How do you self-soothe when your BPD is triggered? Do you have any advice?

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How do you self-soothe when your BPD is triggered? Do you have any advice?

Jay Haliczer, Disability Rights Advocate, Ediscovery Attorney

Ok, so I don’t have a BPD diagnosis. I have PTSD and generalized anxiety. Various “professionals” have tried to tag me with that label, and there’s a lot of crossover.

Honestly the best thing that helps me most reliably is clonidine. It’s nominally an anti-hypertensive, but it’s really most effective at treating hyperarousal and/or nightmares in people with BPD and/or PTSD.

My provider described it to me as “it puts a cap on the amount of adrenaline your system can dump into your bloodstream all at once.” I’m sure that way, way, way oversimplified, maybe to the point of inaccuracy, but it helps. It really helps.

It helps so much that I’m angry that it took almost twenty years of struggling to deal with hyperarousal using mental tricks and skills before anyone told me it exists. So many damaged or broken relationships, for just no good reason. So many hours pacing desperately back and forth, or around the block for hours, just trying to bring my emotions down to a level I could manage. Just so much waste. It’s a really really good drug for me, and for many others with ADHD/BPD/PTSD.

ETA: I hesitated to name a specific drug, but decided to. I did this not because I think everyone should take clonidine, but because for years, I experienced and was treated for mental illness, and somehow no one ever prescribed any drugs to treat hyperarousal or anxiety except for benzos for occasional use. This is so problematic and frustrating. I don’t think every should take the drug I take, and if I did, my opinion would be utterly unbacked by relevant qualifications. I just wish more of us knew that there’s stuff out there beyond antidepressants, benzos, and atypicals (which thank goodness aren’t used off-label as much these days).

☆☆☆☆☆

Asbjorn Magnussen, DBT post grad.

First step has to be to break it down to discern what’s actually happening — nothing triggers ‘BPD’ — BPD is not an emotion, or a thing that exists anywhere in your brain, it is a name some folks gave to a complex set of processes any one of which could be at the root of whatever got triggered.

But those processes aren’t as important as the remediation of the symptoms, so make step one identifying which individual emotion you’re dealing with.

They all have names, they all have different internal and external effects — you can investigate these by meditating and observing your emotions non-judgementally, just to get to know them, but also you can use this cheat sheet:

Anger requires different self-soothing to trust, trust requires different self-soothing to joy, joy requires different self-soothing to sadness, and what’s more the things that work for you will be idiosyncratic to you, yourself and your situation.

So you really have to get to know the stuff you’re working with — you.

Inside and out.

Experiment mindfully with whatever means of self-comfort are at your disposal.

This is best done when you’re not triggered, so that you’re prepared for getting triggered.

Ultimately the best solution is to manage your life right so that you just don’t get triggered, but you can’t know how to do that without establishing a chain of cause and effect — believe it or not the main reason you get triggered at all is because of not being able to establish a chain of cause and effect, and this is a million miles from being your fault because you haven’t had any help with it.

It is very hard to get dysregulated thoughts and emotions put in social context by others, i.e. ‘validated’ — because your emotions are stronger than neurotypical folks, and neurotypical folks are afraid of that which they do not understand. We all are, really — just like you with your emotions, perhaps. Perfectly human, if generally unfortunate. Either way this makes ‘you knowing you’ more difficult than ‘them knowing them’, and it would be easier for you if you were one of ‘them’ because you’d have folks to bounce ideas off, but you don’t, which is why you’re here. Hello!

So anyhow — you have to do it on your own, with self-knowledge, about what makes you happy, sad, angry, etc.

Then, you learn to listen to yourself.

Then, you learn how to get happy, avoid sad, manage anger (rather than eating it) and negate fear. But your life is different to everyone else’s life, so you have to do it for you.

Start by pinning down which individual emotion you mean when you say ‘BPD’.

Hope this helps! :)