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Originally Posted by moonlite  Again - Steve Pavlina is not my patient, he even can't be one. So I'm free to criticize what he wrote. Is my statement about his possible BPD a critique of himself as a person or his thoughts or actions? As I stressed it before - my knowledge of his thoughts and actions is rather limited - I have only his writings before my eyes. So it's even more innocent  |
Since you and I have never met, our relationship (as you perceive it) exists entirely in your mind. Consequently, who's mind are you actually diagnosing? The most valid answer is that you're diagnosing the contents of your own mind. That's the only mind you have direct access to.
The solution in this case is to consider how you've been repressing your own BPD aspects, denying their existence, and decliining to accept them. By labeling someone you've never met with such a disorder (and a meaningless one at that), you're striving to distance yourself from those aspects... as a method of denial.
This practice, however, isn't aligned with Truth, so it's pointing you away from positive growth instead of toward it.
Try to accept that you're perfectly fine as you are. It's okay not to be normal. That's a false ideal you don't have to live up to. You just have to become comfortable in your own skin. Accept yourself as you are without worrying so much about how others perceive you.
As a means of realigning yourself with Truth, you can consider the symptoms of BPD and notice how you're been suppressing them in your own life. Given your training, this shouldn't be that difficult if you don't resist the process. Since you mentioned NPD earlier as well, you might want to do the same exercise for NPD as well, although I suspect that's not much of an issue for you.
Your initial reaction may be to defend yourself or to reassert your earlier diagnosis of me, but there's no need to defend anything because you aren't being attacked. Rather, consider that your request for help has been received and is being responded to.
Posting your diagnosis publicly instead of sending it privately is a rather obvious clue that you're seeking help. Trained professionals who are genuinely concerned for my psychological health don't diagnose me as having a mental disorder in a public forum for non-professionals, inviting others to discuss the issue right in front of me. What reputatable psychologist or psychiatrist would ever do such a thing? If you give it some thought, hopefully your logical mind can recognize the absurdity of this. At the very least, you must admit that such behavior would be rather unprofessional.
In truth you're using these forums to help you process some aspects of your shadow self. This allows those aspects to come to the surface where you can deal with them a little more consciously. I get the feeling, however, that you may not be congruent in your desire to resolve these issues. Part of you wants them resolved, but another part would prefer to continue repressing them.
There are a few other steps you can take, but I'd rather not discuss them with you publicly, as it can get rather personal, and a public forum isn't the right place for it if you're a fairly private person. So if you want help with the rest, feel free to PM me. But I think you get the basic idea. In essence all you really need to do to get started is to run yourself through a mirror exercise.
If you'd like to suggest that I do the same, the answer is that I already have. I do it quite often in fact. Whenever I'm inclined to diagnose others with some sort of disorder, including RDD, I interpret it as a self-diagnosis to see what comes up. In this case it points to an issue that I've known about for some time but which I'm still working to change. To put it simply, I want to be helping more people face-to-face and on a deeper level as opposed to working with people remotely over the Internet. From years of giving and receiving remote diagnoses, I've seen just how inaccurate they tend to be unless there's been a tremendous about of one-on-one communication.
In particular, plain text doesn't convey emotion. It isn't an emotionally expressive medium compared to audio or video. When people read a lot of text, they fill in the emotional void with their own emotions, and these emotions are different for everyone. Consequently, when such people form an opinion of the writer based on their impressions of the text, they're largely evaluating their own emotions, as they have no access to the writer's true emotions and motives. All they can do is make assumptions, which are frequently inaccurate. In such cases the best I can do is to keep nudging people back towards Truth.