Identifying High Risk Situations for Borderline Personality Disorder BPD

Order The Borderline Personality Disorder Workbook by Dr. Fox: https://goo.gl/LQEgy1

This video is going to cover the high-risk situations for individuals with BPD and BPD traits. These high-risk situations include interpersonal situations, negative emotions, life events, cognitive distress, and cue and urges. Learning about these high-risk situations may help you build your awareness and insight into each of these and help you to find alternative behaviors to help manage them better. So let’s get started.

High-risk interpersonal situations tend to involve a lot of conflict and are linked to specific individuals and associated thoughts, feelings, or beliefs. Can you think of some of these for you? They typically occur when you feel you’ve lost the support of a friend, loved one, or family member and feel worthless, abandoned, rejected, and so on.

Negative emotions include anger, anxiety, stress, guilt, loneliness, helplessness, shame, and feelings of being trapped, to name a few. With BPD, these emotions tend to overwhelm you, causing you to have a hard time seeing anything adaptive or positive about yourself, others, and situations.

High-risk life events include divorce, unemployment, death of a loved one, end of a relationship, personal injury, financial problems, imprisonment, or anything that causes significant physical or psychological pain and discomfort.
Cognitive distress involves negative thoughts and memories you can’t get out of your mind that are related to fear, danger, past trauma, or stressful events. It causes intense anxiety, uneasiness, agitation, and so on.

And lastly, cues and urges are those things in the environment that influence your thoughts, feelings, and memories. These can be drug paraphernalia, pictures of hurtful people from your past, items that you use to harm yourself, place of past loss or trauma, etc.

Take a moment and think about each of these and identify people, places, and things that fit for you. Are these triggers or emotional buttons for you? How do you feeling just thinking about them? Many don’t feel too good, and that’s understandable, many want to block them out, but when you try to block them out, you encourage fear and strengthen your BPD to drive you to engage in maladaptive beliefs, behaviors, and patterns. What I do with my clients is empower them to master their response. We work to identify alternative behaviors to engage in.

Some of the ones most effective for my clients include:
Reaching out to a safe and positive friend or loved one.
Removing yourself from the high-risk situation.

Making a list of all the benefits of not falling into your negative patterns.

Smelling an essential oil, such as lavender, cinnamon, or cedarwood, that helps you refocus and calms you down.

I hope you found this video helpful and if you’d like to learn more about high-risk situations and alternative behaviors, check out my workbook The Borderline Personality Disorder Workbook.

Daniel J. Fox, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist in Texas, international speaker, and award winning author. He has been specializing in the treatment and assessment of individuals with personality disorders for over 15 years in the state and federal prison system, universities, and in private practice. His specialty areas include personality disorders, ethics, burnout prevention, and emotional intelligence.

He has published several articles in these areas and is the author of:

The Borderline Personality Disorder Workbook: An Integrative Program to Understand and Manage Your BPD. Available May 1, 2019, but you can order it now at: https://goo.gl/LQEgy1

Antisocial, Borderline, Narcissistic and Histrionic Workbook: Treatment Strategies for Cluster B Personality Disorders (IPBA Benjamin Franklin Gold Award Winner): https://goo.gl/BLRkFy

Narcissistic Personality Disorder Toolbox: 55 Practical Treatment Techniques for Clients, Their Parents & Their Children: https://goo.gl/sZYhym

The Clinician’s Guide to Diagnosis and Treatment of Personality Disorders: https://goo.gl/ZAVe9v

Dr. Fox maintains a website of various treatment interventions focused on working with and attenuating the symptomatology related to individuals along the antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic personality spectrum (www.drdfox.com).

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Amazon Author’s Page: amazon.com/author/drfox

Thank you for your attention and I hope you enjoy my videos and find them helpful and subscribe. I always welcome topic suggestions and comments.