(Part 3) Top products from r/BPD

I conquered emotional eating and some other comfort habits through meditation. We eat to avoid feeling uncomfortable emotions. So I went out of my way to experience them, lean into them, to meditate on those emotions, to understand and accept them. A few weeks of dedicated meditation on feeling and accepting uncomfortable things, combined with a focus on my values (health is a top priority) and learning other emotional regulation skills (through DBT), allowed me to stop eating emotionally in the vast majority of circumstances. It takes hard work to replace such a strong comfort behavior, but it's possible. I'm sure I'll have to do some version of all that again someday, but it's been months now and I'm still good.

As for hobbies, I think you're describing mood-dependent behavior. Our moods change more often than the tide. If you let your moods dictate your behavior, you'll start and quit things all the time. There is no trick here, just an understanding that no matter what I choose, my moods will eventually make it uninteresting. So if I want something in my life, I need to accept that I'll be uninterested at some point, and I'll need to do it anyway. What's the point then? The point is that I value consistency, I value having skills and hobbies, I want to improve in the areas of my life that fit my talents and ambitions, and I absolutely do not value being flaky with the direction of my life. So when I feel like quitting, I remind myself I'd feel like quitting anything, and I chose this thing knowing I want it in my life long-term no matter what I feel in that moment. ( speaking of which, just about time for my 3 mile walk ;) )

A lot of your struggles sound like mine from last year. Getting serious about a DBT program and a starting a strong meditation practice would probably help you a lot. Practice challenging your self-defeating thoughts would also help. The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown and Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns can teach you a lot. The stories we tell ourselves have extreme power over our internal states (things like "I don't deserve oxygen"), and you can absolutely change the stories you tell yourself. It's worth the effort.

PsychologyToday isn't that great as well, on an in depth level. For me, I've found myself aimlessly surfing through the oversimplified/summaried articles, that only veers on the surface level of things.

• "Emotionally instability" -- but what does that explain?
  
  Honestly, the pathology spreads across so many different disciplines/schools of thought, that I had to go through many different academic literature to grasp a conceptual understanding; attachment psychology, complex traumatic stress, neuroscience, developmental psychology, developmental trauma, object-relations, intrapsychic ego (impulsiveness/ego management/emotional-pull-push with people), dissociation, as well as marital therapy and sociological Asian American (to understand the cultural barriers/friction with mental health, then I'm looking towards understanding MBT and DBT, as a way to empathize.
  
  I've pretty much have most of the "mainstream" BPD books out there, and I think the Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified does a fairly good job providing a detailed overview of the prognosis of those with BPD. However, I've come across Borderline Personality Disorder: New Reasons for Hope again, and I think it may be more promising after skimming through it. I passed on it when I first forayed into BPD literature, instead opting for simpler books; however, I've come to realize that has only lead to the surface level of things as well.
  
  
  As for Randi, her book does more oversimplification which is consequently harmful, than the righteousness of doing good it wistfully intends. It also seems that she is using/projecting the book and her participation in the BPD community as a collective coping mechanism for her past. IDK
  
  Your website is great. I feel research/literature wise, we're reaching a point where we have a good amount research/literature on BPD that provides contemporary answers, but it's still fragmented across cross-topics/disciplines. We have top-experts in their own specialization like Otto Von in PTSD that usually have a chapter on BPD in their textbooks, and I reckon there should be more work from everyone into encompassing a collaborative comprehensive text for this highly niche subject of BPD, that entails not just one sole disciplinary focus.

I have two recommendations:

1. read books to get a better understanding of how you work. I personally would recommend these:
   http://www.amazon.com/Taming-Your-Outer-Child-Self-Defeating/dp/0345514483 for a good idea of how emotions and behavior work and interact.
   http://www.amazon.com/Stubbornly-Refuse-Yourself-Miserable-Anything/dp/0818404566/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381271882&sr=1-1&keywords=stubbornly+refuse to help change your perspective
   Or another good trick is looking at the top rated on amazon, too. But knowledge can help a lot.
   
   
2. look for a therapist who will video with you. You want that stake in the ground to help keep you on track and ensure progress. Even if it's every other week. Find someone you trust and are in sync with. They are a known good ground, and a good one will be there for you when you're having a problem.
   
   Do both of these things. You want that external monitoring and gap filling, but the actual growth will come in your own research as you connect the dots.
   
   That's my two cents, at least.
   
   You mentioned school? is there any resources there that can help or redirect you to someone who can?

