Understanding “Borderline Personality Disorder”
A 2-hour long webinar on radically different ways of understanding and caring for people diagnosed with “Borderline Personality Disorder”.
Details
Cost: $25 - $75.
Length: 2 hours
Format: An MP4 video with automatic captions
The full video is available at the link below.
What’s covered:
Understanding “Borderline Personality Disorder”, including a recognition that the majority of people diagnosed with BPD are abuse survivors and / or autistic, as well as shifting our focus from what’s “wrong” with individuals to the environments that they have adapted (and are often continuing to adapt) to.
Caring for people through self-harm and other “self-destructive behaviours”. Too much of how we approach people labelled with BPD who self-harm is through punishment and shame. How can we support people even when they’re causing themselves harm?
Building our capacity to support people through “large” emotions. How can we compassionately support people through emotional expressions that seem like “too much”, confusing or even “scary”?
Understanding experiences like “splitting” or black-and-white thinking that trauma survivors tend to struggle with and how we can support them through it.
Unpacking common beliefs about people with this diagnosis (eg. 'people with BPD are "manipulative" or "attention-seeking"') through the lens of survivor injustice, and gaining radically different ways of understanding traits that have been labelled “attention-seeking”, “manipulative” and “dramatic”.
Caring for yourself while caring for others: learning and honouring your own limitations and ways of compassionately setting boundaries, particularly when caring for folks with abandonment trauma.
An intersectional lens to this diagnosis: why it's important for us to understand and consider a person's intersecting identities, collective, historical traumas and cultural backgrounds in understanding these “symptoms”- and how that can impact how we approach care and healing.
So many people diagnosed with BPD experience violence and control at the hands of someone in a position of greater power over them and then enter the mental health system for help and are met with the same dynamics, and taught that their inability to find healing through this type of treatment makes them “non-compliant”, “difficult” or “treatment-resistant”.
What we’re doing to people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder is incredibly damaging and violent. The majority of people diagnosed with BPD are survivors— though this isn’t always apparent because the diagnosis conceals the origins of these “symptoms”— and we’re punishing and shaming them for how they survive, while rarely taking into consideration the circumstances that many of them have survived or are continuing to survive.
We force them to perform their suffering by labelling their natural expressions of their suffering “dramatic” and “attention-seeking”. We deprive them of care and compassion in order to force them into giving up their only survival mechanisms. We label them “difficult” and accuse them of not “trying hard enough” instead of just trying to understand the challenges that people are facing.
There is no “stigma” towards BPD; people labelled with BPD face serious discrimination that can be retraumatising to life-threatening.
Through this webinar, I invite you to rethink what you’ve been taught about the diagnosis of “Borderline Personality Disorder” and to learn radically different ways of understanding and caring for people with this label rooted in compassion and Disability Justice. This is for mental health practitioners, healthcare workers, and for anyone else who cares for someone diagnosed with BPD.
The experiences of people labelled with BPD are extremely varied— but there is so much more than just the surface-level descriptions offered by this diagnosis. People deserve to be witnessed in their suffering, their traumas, rather than have everything they do be written off as “just their BPD” or “difficult behaviour”.
About me & this offering
I’ve been a survivor advocate and have been caring for survivors for years. I’ve helped survivors share their stories and escape or survive abusive situations. I’ve held space for survivors in the middle of the night when trauma-induced nightmares woke them or when they needed a safe place to stay. I’ve held non-judgmental space and offered compassion for people as they processed the guilt of turning to an old coping mechanism again.
I’ve witnessed survivors break down and respond in huge ways that are often considered “crazy” or “dramatic” without judgment or jumping to “fix” them.
Survivors deserve space to be witnessed in their suffering, to be supported without judgment or pressure to be “healed”. Without coercion or punishment or shame for how they cope.
I’ve also spent years researching this diagnosis, and the past year and a half consulting with mental health practitioners who work with people diagnosed with BPD and offering new ways of understanding their clients as well as advice on compassionately caring for them.
This offering is a culmination of both my research and experiences to offer participants different ways of understanding the suffering and experiences of people labelled with “Borderline Personality Disorder” and as well as more compassionate ways of caring for people diagnosed with BPD— instead of offering “care” that retraumatises them.
Part of the proceeds of this webinar go towards helping two survivors in the Global South relocate from unsafe living situations. Because the Global South remains systematically deprived of its own resources, organising resources to help survivors can be particularly difficult here, and your contributions to this webinar will go a long way.