Tag: Psychology

Borderline Personality Disorder, what exactly is it?

If you know someone who’s extremely sensitive and triggered about the smallest things, read this.

The majority of my posts bring attention to child sexual abuse, its long-term effects, and prevention. Honestly, I hadn’t heard much about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and didn’t begin researching it (until about a year ago) when someone close to me was diagnosed with it, presumably caused by their childhood trauma.

How is BPD different from common irritability, anxiety or depression? If you or someone you know is extremely sensitive, has explosive anger and volatile/unstable relationships, this post is worth reading.

BPD Simplified

Borderline Personality Disorder is a mental health disorder that impacts the way you think and feel about yourself and others, causing problems functioning in everyday life. It includes self-image issues, difficulty managing emotions and behavior, and a pattern of unstable relationships.

With BPD, you have an intense fear of abandonment or instability, and you may have difficulty tolerating being alone. Almost everything in your world is unstable. Yet inappropriate anger, impulsiveness and frequent mood swings may push others away, even though you want to have loving and lasting relationships.

People with BPD tend to be extremely sensitive. Some describe it as like having an exposed nerve ending. Small things can trigger intense reactions. And once upset, you have trouble calming down. It’s easy to understand how this emotional volatility and inability to self-soothe leads to relationship turmoil and impulsive—even reckless—behavior.

Borderline personality disorder usually begins by early adulthood. The condition seems to be worse in young adulthood and may gradually get better with age.

Causes

Some factors related to personality development can increase the risk of developing borderline personality disorder. These include:

  • Hereditary predisposition. You may be at a higher risk if a close relative — your mother, father, brother or sister — has the same or a similar disorder.
  • Stressful childhood. Many people with the disorder report being sexually or physically abused or neglected during childhood.
  • Some people have lost or were separated from a parent or close caregiver when they were young or had parents or caregivers with substance misuse or other mental health issues. Others have been exposed to hostile conflict and unstable family relationships.

A diagnosis of borderline personality disorder is usually made in adults, not in children or teenagers. That’s because what appear to be signs and symptoms of borderline personality disorder may go away as children get older and become more mature.

Diagnosing Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) manifests in many different ways, but for the purposes of diagnosis, mental health professionals group the symptoms into nine major categories.

In order to be diagnosed with BPD, you must show signs of at least five of these symptoms. Furthermore, the symptoms must be long-standing (usually beginning in adolescence) and impact many areas of your life.

Bipolar disorder vs. Borderline Personality Disorder. Bipolar Disorder is a mental (or brain) disorder, while BPD is an emotional disorder. Both disorders are characterized by mood swings, but the length and intensity of these mood swings are different.

The Nine symptoms of BPD

1. Fear of abandonment. People with BPD are often terrified of being abandoned or left alone. Even something as innocuous as a loved one arriving home late from work or going away for the weekend may trigger intense fear. This can prompt frantic efforts to keep the other person close. You may beg, cling, start fights, track your loved one’s movements, or even physically block the person from leaving. Unfortunately, this behavior tends to have the opposite effect—driving others away.

2. Unstable relationships. People with BPD tend to have relationships that are intense and short-lived. You may fall in love quickly, believing that each new person is the one who will make you feel whole, only to be quickly disappointed. Your relationships either seem perfect or horrible, without any middle ground. Your lovers, friends, or family members may feel like they have emotional whiplash as a result of your rapid swings from idealization to devaluation, anger, and hate.

3. Unclear or shifting self-image. When you have BPD, your sense of self is typically unstable. Sometimes you may feel good about yourself, but other times you hate yourself, or even view yourself as evil. You probably don’t have a clear idea of who you are or what you want in life. As a result, you may frequently change jobs, friends, lovers, religion, values, goals, or even sexual identity.

4. Impulsive, self-destructive behaviors. If you have BPD, you may engage in harmful, sensation-seeking behaviors, especially when you’re upset. You may impulsively spend money you can’t afford, binge eat, drive recklessly, shoplift, engage in risky sex, or overdo it with drugs or alcohol. These risky behaviors may help you feel better in the moment, but they hurt you and those around you over the long-term.

