Borderline Personality Disorder was long thought to be untreatable. In spite of maintaining its unfortunate stigmatized standing among many professionals and people generally, BPD, Mental Health and Life Coaches, like myself, along with many who are well on the road to recovery are moving forward. This forward looking movement of BPD awareness is spreading the news that BPD is highly treatable. That there really is hope. This is what I call the 2.0 wave.
Some people, like myself, have been online for years banging this drum pretty much only to hear it echo back. Not any longer and not for some time now. Now as this 2.0 wave stretches out and continues to build momentum more and more people with BPD are at least reading about and hearing about ever-increasing possibility and hope.
What do I mean by the 2.0 Wave?
The 2.0 wave essentially is the "next generation" of thought, therapy, and recovery. It is an embryonic development – perhaps really more of a re-development for some. It supports an awareness and Self Help movement for those with BPD and their Loved Ones. It is a wave that is the cusp of cumulative change. A cumulative change that is hope and promise unfolding in each and every shared voice of experience.
In my own personal experience, in many ways, this BPD self help 2.0 wave is really a re-development of sorts for me in that I recovered from BPD 14 years ago. I have been online writing about BPD for 14 years as well.
Where is a lot of this change coming from?
This change is coming directly from what is referred to as Web 2.0. The more or less second coming of the world wide web, if you will. For those of us who have been online for over 10 years now, 14 in my case as I said, so much has changed. So much!
Where Borderline Personality Disorder is concerned the same is very true. When I first developed a website about BPD I'll bet you there were less than 10 sites that really gave in depth information about it. There were only a few of us with websites that had BPD and were in recovery or had just recovered from BPD around online back then. Just a few voices out there.
Of course this was the pre-blog, pre-youtube, pre-facebook, era of the world wide web. Ever since blogs, youtube, facebook, and the like, came about and took off there has been an explosion in all kinds of information generally, and of course about BPD as well. Not just about BPD generally or scientifically either. But about the actual experience of BPD. Many more people who have BPD or who have had BPD are making their voices heard. Loved ones of those with BPD are also making their voices heard and sharing their experiences and finding information and support that they also require.
The 2.0 Wave of BPD Self Help
As a BPD, Mental Health and Life Coach, I have, for years now, ascribed to the power of self help. When it comes to BPD, self help has tremendous potential to really help those with BPD to help themselves as an adjunct to therapy. Just as the life coaching services I offer are derived from a self help framework, so too can I help others with BPD to help themselves as an adjunct to therapy.
There has unfolded before us on many more websites over the last few years and of course thousands of blogs, along with social networking sites, a self help movement for those with BPD which has at its heart not any life coach or even professional, theory, or organization, for that matter, but rather it has people like you, people who have BPD at its forefront. Whether someone's expression is giving voice to their recovery, or their pain, their anger, or their lostness, and so forth, people can get online and know they are not alone. Know they are being read, watched, listened to and heard.
The 2.0 Wave of BPD – the greater awareness, the era of there is help and hope for BPD is really being led by each and every person who contributes their experience of BPD to the world wide web in whatever way or capacity possible.
Self help borderline style. Self help like only those who know the profound pain associated with Borderline Personality Disorder can communicate. The 2.0 wave is a movement of many, some connected, some not. It is a wave of countless individuals, each with their own experience, coming together in what is a growing BPD community.
This new platform, this nascent wave of intentional and unintentional, conscious and unconscious, interactivity brimming with inter-connectedness, even in the darkest of borderline experience – the intensely difficult reality of Emotional Dysregulation – lends itself literally to the next generation. The next generation that has not only just been diagnosed with BPD, but, the next generation who will experience, perhaps more than ever before, hopefully less stigma, fewer barriers to treatment and to self help based life coaching. This next generation, the generation in their 20's now will map out the journey that is theirs to take now and will walk the road that those of us who came before them paved and will create even further and long-overdue change. This cumulative and unfolding change can and will finally bite the beast of the stigma that has stuck so hard and so long to Borderline Personality Disorder. That has remained for each person with BPD and that even remains after one recovers. This beast of burden that is untold stigma, a stigma that many of us who are older had to endure the full-force of to find the help we needed, is losing its hold at long last.
I see this evidenced in so many online today. I see this evidenced in new approaches to every aspect of what was once the daunting challenge of BPD, what BPD entails and means, and all that is possible in the lives of those who are diagnosed with it. BPD, along with mental illness in general, may be proliferating but so too are the voices of change along with the growing number of people with BPD in recovery.
© A.J. Mahari, July 13, 2009 – All rights reserved.
A.J. Mahari is a Life Coach who, among other things, specializes in working with those with BPD and loved ones of those with BPD. A.J. has 6 years experience as a Life Coach and has coached hundreds of clients from all over the world.
