Posted by obsidian on January 14, 2009, at 18:04:47
In reply to Hurtful diagnoses, posted by yellowbird01 on January 13, 2009, at 19:03:36
> I have a T who apparently loves labels/diagnoses. I love my T to death, aside from this one thing. Borderline personality disorder seems to be a favorite diagnoses of hers (went to an inservice? I dont know). My other clinicians in the past have disagreed with the diagnosis for the most part, but just today my T brought it up again and referred to "my personality disorder". In the same discussion, she talked about challenging negative/irrational thoughts. The thing is, BPD doesnt feel to me like exactly a "positive" diagnosis. Quite the opposite. The focus on "me and my personality disorder" really tears my self esteem to shreds... and it was bad enough to begin with. It makes me doubt my own feelings and my own judgment in everything in my life. I know I'm not perfect and I can be negative and even irrational... if everything was perfect, I wouldnt be in therapy. But to insist that my issues with being labeled this way are irrational and just me being negative just feels wrong to me. It hurts my trust in my T as well. I think many rational people would react badly to it. I'm not crazy.
can I say yuck?? I can understand why this bothers you so :-(
I would be tempted (perhaps in a passive aggressive way ;-) to then call her out on then what "specifically" (if we are going to think about things in a narrow minded medical model sort of way) what type of therapy/treatment this particular diagnosis necessitates
it's quite a reductionistic approach isn't it? neatly packaged and all
it might be much more helpful to think about patterns of behavior, patterns of coping, patterns of relating, etc. rather than a label
I mean what the f*ck can someone do about a personality disorder? it's like saying 'well, your self is just f*ck*d up-the essence of who you are is an illness'
how about some useful information which furthers self understanding and therefore more adaptive means of coping??
feelings by the way don't tend to be rational, who'd want to be rational all the time anyway
> Does anyone have any advice? I plan to talk to T about this, but I've done it before and I dont think she truly understands how hurtful the label can be. I think she's hearing what I'm saying about it through the lens of me being "borderline". Otherwise, she's wonderful. I just cant keep seeing her if she's going to push this again. It just destroys me.I might ask her what this particular label helps her to understand about you and then how does this label help your work together. You sound like you feel invalidated, which is ironic because much is written about the "invalidating environment" as a contributing factor to the development of borderline personality disorder.
I mean why not say "you feel this way because you're a woman..or because you're white...or a republican etc."
I hate the judgment.
poster:obsidian
thread:873850
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20090109/msgs/874011.html