5. Self harm. Suicidal behavior or deliberate self-harm is common in people with BPD. Suicidal behavior includes thinking about suicide, making suicidal gestures or threats, or actually carrying out a suicide attempt. Self-harm encompasses all other attempts to hurt yourself without suicidal intent. Common forms of self-harm include cutting and burning.

6. Extreme emotional swings. Unstable emotions and moods are common with BPD. One moment, you may feel happy, and the next, despondent. Little things that other people brush off can send you into an emotional tailspin. These mood swings are intense, but they tend to pass fairly quickly (unlike the emotional swings of depression or bipolar disorder), usually lasting just a few minutes or hours.

7. Chronic feelings of emptiness. People with BPD often talk about feeling empty, as if there’s a hole or a void inside them. At the extreme, you may feel as if you’re “nothing” or “nobody.” This feeling is uncomfortable, so you may try to fill the void with things like drugs, food, or sex. But nothing feels truly satisfying.

8. Explosive anger. If you have BPD, you may struggle with intense anger and a short temper. You may also have trouble controlling yourself once the fuse is lit—yelling, throwing things, or becoming completely consumed by rage. It’s important to note that this anger isn’t always directed outwards. You may spend a lot of time feeling angry at yourself.

9. Feeling suspicious or out of touch with reality. People with BPD often struggle with paranoia or suspicious thoughts about others’ motives. When under stress, you may even lose touch with reality—an experience known as dissociation. You may feel foggy, spaced out, or as if you’re outside your own body.

BPD is treatable. Healing is a matter of breaking the dysfunctional patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are causing you distress. It’s not easy to change lifelong habits.

In the past, many mental health professionals found it difficult to treat BPD, so they came to the conclusion that there was little to be done. But we now know that BPD is treatable. In fact, the long-term prognosis for BPD is better than those for depression and bipolar disorder. However, it requires a specialized approach.

The bottom line is that most people with BPD can and do get better—and they do so fairly rapidly with the right treatments and support.

Help is available right now!

Borderline Personality Disorder is a mental health disorder that impacts self-image, difficulty managing emotions and behavior, and a pattern of unstable relationships.

Sources: 1. Mayo Clinic – https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/borderline-personality-disorder/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20370242. 2. Helpguide.org- http://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-disorders/borderline-personality-disorder.html

9 Ways Your Parents Caused Your Low Self-Esteem

It’s not uncommon for childhood trauma to manifest itself well into adulthood. When we start to connect-the-dots, it’s clear to see a direct correlation between certain childhood events and our self-worth. Low self-esteem can be a result of a negative or dysfunctional family environment, but where exactly does it originate? There’s no one answer to this question but here’s a short list of ways your parents may be the root-cause of your low self-esteem.

1. Disapproving Authority Figures

If you grew up hearing that whatever you did wasn’t good enough, how are you supposed to grow into an adult with a positive self-image? If you were criticized no matter what you did or how hard you tried, it becomes difficult to feel confident and comfortable in your own skin later. The fear forced on you for perpetually “failing” can feel blindingly painful.

2. Uninvolved/Preoccupied Caregivers

It’s difficult to motivate yourself to want more, strive for more, and imagine that you deserve more when your parents or other primary caregivers didn’t pay attention – as if your greatest achievements weren’t worth noticing. This scenario often results in feeling forgotten, unacknowledged, and unimportant later. It can also leave you feeling that you are not accountable to anyone, or you may believe that no one in the here and now is concerned about your whereabouts, when that’s actually a carry-over feeling from the past. Feeling unrecognized can result in the belief that you are supposed to apologize for your existence.

3. Authority Figures in Conflict

If parents or other caregivers fight or make each other feel badly, children absorb the negative emotions and distrustful situations that have been modeled for them. It’s scary, overwhelming, and disorganizing. This experience can also occur when one parent is deeply distraught or acts unpredictably around the child. When you were subjected to excessive conflicts between authority figures, it can feel as if you contributed to the fights or to a parent’s painful circumstance. Intense conflicts are experienced as extremely threatening, fear driving, and you may believe you caused it. This feeling of being “tainted” can be carried into adulthood.

