can give yourself and the person with BPD in your life. That person may not appreciate your boundaries or what they could mean for them too but you can’t let that stop you from having the boundaries you need or you will be living from a codependent enmeshed and enabling dilemma that will, sooner or later, demand that you save yourself. It is a very painful way and place to live. It is choosing to suffer emotionally when you really do not have to.

© A.J. Mahari, January 5, 2010 – All rights reserved.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) Coach, Mental Health and Life Coach, and author, A.J. Mahari has a new mircoblog, Ask The BPD Coach, where she answers questions about BPD from those who have BPD and loved ones – partners and family members of those with BPD. Are there aspects of BPD that you’d like to know more about?

• Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES or 3 Non Borderline Ebooks packaged together with audio.
• 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 Abandoned Pain of BPD Ebook
• The Legacy of Abandonment in BPD Ebook
• The Shadows and Echoes of Self – False Self In BPD Ebook
• BPD and Rage Ebook
• Loneliness Ebook
• Those with BPD and/or Non Borderlines can purchase A.J. Mahari’s 3 “Core Wound of Abandonment” series ebooks only or A.J. Mahari’s 3 “Core Wound of Abandonment” series ebooks packaged together with From False Self To Authentic Self In BPD – The Inner Child Audio Program
• Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder The Lost Self The Impact of The Core Wound of Abandonment
• The Other Side of BPD – Mindfulness and Radical Acceptance for Non Borderlines
• Non Borderline Dilemma – Can Borderlines Love? Do they feel love?
• Full Circle – Lessons for Non Borderlines
• Non Borderlines – You can purchase 6 ebooks packaged together with or without audio.
• Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES packaged together with or without audio.

If you would like to Ask the BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari a question about Borderline Personality Disorder or anything related to BPD please email her at: bpdcoachaj@yahoo.ca

© Ask the BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari and Touchstone Life Coaching Services September 3, 2009 – All rights reserved.

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READ MORE …

• 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 © A.J. Mahari