Recommended:

Nina Brown's Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up's Guide to Getting Over Narcissistic Parents

Eleanor Payson's The Wizard of Oz and other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family

Lindsay Gibson's Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents

Elan Golomb's Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in the Struggle for Self

Susan Forward's Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life (a bit long in tooth now, but still useful) and Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You

Plus getting on board the Treatment Train:

1. Medications, but only if really needed to get one stabilized enough to do the next six things on this list: Find a board certified psychopharmacologist in your area by using the clinician locator on the Psychology Today website. Getting psych meds from a GP or primary care doc can be useless or even risky. Psych diagnoses, meds and med interactions are just too complex now for most GPs and primary care docs.
   
   
2. Support Groups: AA, MA and/or NA if one is using intoxicants to try to cope with emotional pain; ACA, EA and CoDA... where you will find others in similar boats who have found explanations, answers and solutions.
   
   
3. Books and academic, professional websites including Mayo Clinic, WebMD, NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), and even Wikipedia (when everything asserted is solidly documented with citations). Strongly recommended because they all understand the upshots of having been stressed for too long, including complex PTSD which sounds like at least a good possibility here: Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Patricia Ogden, Ronald Kurtz, Laurence Heller, Bruce McEwen, Sonya Lupien and Robert Sapolsky. Accurate information is power.
   
   
4. Psychotherapy: I currently use Ogden's SP4T as the interoceptive 9th of the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing to manage any "time bombs" that turn up, but had good results over the years with several of the CBTs including REBT, collegiate critical thinking, schema therapy, and CPT, as well as DBT, MBCT, ACT, MBBT, MBSR, EMDR, HBCP, SEPt, and NARM.
   
   DBT, MBCT, ACT, MBBT and MBSR are terrific for symptom management. EMDR, HBCT, SEPt, SP4T and NARM are first-rate for memory-reprocessing, sense-making and detachment from the conditioning, programming, etc.
   
   To find the clinicians who know how to use these psychotherapies, look here, and here, and here, and (for DBT specialists in particular) here. If you dig a little on each page, you will be able to see which therapies they use. Then interview them as though they were applying for a job with your company. Most MD / psychiatrists, btw, are not therapists themselves (they are medication specialists), but can refer you to those who are, and are often -- though not always -- excellent sources of referral.
   
   
5. Mindfulness Meditation: Try the Vipassana-style? (For a lot of people with anxiety, this stuff handles anxiety chop chop. Not sure about depression. Many of the modern psychotherapies for anxiety are actually based on it now.)
   
   
6. Therapy Workbooks: I got a lot of lift-off by using inexpensive workbooks like these, and these, and these, and these.
   
   
7. Moderate exercise: Because it is the single healthiest of the distractions one can use to yank oneself out of the paradigm for a while... and it can help to "massage" the brain so that it responds more quickly to psychotherapy.
   

Many, many things actually. I like the following books. They contain tons of helpful information and techniques without fluff:

• Coping with BPD: DBT and CBT Skills to Soothe the Symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder - Nice little simple and concise guide on how to handle almost anything. It's especially helpful to reference when you're feeling overwhelmed, which is what I mainly use it for.
  
  
• The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook - The basics of DBT. Has exercises to do on your own.
  
  
  
• The Feeling Good Handbook - Basics of CBT. Also contains exercises to do on your own.
  
  
• Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World - DBT doesn't do mindfulness justice imo, especially considering it's "the core of DBT." This book helped me to actually understand it, its value, and how to incorporate it into my life.
  
  edit:typo

I honestly have no idea (it could have been an article also) but this is good:
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Multitasking-Doing-Gets-Nothing/dp/0470372257/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494875493&sr=8-1&keywords=multitasking

Also two of my favorite pop pysch books (not 'laziness' related but great information just about how the brain works):
https://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Love-Thomas-Lewis/dp/0375709223/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494875459&sr=8-1&keywords=a+general+theory+of+love
https://www.amazon.com/Love-2-0-Finding-Happiness-Connection/dp/0142180475/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&qid=1494875385&sr=8-19&keywords=the+psychology+of+love

A good book to look at is the body keeps the score by bessel van der kolk .

https://somethingtosayafterabusecom.com/ - good list for processing abuse

https://crazywisefilm.com/ - This isnt about BPD but more broadly about mental health.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P_Gj6Z9_LM- Gabor Mate is a great person to look into. He has several talks and books that on trauma that have really helped things click for me.

madinamerica.com is a website that has a lot of great resources (like Emily Cutler). It can seem "out there" but it offers unique lens to understand trauma and mental health.

