BPD support sessions
1:1 consultations for mental health practitioners to unlearn harmful practices and views towards people diagnosed with BPD
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We can dream far outside of the DSM and all of the harmful, pathologising ways we’ve been taught to understand people diagnosed with BPD.
For mental health practitioners who work with people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder who would like to join me for a 1:1 chat to co-envision ways of understanding and caring for your clients that directly oppose the harmful, retraumatising advice that is usually shared in books and trainings on this ‘BPD’.
Most of the literature that exists on ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ offers advice that is usually very activating and harmful, and even downright traumatic, punishing people for what are often survival responses, instead of honouring and learning how to work with them (eg. withholding compassion or care when someone self-harms, labelling people ‘non-compliant’, or forcing them into ‘treatment’). People diagnosed with BPD are overwhelmingly considered “difficult” in clinical spaces, and this widespread belief can lead to even the most radical practitioners treating folks with this diagnosis with contempt.
You can share with me a particular issue or issues that you've been facing with supporting or caring for your client or loved one and we can process them together. I can offer advice, insights and tools.
"Candice provided me with incredibly valuable consultation about a client that I care deeply for but was feeling stuck with. Though I've been working with this client for 3 years, Candice helped me see nuance and highlighted dynamics that I hadn't fully understood before. Candice facilitated me thinking more deeply and more compassionately about this unique client. In particular, she provided me with education about the specific manifestations of anger for people with BPD as well as the attachment wounds that likely influence the way my client expresses her discomfort and pain in our relationship. After receiving consultation from Candice, I feel more confident and capable of meeting my clients needs for deeper healing. Candice is an incredible person to consult with- she is kind, curious, and speaks from a place of profound understanding about the experiences of people with BPD. I highly recommend pursuing her support and gaining clinical clarity that will help you serve your clients.”
-Dr. Jennifer Wang-Hall, Licensed Psychologist, California
What can we explore?
We can work together on things like:
how a lot of what is being diagnosed as BPD can be interpreted through different frameworks, like OCD.
helping you to better understand specific experiences and traits that are often poorly understood and misrepresented, from a more internal and humanising lens, such as rage.
supporting someone through difficult emotional and mental states in ways that are compassionate and still support their agency and autonomy.
supporting people through coping mechanisms that can cause harm to themselves through a much more compassionate, harm reductionist approach than is usually encouraged when working with folks diagnosed with BPD.
a deeper look at BPD ‘symptoms’, including through a non-medicalised lens.
My work includes taking a non-pathologising lens, which includes:
- Not reducing people's inability to work, their suicidality, rage or large emotions to their “personality disorder”.
- Not moralising the coping mechanisms that people diagnosed with BPD use to survive, such as self-injury.
- Understanding that everything labelled “disordered” about people diagnosed with BPD is often a survival strategy, and that it’s much more effective if we work with our bodies’ wisdom, than against it, which is what pathologising often leads to.
- Advocating for consent in treatment and care, as opposed to the vast majority of advice on BPD that advocates for non-consensual and potentially retraumatising ways of 'caring' for and supporting people with this diagnosis.
- An understanding that many of these traits are coping mechanisms to current and ongoing systemic traumas as well, and that we can't expect everyone to be able to give them up or to "heal" entirely from them. This includes things like identity struggles and dissociation.
- An understanding that a lot of “BPD symptoms” are reactions to systemic oppression, and that bringing a systemic analysis to recovery can help to deepen healing— however people define that for themselves.
"Candice is my go-to person for support and education for working with clients with BPD. Candice's lived experience and anti-oppression lens is so needed in the field of mental health when it comes to BPD. As a mental health provider, I have learned more from Candice than any DBT manual or clinical training I have taken on BPD. Candice helps you address roadblocks, triggers, stuck points and teaches you tools and scripts to help you support your loved one. I cannot recommend someone to consult with on BPD more highly.
-Allyson Inez Ford, LPCC, Clinical Mental Health Therapist, California.
Details
You can book a consultation with me every Thursday from 10am - 7pm ET / 6am - 4pm PT at a sliding scale of $70 - $130/ hour