JOURNAL OF CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. 62(4), 459–480 (2006).

Despite increased attention to treatment development for borderline personality disorder (BPD), very little research has examined the basic processes or mechanisms underlying
patient change.

it has demonstrated efficacy in RCTs for chronically depressed older adults (Lynch, Morse, Mendelson, & Robins, 2003) and eating disordered individuals (

reductions in several problems associated with
BPD, including self-injurious behavior, suicide attempts, suicidal ideation, hopelessness, depression, and bulimic behavior. (See Robins & Chapman, 2004, for a review.)

From Theory to Practice: Dialectical Philosophy and the Biosocial Theory
of Borderline Personality Disorder Philosophical Foundations

Marsha Linehan discovered an important shortcoming in standard cognitive and behavioral treatments: They focused almost exclusively on helping patients change their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. A treatment solely focused on change often was not palatable to these patients, who often felt invalidated and criticized and dropped out of treatment. On the flip side, a treatment focused entirely on acceptance invalidated the seriousness of the patients’ suffering and the urgent need to produce change

As a worldview, dialectical philosophy
most often is associated with Marxist socioeconomic principles, but the philosophy of
dialectics actually extends back thousands of years

According to Hegel, the process by which a phenomenon, behavior, or argument is
transformed is the dialectic,

applied to the understanding of
human suffering, this ontological principle of interrelatedness and wholeness leads to a
systemic and contextual conceptualization of behavior. DBT treats the whole

the transaction
between a biological tendency toward emotional vulnerability and an invalidating rearing
environment produces a dysregulation of the patient’s emotional system.

invalidation is the critical socially mediated etiological process

emotional vulnerability is the key biological factor.

The invalidating environment is characterized by punishing,
ignoring, or trivializing the individual’s communication of thoughts and emotions as well
as self-initiated behaviors and may involve sexual, physical, and emotional abuse (Wagner
& Linehan, 1997).

the inevitable sequelae of dysregulated emotions,
or as maladaptive methods of altering emotional experiences. For example, impulsive
or self-destructive behaviors such as self-injury, suicide attempts, or disordered eating
may occur in direct response to or function to regulate

the ultimate goal is
not to achieve an objective “distance” from one’s experience, but rather to enter into,
participate in, and become “one with” experience (

learning to control the focus of attention, not the object

By allowing emotions to be experienced (exposure)
without judgment, new associations are acquired (the emotion “just is,” the thought “just
is,” the memory “just is”). With repeated practice,

in the patient’s life, DBT provides an opportunity to learn new associations with
stimuli that elicit intense emotional pain.

For instance, the socially anxious individual who avoids giving speeches
in response to a verbal rule (“If I publicly speak, I will be humiliated”) may fail to learn
that public speaking is nonthreatening, even if he or she gives a successful speech. Literal
belief in these types of verbal rules leads the individual to experience thoughts, feelings,
and situations as dangerous (i.e., “If I think X, a very bad thing will happen”) and to
evaluate certain thoughts as “bad” and/or equivalent to an unwanted action

observe a “thought as a thought”
without believing it is literally true

does not work by altering

it encourages the development

metacognitive awareness (i.e. seeing thoughts as thouhts, not literally true)

Indeed, BPD patients frequently describe a negative, shameful, or otherwise aversive
sense of self, which is likely maintained by literal belief in negative self-judgments.
Mindfulness may function to create a new sense of self

the difficulty individuals who have BPD
have in disengaging attention from emotional stimuli

DBT operationally defines the specific
behaviors involved in validation in a unique manner. As such, DBT involves six levels of
validation: (1) active listening, and awakeness to and interest in the patient; (2) accurate
reflecting of the patient’s feelings, thoughts, or behaviors; (3) articulating unverbalized
feelings or thoughts, or “mind reading”; (4) expressing that the patient’s dysfunctional
behavior is logical in view of past learning history or biological factors; (5) expressing
that the patient’s behavior is normative, wise, or expected given the current context; and
(6) acting in a manner that is genuine, or “radical genuineness.”

BPD individuals often suffer from identity disturbance, involving persistent and markedly
disturbed, distorted, or unstable self-image or sense of self (American Psychiatric
Association, 1994; Koenigsberg et al., 2001). Therefore, the ability to organize experiences,
predict future events, and engage in effective social interactions may be compromised
as well. Within

In turn, heightened arousal interferes with cognition and task performance

people tend to “gravitate toward and stay in environments that are compatible with their
self-conceptions” (Swann, 1983, p. 39).

to help the patient reduce emotion dysregulation
in the service of building a life worth living

For instance, many BPD patients engage in various behaviors
(i.e., self-injury) that they are rather averse to disclose and discuss, let alone in an
excruciatingly detailed chain analysis.

Shame has been described as a painful state that disrupts ongoing
behavior and cognition

The action tendencies
associated with shame include the urge to hide, withdraw, disappear, or avoid thinking
about aspects of the shameful behavior

Requiring the patient to talk in detail about shameful events or behaviors may work
very similarly to mindfulness or opposite action

The patient implements
emotion regulation skills to attenuate feelings of sadness and shame, discards her
razor blades, and seeks social contact and support or advice

Reducing Emotion Dysregulation and Building Skills:
Emotion Regulation Skills and Opposite Action

the biosocial theory that BPD is fundamentally a disorder of pervasive emotion dysregulation

Against Men

After Miguel James’ “Against the Police”

My entire Oeuvre is against men.
If I write a Love poem it is against men.
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against men.
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against men.
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against men.
And if I manage to create a poem it’s against men.
I haven’t written a single world, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against men.
All my prose is against men.
My entire Oeuvre
Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against men.

