Posted by SLS on July 29, 2009, at 5:44:18
In reply to Do people here care when I am in pain?, posted by Deneb on July 28, 2009, at 19:46:04
> Just asking.
Yes, Deneb.
It is good that you are learning more and more about yourself and the way your illness affects you. You know how rejection-sensitive the BPD leaves you. I'm sure there are specific triggers that can set the overwhelming sense of rejection into motion. The CBT comes in when, instead of acting immediately on your thoughts, you step back for awhile and evaluate just how realistic those thoughts are.
For instance, if no one answers one of your posts right away, it does not mean that the whole community has all of a sudden rejected you (unrealistic). It just means that people either don't have anything they feel they can contribute or they are busy doing other things (realistic).
You will tend to focus on the negative and filter out the positive. Knowing this, you might actually have to do some self-talk to be able to look for alternative, positive ways of thinking. Pay attention to and remember the nice things that people have to say about you. If you can find ways to recognize the BPD talking, then you can find ways of ignoring it knowing that they do not reflect reality. Sure, some things are going to negative in real life, but why add to them unnecessarily?
If you begin to pay attention to the positive and perform reality-checks on the negative, you will feel better about yourself. It is a strategy that takes practice. After awhile you will begin to do these things automatically.
See below the list of common cognitive distortions (negative messages) that people with BPD often find themselves thinking:
David Burns CBT
1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING; You see things in black-or-white categories.
If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total
failure.
2. OVERGENERALIZATION; You see a single negative event, such as a romantic
rejection or a career reversal as a never-ending pattern of defeat by
using words such as "always" or "never" when you think about it.
3. MENTAL FILTER; You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it
exclusively, so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the
drop of ink that discolors a beaker of water. Example: You receive many
positive comments about your presentation to a group of associates at
work, but one of them says something mildly critical. You obsess about his
reaction for days and ignore all of the positive feedback.
4. DISCOUNTING THE POSITIVE; You reject positive experiences by insisting
they "don't count." If you do a good job, you may tell yourself that it
wasn't good enough or that anyone could have done as well. Discounting the
positive takes the joy out of life and makes you feel inadequate and
unrewarded.
5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS; You interpret things negatively when there are
no facts to support your conclusion.MIND READING; Without checking it out, you arbitrarily conclude that
someone is reacting negatively to you.FORTUNE-TELLING; You predict that things will turn out badly and feel
convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
6. MAGNIFICATION OR MINIMIZATION; You exaggerate the importance of things
(such as your problems or shortcomings), or you inappropriately shrink
things down until they appear tiny (the importance of your desirable
qualities or your progress in therapy)This is also called the binocular
trick.
7. EMOTIONAL REASONING; You assume that your negative emotions necessarily
reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."
Example: "I feel guilty. I must be a rotten person."
8. SHOULD STATEMENTS; You try to motivate yourself with "shoulds" and
shouldn'ts," as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be
expected to do anything. Or, you tell yourself that things "should" be the
way you hoped or expected them to be. "Should statements" lead to anger
and frustration.
9. LABELING; Labelling is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking.
Instead of saying "I made a mistake," you attach a negative label to
yourself. "I'm a loser." You might also label yourself "a fool" or "a
failure" or "a jerk." Labeling is quite irrational because you are not the
same thing as what you do. Human beings exist, but "fools," "losers," and
"jerks" do not. These labels are just useless abstractions that lead to
anger, anxiety, frustration, and low self-esteem.
10. PERSONALIZATION; You see yourself as the cause of some negative
external event that isn't entirely under your control. When a woman
received a note that her child was having difficulties at school, she told
herself, "This shows what a bad mother I am," instead of trying to
pinpoint the cause of the problem so that she could be helpful to the
child.
- Scott
poster:SLS
thread:909058
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20090714/msgs/909129.html