Holotropic breathwork can be a low cost and effective healing modality.

There's a great book you might like, called Writing as a Way of Healing (http://www.amazon.ca/Writing-Way-Healing-Telling-Transforms/dp/0807072435). It really helped me journal in a way that was more productive. Eventually I was able to write about past events that were extremely painful, and I found it really cathartic.

(also Star Trek rules! :D)

edit: one of my favourite quotes on the healing power of writing: "Write hard and clear about what hurts." -Ernest Hemingway

Have you tried mindfulness meditation or prayer? I also struggle with this and i'm trying to get some sort of prayer or mindfulness meditation in everyday. The prayer is easy for me as i'm a Muslim. I recommend the following book for mindfulness:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindfulness-practical-guide-finding-frantic/dp/074995308X

Edit: Oh and def bring it up with your psych. That is what they are there for.

thinking of getting this: https://www.amazon.com.au/Ivy-Inky-Butterfly-Johanna-Basford/dp/0753545659
looks good :3

>When she sometimes stay over in the town he lives in, she sleeps in his bed. They have a couch. I don't think things are platonic, and though he tells me that it is. God, his presences drives me int a speculative-crazydom.


DUUUUUUUUUDE. Dude.... Dude? I mean come on. If I was your friend I would slap you in the face. Just know that when you breakup she is doing to get another BF the next day and you need to be mentally prepared for that. She is going to hound you relentlessly after that. Dont look at her instagram/fb/etc. it will only hurt you

Its good that she is in DBT and it will be up to you if you want to completely cut her out of your life or see if she gets any bit better. A relationship should be mutual and this relationship is not.

>I feel like I let myself stagnate. I don't enjoy life.

Nothing more needs to be said. Get out before she destroys whats left of you. On your road to recovery, if you're in your 20's or about to be, I suggest this book, its helped me mentally a lot already even though I read it kind of late (I'm 27).

http://www.amazon.com/The-Defining-Decade-Twenties-Matter-And/dp/0446561754

Yep, here is book with many reasons: https://www.amazon.com/Hope-People-Borderline-Personality-Disorder/dp/0761525726

In case anyone was wondering what a mochipuni banana looks like...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079KJVLGX/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_EakYBbX05Y9X7

http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Handbook-David-Burns/dp/0452281326

No not weird at all! Am happy to share knowing it'll help you. I remember being where you are ~2years ago now. I was very confused and in denial for so long, I doubted my own perceptions because they were masters at making me feel like I was simply just crazy. There's an overwhelming amount of resources online about narcissistic abuse, and even how pwBPD and pwNPD are drawn to each other in the "toxic dance" of feeding into each other's sickness. Don't get too caught up in reading those sites, it's important to educate yourself but it's also all too easy to become obsessed and staying locked in a victim mentality instead of moving forward.
Do not question yourself. If it's one thing I learned from all my abusive relationships it's to ALWAYS TRUST YOUR GUT. My body knew early on that something felt off, I would have these fleeting moments where I felt distinctly unsafe and deeply unsettled but having no idea why or where it came from. It just took my mind a lot longer to catch up and figure out what was going on.

For me, the hard part wasn't figuring out the abuse though. The hard part was actually getting out of it. I researched, I obsessed, I rationalized- I did Olympic levels of mental gymnastics to convince myself of reasons to stay. That maybe they're just sick, and I'm sick, and we could help each other by just staying together and fighting through it. It took me months before I fully accepted reality and went no contact. The turning point for me was realizing that the abuse would never stop, those kind of abusers do. not. change. I highly recommend reading "Why does he do that?" By Lundy Bancroft
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/0425191656
The author is a counselor specifically for abusive men, he has experience with thousands of abusers and he wrote this book to educate and give insight into the minds of these guys. He lays it out in the first chapter, abusers don't change (it's extremely rare, and more often than not, the change is temporary). This book was the game changer for me, it helped me understand that abuse isn't some uncontrollable symptom of a mental illness-- it's a choice. It's about power and control, power and control that abusers do not and will not give up. Really knowing that is what gave me the strength to say no more.

Sorry this got so long and wordy, if you have any questions about anything don't hesitate to ask. I also really want you to know that you are a beautiful and worthy human being who deserves to be loved and respected<3