4. Bullying (with Unsupportive Parents)

If you had the support of a relatively safe, responsive, aware family you may have had a better chance of recovering and salvaging your self esteem after having been taunted and bullied as a child. If you already felt unsafe at home and the torture continued outside home, the overwhelming sense of being lost, abandoned, hopeless, and filled with self-loathing pervaded your everyday life. It can also feel like anyone who befriends you is doing you a favor, because you see yourself as so damaged. Or you may think that anyone involved in your life must be predatory and not to be trusted. Without a supportive home life, the effects of bullying can be magnified and miserably erode quality of life.

5. Bullying (with Over-Supportive Parents)

Conversely, if your parents were overly and indiscriminately supportive, it can leave you feeling unprepared for the cruel world. Without initial cause to develop a thick outer layer, it can feel challenging and even shameful to view yourself as unable to withstand the challenges of life outside the home. From this perspective, you may feel ill prepared and deeply ashamed to admit this dirty ugly secret about you, even to your parents, because you need to protect them from the pain they would endure if they knew. Instead, you hid the painful secret of what’s happened to you. Shame can cloud your perspective.

Eventually it can seem as if your parents’ opinion of you is in conflict with the world’s opinion of you. It can compel you to cling to what is familiar in your life, because it’s hard to trust what’s real and what isn’t. You may question the validity of your parents’ positive view of you, and default to the idea that you are not good enough or are victim-like and should be the subject of ridicule.

6. Bullying (with Uninvolved Parents)

If your primary caregivers were otherwise occupied while you were being bullied and downplayed your experience, or they let you down when you needed their advocacy, you might have struggled with feeling undeserving of notice, unworthy of attention, and angry at being shortchanged. When the world feels unsafe, the shame and pain are brutal. These feelings could also be evoked if parents were in transitional or chaotic states – so that what happened to you wasn’t on anyone’s radar. If there’s chaos at home, it can be hard to ask for attention or to feel like there is room for you take up space with your struggles. Instead, you may retreat and become more isolated and stuck in shame.

7. Academic Challenges Without Caregiver Support

There’s nothing like feeling stupid to create low self-esteem. If you felt like you didn’t understand what was happening in school – as if you were getting further and further behind without anyone noticing or stepping in to help you figure out what accommodations you needed – you might have internalized the belief that you are somehow defective. You may feel preoccupied with and excessively doubt your own smartness, and feel terribly self-conscious about sharing your opinions. The shame of feeling as if you aren’t good enough can be difficult to shake, even after you learn your own ways to accomodate for your academic difficulties.

8. Trauma

Physical, sexual, or emotional abuse may be the most striking and overt causes of low self-esteem. Being forced into a physical and emotional position against your will can make it very hard to like the world, trust yourself or trust others, which profoundly impacts self-esteem. It may even feel like your fault when it couldn’t be less your fault. Obviously, in these scenarios, there is so much going on at one time that you might need to check out, dissociate, go away. It can make you feel like nothingness. In an effort to gain control of your circumstances, in your head you may have convinced yourself that you were complicit or even to blame. You may have found ways to cope with the abuse, to manage the chaos in ways that you understand are unhealthy, so you may ultimately view yourself as repulsive and seeringly shameful, among a zillion other feelings. 

9. Belief Systems

When your religious (or other) belief system puts you in a position of feeling as if you are perpetually sinning, it can be similar to the experience of living with a disapproving authority figure. Whether judgment is emanating from authority figures or from an established belief system in your life, it can evoke shame, guilt, conflict and self-loathing. Many structured belief systems offer two paths: one that’s all good and one that’s all bad. When you inevitably fall in the abyss between the two, you end up feeling confused, wrong, disoriented, shameful, fake, and disappointed with yourself over and over again. 

It is important to understand that experiencing any of these early circumstances doesn’t mean you must be bound by them as an adult. They will be woven into your fabric and absorbed into your sense of yourself in different ways over time, but there are many paths to feeling that you are better prepared, less fragmented, and more confident moving forward.

As an adult, when you examine your history, you can begin to see that in some cases the derision or intense negative messages you encountered weren’t necessarily meant for you. Rather, they flowed from the circumstances of the people who delivered them. That perspective can help you to dilute the power of the negative messages about yourself you received and formed.

