People with Borderline Personality Disorder will benefit from searching for hope. There is hope for recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder. It is a challenge to find and learn to trust hope from the active throes of BPD where thinking and feeling and mired in polarized negativity.
Hope requires learning to bring together what Marsha Linehan, in her DBT Skills, refers to as Reasonable Mind and Emotion Mind into Wise Mind. The dialectical reality of Wise Mind is one that is of a paradoxical nature. It is the very rigid and polarized all-or-nothing thinking of those with BPD that often precludes much, if any, experience of life in the “big picture”, life in the paradox of wise mind.
People with BPD usually are living from either Reasonable Mind or Emotion Mind. That is the quintessential nature of the foundational split in those with BPD. A split that drives a cognitively distorted black-and-white and more often than not negative perception and experience in and of life. A split that supports the experience of Emotion Dysregulation in BPD which serves to protect the borderline from the pain of his or her core wound of abandonment pain and its legacy relegating him or her to what is often a perpetual and seemingly endless pit of despair surrounded by feelings of victimization and hopelessness.
If you have BPD it is possible to Find Hope From the Polarized Negativity of BPD and to put that hope to work in an active way that can and will support your on-going process of recovery in therapy.
There is absolutely hope for recovery. The process of recovery requires hope. Hope is a central, foundational, and sustaining force – a balancing way of engaging therapy that the enables those with BPD to move through the various stages of the process of recovery.
The process of recovery from BPD is the journey one must take from the negative core beliefs of the borderline false self to acquiring an awareness of the beliefs getting in touch with your lost authentic self will put you in touch with – beliefs that are much more balanced. This sacred and worthwhile journey From False Self to Authentic Self that is made possible by learning to re-connect with one’s wounded and dissociated from inner child.
In my latest Borderline Personality Inside Out Radio Show segment, “BPD and Hope”.
© A.J. Mahari, September 3, 2008 – All rights reserved.