 

“Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games.”

“It was Sappho who first called eros “bittersweet.”

[to be continued]

On Mel Y. Chen’s Toxic Inanimacies in conversation with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

1.

Lead, as a material representative of toxicity, teeters on both the sides of life and nonlife. It straddles “the literal bounds of bodies, in ways that introduce a certain complexity to the presumption of integrity of either lifely or deathly subjects” (Chen 279). I think about Mel’s consideration of toxicity the same way the poet Maggie Nelson considers the colour blue. In Bluets, Nelson animates blue in a similar way in which Mel animates lead. Nelson refracts life through blue, as Mel refracts life through toxicity. My associations between the two also come from their shared philosophical undertone, the use of poetic language, the autobiographical elements, and their decision to write about two subjects which share a diffuse and permeable characteristic – they are in things, they exist within things, but are barely considered in the meticulous, molecular way that Mel and Nelson do. I especially think about the future implications of considering life on the level of its foundations – what changes when we think of life through the atom.

2.

Through this method of thought, sharing pain becomes an act of generosity.

In Fragment 104, Nelson writes, “I do not feel my friend’s pain, but when I intentionally cause her pain I wince as if I hurt somewhere, and I do. […] She says, ‘if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you.’ This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. Perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers.”

Does this operate within the same logic and affect as when Mel proposes “toxicity propels, not repels, queer loves” (Chen 281)? I understand the same surface level associations that people make with “toxicity as pain”, not “toxicity as gratitude.” But both writers invite new understandings of previously damned concepts. Toxicity propels, produces, gives birth to spaces in which queer loves are able to exist and thrive beyond normative understandings of love. These new understandings are harder to grasp, but are infinitely rewarding when done so.

Mel talks about having love for a couch. This couch, an inanimate body whose arms and back were responsible for the soothing and comforting that any other animate body could not have given in a particular toxic moment. In the throes of dizzying poisoning, Mel finds the needed stillness that the couch offered.

Pain operates in an analogous way. Nelson acknowledges the way in which her friend’s pain translates into a generosity previously articulated through different ways. Ever since her friend’s accident, her friend now embodies a new existence which is now inextricably bound with dependence – quadriparalysis requires a wheelchair and a caretaker. Though this dependence has given her a different aura ­­— one of an oracle, a figure upon which people come to willingly. Now, pain becomes a language upon which their ever-evolving friendship rests. In another book, The Argonauts, Nelson refers to Barthes’ description of how “the subject who utters the phrase ‘I love you’ is like the ‘Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name. Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase, ‘I love you,’ its meaning must be renewed by each use, as the ‘very task of love and language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.” In this sense, life has changed some aspects of sociality between Nelson and her friend. It now necessitates different forms of love that need to make sense within life as it is now.

This too extends to how Mel engages with toxicity as something that propels. Through an illustrative account of hypersensitivity and the shutting down of the body, Mel describes the ways in which the condition has forced Mel to find creative ways to survive, finding aid through objects that most people do not consider as solace. When one’s subjectivity is (dis)regarded through codes of normativity and intersecting forces of oppression, one begins to look for new ways to navigate life in a way that moves beyond undesired conditions – finding ways to replace the ship’s parts.

3.

Nelson writes: “159. A good many have figured God as light, but a good many have also figured him as darkness.  She recalls the idea of a “Divine Darkness,” which must be separated from other forms of darkness, such as the darkness of sin or the darkness of the soul. I relate this idea of Divine Darkness to previous articulations of both toxin and blue as having two contradictory forces within them – life and death. Both toxin and blue can be sources of profound hope, but also of uncertainty. I am thinking about the widespread use of “toxic” as a surrogate for “abusive.” Pop psychology is often guilty of this place-holding. It does speak to larger questions of love, which Mel aptly reminds us is worthy of theoretical consideration.

4.

How can someone love perfume aisles and find them pleasurable, therapeutic? How is it that so much of desire and attraction are inextricably bound to smell and consumption (luxury perfumes, aromatherapy, unique mixes of essential oils for “ultrasonic diffusers”) when it can have a mortal effect on many people? What changes when something that gives life[1] can also subject others to death?

In Fragment 181, Nelson writes, “Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues, Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial colour, and paint.” The same logic applies to the designation of toxicity as a doubly-voiced phenomenon, equally capable of propagating and inhabiting life in a way that’s purposefully vague. The implications of this are potentially threatening, especially beyond the realm of the personal. Structurally, we must understand that policies and rights are often blanketed under the same benevolent guise – “The law is there to protect us” or “Trans rights are human rights.” But suffice it to say that the polysemous nature of things can sharply change how one person experiences life, especially in relation to, or against, our own experiences of life which we may be reluctant to question. One possible way is to feel settled in ambiguity. To accept that certain phenomena – whether lead, or blue – are ultimately shaped through dominant discourses that give life to some and withhold it from others. If only on a personal level, to understand that things are not as they are according to what we know, and to feel comfortable in this and not betrayed.

 

 

[1] Or something that elevates life. After all, fragrance can be a treat for the senses, much like how eating good food directly speaks to pleasure, and by extension, hedonism.