There are some circumstances you may have suffered that may be impossible to understand. You can’t and aren’t expected to understand, empathize or forgive in these circumstances. What matters most is continuing to find ways to feel as okay and as safe as you can in your own life right now.

The more you understand the sources of your low self-esteem and can put them into context, the more you can use your self-understanding to begin the process of repairing self-esteem and living the life you’ve always wanted.

Source: Original article, psychologytoday.com- 2013, by Suzanne Lachmann Psy.D.

Emotional abuse of a child longer-lasting effects than childhood sexual abuse?

Surprisingly, psychological, also known as ‘emotional abuse’ of a child can have more long-lasting negative psychiatric effects than either childhood physical abuse or childhood sexual abuse.

Definition of Child Psychological Abuse

Psychological abuse of a child is a pattern of intentional verbal or behavioral actions or lack of actions that convey to a child the message that he or she is worthless, flawed, unloved, unwanted, endangered, or only of value to meet someone else’s needs.

Withholding emotional support, isolation, or terrorizing a child are forms of psychological abuse. Domestic violence that is witnessed by a child is also considered a form of psychological abuse.

Types of Child Psychological Abuse

Psychological abuse of a child is often divided into nine categories:

1.  Rejection: to reject a child, to push him away, to make him feel that he is useless or worthless, to undermine the value of his ideas or feelings, to refuse to help him.

2.  Scorn: to demean the child, to ridicule him, to humiliate him, to cause him to be ashamed, to criticize the child, to insult him.

3.  Terrorism: to threaten a child or someone who is dear to him with physical violence, abandonment or death, to threaten to destroy the child’s possessions, to place him in chaotic or dangerous situations, to define strict and unreasonable expectations and to threaten him with punishment if he does not comply.

4.  Isolation: to physically or socially isolate a child, to limit his opportunities to socialize with others.

5.  Corruption or exploitation: to tolerate or encourage inappropriate or deviant behavior, to expose the child to antisocial role-models, to consider the child as a servant, to encourage him or coerce him to participate in sexual activities.

6.  The absence of emotional response: to show oneself as inattentive or indifferent towards the child, to ignore his emotional needs, to avoid visual contact, kisses or verbal communication with him, to never congratulate him.

Neglect: to ignore the health or educational needs of the child, to refuse or to neglect to apply the required treatment. (See: What is Child Neglect?)

7.  Exposure to domestic violence: to expose a child to violent words and acts between his parents.

The behavior of an emotionally abusive parent or caregiver does not support a child’s healthy development and well-being-instead, it creates an environment of fear, hostility, or anxiety. A child is sensitive to the feeling, opinions, and actions of his or her parents.

8.  Showing a lack of regard for the child

This behavior often includes rejecting the child by:

  • Not showing affection.
  • Ignoring the child’s presence and obvious needs.
  • Ignoring the child when he or she is in need of comfort.
  • Not calling the child by his or her name.

9.  Saying unkind things to the child

Emotionally abusive parents say things or convey feelings that can hurt a child deeply. Common examples include:

  • Making the child feel unwanted, perhaps by stating or implying that life would be easier without the child. For example, a parent may tell a child, “I wish you were never born.”
  • Ridiculing or belittling the child, such as saying, “You are stupid.”
  • Threatening the child with harsh punishment or even death.
  • Continuous verbal abuse.

Symptoms of Child Psychological Abuse

Symptoms of psychological abuse of a child may include:

  • Difficulties in school
  • Eating disorders, resulting in weight loss or poor weight gain
  • Emotional issues such as low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety
  • Rebellious behavior
  • Sleep disorders
  • Vague physical complaints

Psychological abuse of a child can have long-lasting negative psychiatric effects. Learn about the types and symptoms of psychological abuse.

