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Recovering Your True Self: It's All About You AND All About Others!

Borderline Personality Disorder steals your sense of self. One of the criterion that “qualifies” you to have Borderline Personality Disorder talks about an unstable self- image. Others speak to feelings of emptiness and not wanting to be left alone.

Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder allows you to discover that deep down sense of self that is not shaken by events or people leaving your presence. In my experience, this starts to happen once you have a little recovery under your belt. First you learn how to control the emotions and thoughts that once caused you misery. 

Now you start to get a little bit of your confidence back and are ready to do the fun work of rediscovering your true self. At this point you begin to develop an awareness of the needs of others, separate and apart from your own.

Some challenges at this stage of recovery may be grief over the losses you have suffered through the years of illness. You also may experience feelings of guilt over some of your actions. However, the intense pain and turmoil is lessening, and you are beginning to feel emotions in a helpful way.

Though you may still feel empty and directionless, now you can do the work to find a true sense of your self that will no longer be shaken by events.

Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder teaches you to stop thinking in black and white terms. YOU learn to think one way AND another way at the same time. You think about a concept and think of both sides of the equation, or both perspectives, or both viewpoints.

I have developed a fun exercise I do with my coaching clients to use at this point in recovery. This work will help you to learn more about yourself AND more about others. You focus on building up yourself by doing things for others. Your feelings of guilt or loss over our past are soothed by the positive things you can do today.

Here is the work:

It's the ALL ABOUT ME  -and-  ALL ABOUT OTHERS exercise

Every day, for a week, you do two things. You keep two lists.

1. On the All About Me list you write:

• The things you love
• What you do well
• Your preferences
• Things you notice you enjoy
• Things you would like to avoid

2. On the All About Others list you write:

• Things you notice that some one you love enjoys
• Something you hear another person say they would like from you
• Things you observe that might hurt someone else if done or said
• Areas in which they could use assistance

By doing this, you realize what you have that you can give to others, and also what others might wish you to give to them. You also become more aware of what you really don’t like to do, as well as things others really don’t want done for them.

Here is what this exercise does for you: your sense of self begins to grow as you think about what you like and what you are good at each day. Your sense of confidence and worth begins to grow as you achieve things by giving of yourself.

Happy giving!

For more on finding yourself through finding friends, try: