I need them to be aware and present with me in the midst of the storm, not just tell me what to do.

Thirty seconds of pure awareness is a long time, especially after a lifetime of escaping yourself at all costs.

An inner ease spreads inside me. Such is the power of acceptance and understanding from other people, the power of validation

DBT’s catchphrase of developing a life worth living means you’re not just surviving; rather, you have good reasons for living. I’m also getting better at keeping another dialectic in mind: On the one hand, the...

For those of us with BPD, entering into a shared experience means passing through the ring of fire that leaves us feeling even more burned—and in this case branded with a label no one would...

I’m not interested in Bob Marley telling me to ‘lively up’ myself. The only music that satisfies me is Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor’s voice crying through industrial rhytms. In the August evenings, I...

I’ve grown up with an ethic, call it a part, that insists I hide my pain at all costs. As I talk, I feel this pain leaking out—not just the core symptom of BPD, but...

So at family gatherings… I try to stick to the acceptable script. Indeed, I discover that the less I say, the happier everyone seems to be with me. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t have...

All the skills from DBT glom together, a mass of acronyms without any meaning. I pull out the DBT books and paw through the pages. Something has to help. Then I find these words: ‘The...

I’m so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.

Accepting a psychiatric diagnosis is like a religious conversion. It’s an adjustment in cosmology, with all its accompanying high priests, sacred texts, and stories of religion. And I am, for better or worse, an instant...

But what if you simply don’t have a solid self to return to—if the way you are is seen as basically broken? And what if you can’t conceive of “normal” or “healthy” because pain and...

In the life cycle of an intense emotion, if it isn’t acted upon, it eventually peaks and then decreases. But as Dr. Linehan explains, people with BPD have a different physiological experience with this process...

Yet I also recognize this: Even if everyone in the world were to accept me and my illness and validate my pain, unless I can abide myself and be compassionate toward my own distress, I...

We need this help from the outside because we don’t know how to to do this for ourselves. We start with a deep deficit—a chasm really—when it comes to understanding and being tolerant of ourselves,...