How to report any type of child abuse:

https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/responding/reporting/how/

 

 

 

APA Reference
Gluck, S. (2011, November 23). What is Psychological Abuse of a Child?, HealthyPlace. Retrieved on 2019, September 27 from https://www.healthyplace.com/abuse/child-psychological-abuse/what-is-psychological-abuse-of-a-child

I Want To Tell You About My Suicidal Thoughts

National Suicide Prevention Week: Sunday, September 8 – Saturday, September 14, 2019

By: Amanda Rances Wang, Good Advice – 9/8/2019

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, yet it is still treated with shame and silence. In honor of National Suicide Prevention Week, we’re sharing stories about suicide in order to encourage awareness and combat stigma. If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

I’ve struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts since I was a teenager. But by the time I was 29, I thought I had things under control. I took antidepressants and talked to a therapist every week. I had a full life with my husband of three years. Trips were ventured, friends gathered together, and there were plenty of nights on the town. Everything appeared fine from the outside.

It’s just that there’s this one single thing that I slowly began to notice until I could no longer deny its presence in my life. I was gay.

In my mind, being gay meant the destruction of the one thing that I thought kept the demons at bay: my marriage. I was in love and he had this uncanny ability to draw me out from the dark side. Being married to this wonderful person, I thought, would solve all my problems. So now to be gay, and lose him and all that he represented? I wouldn’t dare make that leap. To even think about it was too painful, too terrifying.

I got far enough with my suicidal ideation that I finally shared all my passwords and bank account information with my friend Karen. I also gave her access to my online journal, and she noticed a very disturbing passage about how I had been hurting myself. The next thing I know, my brother knocks on my apartment door. “Is everything okay?” he asks. “Karen told me about what you wrote, are you sure you’re okay?”

I told him I was fine, but he knew me better. That Friday after dinner, my family—my parents, my brother, my husband, and my godmother—were gathered at my parents’ house. In front of everyone, my brother shared that he was concerned about my well-being, and that he noticed I’ve been having a hard time. Then he outed me, right then and there, announcing that I’m gay—revealing the truth that I had only ever written in my journal. Tears started to fall down my husband’s cheeks. He said, “Whatever makes you happy, Amanda. I’ll support it.” You’d think that would make my decision easier and lighten my load, but instead, I thought to myself, “I am one fucking terrible person.”

The self-harm got worse and more frequent after that. I was doing anything to take the edge off and dull the pain. Two weeks later, Karen finally told me, “Amanda, we’ve done all we could. You’ve done all that you could. You’ve seen your therapist, you’re taking meds, you’ve told your husband and your parents, and still it’s not working. It’s time, Amanda. I think it’s time you entered yourself into the hospital.”

It took a long time, but once I was able to manage my symptoms, I was able to come to terms with the reality of who I was.

It was there on the 11th floor of a New York City hospital that my social worker finally puts a name to what I’ve been suffering from most of my life. She begins to read each of the nine symptoms out loud, and with every symptom, I’m convinced she’s reading my biography. “Amanda, have you ever heard of borderline personality disorder?” she asks.

That moment changed my life. Receiving a diagnosis put me on the track to proper treatment (dialectical behavior therapy, which is designed specifically to help people with BPD) and with it, I begin to understand my emotions, my vulnerabilities, and most important of all, what to do when I am feeling suicidal—tools that I never really had before.

It’s been 13 years since I received my diagnosis. I continue to work with a DBT therapist and go to a group class to learn the skills I need to thrive. My therapist has been invaluable to me. She challenges me, keeps me accountable, and helps me build a life I’m happy to live as a proud gay woman. It took a long time, but once I was able to manage my symptoms, I was able to come to terms with the reality of who I was. It was so hard for me to let go of my husband, who gave me hope, stability, and structure—things so important to my mental health—but I had to first believe that I could be those things for myself.

Still, it hasn’t been easy. I continue to work through suicidal thoughts and urges. I have been hospitalized three additional times since my first hospitalization all those years ago. Although I sometimes see those as failures, I ultimately recognize that indeed, they were strides in the right direction. I’m still here, and that has to count for something.

You know what? Maybe that something is courage. People who have been through hell and live in a body and mind that conspire to kill itself are incredibly courageous for not only sticking it out, but for seeking the right professional help to keep them alive. Seemingly insignificant things like talking to the barista, going for a jog, holding ice in your hands, and yes, accepting help when you need it most, are courageous acts in the face of suicide. We must choose courage, no matter how difficult and painful the road ahead of us lies.

Amanda Rances Wang is a digital designer by trade, an advocate for those living with mental illness, and founder of a startup. She lives with her son in Long Island, NY.

