Borderline Personality Disorder and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy

1369 Words3 Pages

Ever since entering the field of Social Work, I have been exposed to many disorders, therapies, frameworks, and strategies in my studies. My worldview for much of my life had been that I would never need to use any of the treatments or skills, because I was not “broken”, or “too underprivileged” to have gained the education to “know better”. But, as I progressed through my education, I have come to realize that everybody is constantly learning and using acquired skills to function better in everyday life. For myself, I found the skills within Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) treatment to best addressed the areas I was lacking. DBT was originally developed to focus on individuals suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). As described by the National Institute of Mental Health, the criteria an individual must meet to be diagnosed with BPD are some of the following: extreme emotional reactions, a pattern of intense and stormy relationships with family, distorted and unstable self-image or sense of self, impulsive and dangerous behaviours, recurring suicidal/self-harming behaviours, intense and highly changeable moods, chronic feelings of emptiness/boredom, inappropriate and intense anger, and having stress-related paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms (n.d.). To meet the needs of these complex symptoms, a four module skills training group was developed to known as “DBT skills”, 1) mindfulness, 2) interpersonal effectiveness, 3) emotion regulation, and 4) distress tolerance (Feigenbaum, 2008). The model of DBT assumes that individuals with BPD lack in the areas of interpersonal, self-regulation, and distress tolerance skills, and recognize that an individual’s personal and environment factors are influenti... ... middle of paper ... ...e personally. As I have mentioned previously, I have always had a challenging relationship with my mother. I felt like nothing I did was good enough, and the things I did accomplish were dismissed to the point where I felt like my life was nothing of importance. Why I was so fixated on my mother’s approval is a discussion for another paper, but according to such social contingencies result in the child’s oscillation between emotional inhibition and extreme emotional reac- tivity. In support of these proposals, research has found that parental punishment or minimization of emotional expres- sion is correlated with children’s proneness to frequent or in- tense negative emotions (e.g., Eisenberg, Fabes, & Murphy, 1996) and low socioemotional competence (e.g., Jones, Eisenberg, Fabes, & MacKinnon, 2002).

Open Document