Dear Gigi:

Yes, DBT was part of my therapy. It is widely used in treatment of the BPD diagnosed. The core principle of it, is to use “and” instead of “or” in our thinking, feeling and relating. For example, instead of blaming the man in your life OR blaming yourself, you blame him and you. To use a better word than blaming, it is about seeing that both, the man and you are responsible for what is going on.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT): the “Di in Dialectical means two or both. Another example: instead of seeing a particular person good OR bad, you see the person as a combination of both good and bad.

In your relationship with your boyfriend, you are responsible for your participation in every interaction between you and he is responsible for his participation in every interaction with you. If you figure this out, who is responsible for what, you will make great progress.

When you feel like making rude and destructive comments to your boyfriend, being so distressed you almost can’t help yourself and you have to say a rude comment … no matter how strong the urge- don’t! it’s like an itch, that urge, isn’t it? And you feel that you have to scratch?

Well, don’t. If you truly not allow yourself to “scratch”, the itch will weaken, you will see. As long as you see it as a possibility, to scratch, as long as you rationalize it (maybe it is okay, maybe I am right), you will “scratch”

Be firm with your self: No scratching/ no rude comments, no starting a fight. Not an Option!

I did it. Drove me nuts to not scratch, but then scratching was only making my nuttiness worse.

anita

Dear Gigi:

It is going to take a whole lot of time and patience. Most people give up because it takes so much time, so at one point they say: “&^%$ it, it is not working!” and give up. To heal, to improve, to make your life better it takes patience, and then, more patience and gentleness with yourself, not beating yourself up for “failures”- in quotation marks because you can use each “failure” to learn from and proceed. At the least you can learn patience when you …fail. Each time.

I call this kind of patience “excruciating patience” because, sincerely, it is too much. You think you got it- and boom, the old feelings return and there is that urge to automatically react like before.

One step at a time, it is the nature of the process. It takes a whole lot of time to weaken existing neural pathways in our brain and create and strengthen new ones. It is a long term process. So relax into it the best you can. All the efforts you do now will pay off later.

anita

Dear Gigi:

I too was into thrillers and horror movies. The first horror movie I watched when I was a teenager was Psycho, the original. I was hooked. Jaws, the original was next. In the last few decades Fatal Attraction is memorable to me, psycho thrillers was/ is my favorite genre. Blood and gore movies make me sick but I like the parts in between the blood and gore. And then I read True Crime, strictly. And accounts of World War 2, the holocaust, Auschwitz, death camps. It is only in the last few years that I no longer read True Crime, no longer attracted to this genre.

I am thinking now about the reason we both like these themes. It is the experience of it, isn’t it? When you watch this kind of movie, there is a problem, a building suspense, the heart beats faster, we are fully alert, we are paying attention to the screen and to nothing else (a welcome, welcome break!) and then the climax of the movie and … we feel much better, peaceful. Is it like this for you? My life with my mother was a horror movie, really. So when I watched a horror movie I got to kind of watch my childhood from a safe distance, knowing I am safe there watching. And watching the whole movie to the end was sort of… resolving my fear, temporarily: there I was afraid, the movie is over and I am okay.

What do you think of the reason you are drawn to such?

anita

Dear Gigi:

Romantic comedies is my last choice of a movie. To my surprise, I relaxed at times into some nothing-much-is-happening movie such as My Sister’s Sister. I can’t explain it. And then drama movies, I actually like now, The Bridges of Madison County: nothing scary (but not a comedy)- I really like this movie.

And you are not alone, Gigi. There is nothing about you, nothing about anything you ever thought, felt, experienced and did that is outside the human experience. This last statement I just wrote, I didn’t know it about myself for the longest time. I really thought I was that weird, other- species.

anita

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