Here’s the best way to take care of a friend struggling with suicidal thoughts. And here’s the best way to talk about suicide, according to a psychiatrist.

Source: www.wellandgood.com/good-advice/suicidal-thoughts-depression-help/

Does Social and Emotional Learning Belong in the Classroom?

Asking if SEL should occur in a classroom is like asking if breathing should happen in the room.

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has been gathering traction as a new education trend over the past few years. Back at the start of 2018, EdWeek was noting “Experts Agree Social-Emotional Learning Matters, and Are Plotting Roadmap of How To Do It.” But many folks still haven’t gotten far beyond the “it matters” stage in their plotting.

That’s the easy part. We can mostly agree that SEL matters; in fact, we ought to agree that it already happens in classrooms. It’s impossible to avoid; where children are around adults, SEL is going on.

Asking if SEL should occur in a classroom is like asking if breathing should happen in the room.

The real question is whether or not it should occur in a formal, structured, instructed and assessed manner. That is the question that starts all the arguments. We can break down the arguments by asking the same questions we ask about any content we want to bring into the classroom.

Why do we want to teach this?

Some SEL proponents have developed a utilitarian focus. Summarizing the work of the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development, EdWeek said “social-emotional learning strategies center on research that has linked the development of skills like building healthy peer relationships and responsible decision-making to success inside and outside the classroom.” But what happens if we approach what used to be called character education with the idea that it’s useful for getting ahead?

Doesn’t SEL need to be about more than learning to act like a good person in order to get a grade, a job, and a fatter paycheck?

Are you even developing good character if your purpose for developing that character is to grab some benefits for yourself?

We can reject that kind of selfish focus for SEL and instead focus on the “whole child,” and treat SEL, as Tim Shriver (co-chair of that Aspen Institute) and Frederick Hess (of the American Enterprise Institute) wrote, as “an opportunity to focus on values and student needs that matter deeply to parents and unite Americans across the ideological spectrum—things like integrity, empathy, and responsible decision making.” But then we find ourselves with another problem.

What do we want to teach?

If we’re going to adopt SEL in order to essentially teach students to be better people, then who will decide what “better” looks like? Is “tolerance” going to be one of the virtues, and if so, does that mean that students must learn to tolerate persons who would not be tolerated by their families (be that married gay folks or strict religious conservatives)? Should students be taught to feel empathy for everyone, from Nazis to sociopaths?

Source: Forbes.com. Peter Greene, Senior Contributor. Does social and emotional learning belong in the classroom. ww.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/08/22/does-social-and-emotional-learning-belong-in-the-classroom/ Accessed: August 26, 2019.

Don’t Be Afraid To Rewrite Your Past

Your past, present, and future are all happening right now—at least in your mind.

Something for parents and teens.

According to the Theory of Narrative Identity, developed by scholar and researcher Dr. Dan McAdams, we form our identity by integrating our life experiences into an internalized, evolving story of ourselves which gives a sense of unity and purpose to our lives. 

This life narrative integrates our reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future. All three coexist at the same time. Hence, from an experiential standpoint, the past, present, and future are not separate and linear, but holistic and co-occurring. 

In other words, your past, present, and future are all happening right now—at least in your mind. As American writer and Nobel Prize laureate, William Faulkner famously put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

When you change the meaning and narrative of your past, you simultaneously change the narrative of your present and future. And vice versa.

Changing the narrative of your present and future simultaneously alters the meaning or narrative of your past. 

The story we hold of ourselves is continually evolving and changing based on the experiences we are having. No, the facts about your past can’t change. But the story you tell yourself about them absolutely can change.

Unfortunately, most people are not strategic about their narrative identity. They aren’t conscious of the meaning-making process they instinctively go through in their day-to-day life, and as a result, they often shape limiting stories based on the emotions they are experiencing. 

Your entire identity and view of the world is a meaning. A story. The questions to ask yourself: Is this story serving you? Is this the story you want to tell?

The story you have in your mind about the world at large and yourself as an individual is far from objective.  Chances are, much of who you believe you are is based on stories that you tell yourself, that have come from experiences in your past. Potentially traumatic experiences wherein you didn’t or haven’t had an empathetic witness help you to positively and powerfully frame those experiences. 

