The Benefits of Mindfulness for Borderline Personality Disorder

The gold standard in Borderline Personality Disorder treatment is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), an innovative modality that seeks to simultaneously increase acceptance and replace maladaptive behaviors with healthy alternatives. One of the core elements within DBT is mindfulness, or “maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.” The following is one most accurate and useful descriptions I have come across:

Mindfulness is a state of active, open attention on the present. When you’re mindful, you observe your thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging them good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to experience.

While mindfulness can enhance the life of anyone, whether they suffer from mental illness or not, it is particularly useful for people with BPD, whose disorder typically prevents the spontaneous establishment of such thought. Learning how to be mindful directly addresses many of the symptoms associated with BPD and improves emotional regulation, impulse control, and interpersonal relationships. In DBT, these skills are taught in a structured way within the context of a client-therapist relationship, helping you to explicitly and verbally explore and establish mindfulness. While DBT can be invaluable for consciously learning and practicing mindfulness, returning to the roots of mindfulness can offer a different path towards healing that fortifies your ability to engage with the recovery process, with the world around you, and with yourself.

The concept of mindfulness was born out of Buddhist meditation; as such, using meditation to achieve mindfulness is a natural choice. Over the years, mindful meditation has transformed to include a range of secular practices that can be used in daily life as well as within specialized mental health treatment. A growing body of research indicates that these practices offer a number of profound benefits that directly speak to the needs of people with Borderline Personality Disorder:

• Decreasing stress, anxiety, and depression
• Increasing your ability to cope with and tolerate distress
• Enhancing compassion and altruism
• Increasing emotional regulation
• Fortifying relationships and encouraging healthy bonding
• Reducing PTSD symptoms

One of the most fascinating aspects of mindful meditation is that it has been found to encourage neurogenesis and increase activity in the left frontal cortex, the area in which we “generate positive feelings, such as joy and well-being.” Dr. Blaise Aguirre, Medical Director at McLean Hospital, explains the implication of these findings for Borderline Personality Disorder Treatment:

The data thus shows that regular practice of loving compassion activates the area of the brain that experiences joy and that allows us to consider that others might experience things differently from the way that we do. Both of these ideas are of profound importance to developing well-being in people with BPD.

Both the conscious and unconscious gifts meditation can bring you can be extraordinarily powerful pieces of your recovery process.