{"id":18079,"date":"2025-09-09T19:48:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T19:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/?p=18079"},"modified":"2025-09-09T19:48:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T19:48:11","slug":"2-mindful-therapy-techniques-healed-my-bpd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/?p=18079","title":{"rendered":"2 Mindful Therapy Techniques Healed My BPD"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

When I first became depressed, all had been well. I was an anxious, screen-addicted 16 year-old, but I was well-liked by my teachers and classmates and my parents believed my future was bright. The metastasizing bleakness I felt within was unreasonable and inexplicable, except I seemed to know, \u201cYou are a very, very bad person, and you will never be happy<\/em>.\u201d Or, at least that\u2019s what I told myself. <\/p>\n

Initially a mindfulness skeptic<\/h2>\n
\n

In a matter of weeks, I wanted to die. I began visiting the school social worker, who was a sweet Italian-Canadian lady named Anita. Anita strongly believed in the healing power of mindful breathing, which she taught in a sparsely attended meditation club during lunch breaks. <\/p>\n

I let my mind wander aimlessly during those sessions, believing that mindfulness was simultaneously too hard for me to practice and too simple to be effective. How could paying attention to my breath possibly have any meaningful effect on the unprovoked and agonizing emotional pain that was suddenly tearing my life to shreds? <\/p>\n

I was a mindfulness skeptic right out of the gate, and while Anita helped and inspired me in many ways, in my head I thought little of her passion for mindfulness. Little did I know that years down the line, mindfulness would be my salvation.<\/p>\n

Antipsychotics, ECT and BPD<\/h2>\n
\n

By the time I was 17 years old, I\u2019d started taking antipsychotics and was undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), commonly known as electroshock therapy\u2014a therapy that was as intensive as I believed my depression would require. The riskier and more burdensome the treatment was, the more hopeful I\u2019d feel that it would help me.<\/p>\n

Over the next four years of lingering unproductively in university, I underwent lots of ECT and went through many courses of therapy, all while riding the medication carousel and trying to find something that helped. At some point I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), which is characterized by intense mood swings, self-destructive behaviour and unstable relationships. <\/p>\n

Drinking, smoking, self-harm, bad relationships, hospitalizations and starving myself were my extracurricular activities in those years. There were wholesome periods, too, during which a treatment would work for a time and I\u2019d get in the habit of meditating daily. I found much of what I read about Buddhist philosophy to be evidently true, but I struggled to integrate mindfulness into life outside meditation, and after six months or so I\u2019d relapse and be in that dark hole again.<\/p>\n

My first full-time job<\/h2>\n
\n

After six tumultuous years, I was finally finding my way in life at my first full-time job as a telefundraiser. The medication I was taking had been working for me, and in a bizarre twist of fate, I proved to be a prodigious fundraiser. The employee turnover rate was indicative of the difficulty of the job, because in nine months, I was the most senior fundraiser there. <\/p>\n

Having the job was a fortuitous self-esteem boost, and by the time I was once again senselessly plunged into depression, I believed from the bottom of my heart\u2014for the first time in my life\u2014that life was worth living. Though I\u2019d relapsed into self-harm and was experiencing wicked mood swings, my job proved to me my own value and my co-workers had become some of my best friends. <\/p>\n

Thus, my attitude was firm and hopeful when I got the call that I was at the top of the waiting list for the six-month dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT) program at an Ontario (Canada) hospital\u2019s borderline personality disorder clinic. I\u2019d been on the waiting list for three years and the timing of that call was impeccable; the thread of my sanity was rapidly unravelling once again, and I was more motivated than ever to see myself get through the ordeal. <\/p>\n

More about DBT<\/h2>\n
\n

For those unfamiliar, DBT was created by a Buddhist psychiatrist named Marsha Linehan as a way to treat BPD, which is more of a complex trauma response that can be healed with therapy than an illness to be treated by medication. <\/p>\n

Dr. Linehan suffered from borderline personality disorder herself and found relief in her Buddhist practice. Therefore, she adapted various aspects of Buddhist philosophy into teachable skills to improve patients\u2019 emotion regulation, distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness, with mindfulness being the foundational skill upon which all others are built. This therapy has proven to be immensely effective for BPD, among other disorders, allowing many patients to achieve full remission.<\/p>\n

Incorporating mindful journaling<\/h2>\n
\n
\n