A fundamental aspect of reframing the past is to shift what was formerly seen as a negative experience into a positive one.

Having studied this for over a decade, I’ve never seen a more useful reframing technique that what Dan Sullivan calls, “The Gap and the Gain.”  Continue Reading…

By: Benjamin Hardy Ph.D., https://www.psychologytoday.com

This is how to rewire your brain for happiness: 4 secrets from research

“Thoughts determine feelings.”
Remember that. Make a note. Get a tattoo.

This is an awesome article which can apply to anyone, at any age. Especially teens.

By Eric Barker, TheLadders.com

Someone compliments you and you think, “They don’t mean it.” Something good happens and you hear, “I don’t deserve this.” You’re meeting new people and it’s, “They won’t like me.”

And you usually accept those words because they’re coming from inside your head. It’s like the horror movie where the calls from the killer are coming from inside the house.

These are called “automatic thoughts.” And they suck. But we all know the answer: you just need to think happy thoughts, right? Wrong. Let’s get our psychology lessons from somewhere other than Instagram memes, alright? “Think happy thoughts” doesn’t help unless you don’t need help.

From The Confidence Gap:

Their study, entitled “Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others,” … showed that people with low self-esteem actually feel worse after repeating positive self-statements such as “I am a lovable person” or “I will succeed.” Rather than being helpful, these positive thoughts typically triggered a strong negative reaction and a resultant low mood.

So when you’re really feeling down, happy cliches won’t cut it. Nope. So we’re gonna need to science the hell out of this one. We need to rewire your brain, bubba.

From Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders:

This new approach— cognitive therapy— suggests that the individual’s problems are derived largely from certain distortions of reality based on erroneous premises and assumptions. These incorrect conceptions originated in defective learning during the person’s cognitive development. Regardless of their origin, it is relatively simple to state the formula for treatment: The therapist helps a patient to unravel his distortions in thinking and to learn alternative, more realistic ways to formulate his experiences.

It’s not hard or expensive, but it’s gonna take some practice. (Look, if you can spend 10 minutes taking a Facebook quiz to find out which Harry Potter character you are, you can spend 5 minutes a day to live a happier life, alright?). And once you get good at this it won’t just make you happier — these techniques are proven to help with all kinds of issues from procrastination to anxiety to anger.

From Thoughts and Feelings:

Challenging automatic thoughts is a powerful way to counter perfectionism, curb procrastination, and relieve depression and anxiety. It is also helpful in treating low self-esteem, shame and guilt, and anger. The techniques in this chapter are based on the cognitive therapy of Aaron Beck (1976), who pioneered this method of analyzing automatic thoughts and composing rational comebacks to refute and replace distorted thinking.

We’re gonna get some solid answers from Dr. Matthew McKay’s “Thoughts and Feelings” and even roll psychologically old school with UPenn professor Aaron Beck’s 1979 classic “Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders.”

Let’s get to it…

Cognitive Therapy 101

“Thoughts determine feelings.” Remember that. Make a note. Get a tattoo. This powerful idea goes back thousands of years to the Stoics. Aaron Beck even quotes Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus (the Biggie and Tupac of Stoicism) in his book.

From Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders:

If thou are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thine own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now. – Marcus Aurelius

“Always trust your feelings” sounds sweet but you wouldn’t tell that to someone with a phobia, a hoarding problem, or — god forbid — homicidal impulses, would you? No. Teenagers and golden retrievers are excellent at blindly following their feelings but neither are regularly consulted on their decision-making skills. Continue reading…

How Your Parents Behaviors Shape Who You Are Today

If your mom was constantly stressed, you were more likely to be worse at math.

Whether your parents were your best friends or you barely knew them, your relationship with Mom and Dad had an impact on who you are today.

At least that’s what Sigmund Freud said when he theorized that our adult personality develops from early childhood experiences, an insight empirically tested by attachment theory and developmental psychology through the 20th century up until today.

Here are 10 ways your parents shaped who you are today.

1. If your mother was constantly juggling multiple jobs, you are likely to suffer from stress.

2. If your parents spoke negatively about their body, you are more likely to have low self-confidence.  Continue Reading…