Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder by Shari Y. Manning

Author:Shari Y. Manning [Y. Manning Shari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781606234860
Publisher: Guilford Publications
Published: 2014-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

Help Your Loved One Check the Facts

Self-invalidating people have to learn to tolerate their own emotional experiences. It’s important to remember that what is precipitating the self-criticism is often emotion. The emotion fires, the emotion is difficult, and the person with BPD invalidates the emotion as wrong, bad, and so forth. When something bad happens to people with BPD, as it happens to all of us, they begin to believe that bad things happen to them because they are bad. When this is the case, it’s often useful to help your loved one check the facts. This does not mean telling him that bad things happen to all of us. It is about looking at the facts of the situation. Remember these guidelines:

• Ask the person to say exactly what happened without adding to it. So, it’s not “I’m so stupid and the tire blew on the interstate. I don’t deserve to be able to go out with friends.” It is “I was driving down the interstate. It was 10 o’clock at night. I had been to dinner with friends. My tire blew out on the interstate.”

• Now ask what emotion the person was having at the time. My guess, in the case of the tire blowout, is that it was probably fear.

• Then validate the emotion. Any of us would have some anxiety if we blew a tire out at night. Especially if we are women. That is a dangerous situation.

• Encourage the person to describe the behavior in the moment without generalizing to an interpretation of something larger (who he is as a person, how others feel about him, etc). Even after you’ve validated the emotion, most people with BPD will immediately tell you how it’s their fault that the event occurred. The fact is, the car owner could have something to do with a tire blowing. It could be that the tires are old and worn and the last time he had the oil changed he was told he needed new tires but put it off. It could be that he had a nail in his tire that he needed to have removed and he had not done so. In these cases, allow your loved one to own the behavior but not to leap from not getting the tire fixed to being bad or incapable. You can do this by sticking to the facts yourself. You might say something like “Okay, so you knew that you needed to get the nail out of the tire. We’ll agree that next time you will have that done, right?”

• Be a broken record—and don’t be lured into arguing the accuracy of your loved one’s self-criticism. If your loved one returns to how he’s bad, repeat that he knew he should fix the tire, but don’t argue for or against his being a stupid person.

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