Janina Fisher video – Reframing ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ as Traumatic Attachment

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Impulsivity, suicidality and self-harm. Intense, unstable relationships. Chronic feelings of emptiness. Difficulty controlling anger. Frantic efforts to avoid abandonment. An unstable sense of self…

The diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder are really eloquent symptoms telling a story of trauma – if only we would listen to them.

In the free video above, Janina Fisher takes on a mental health diagnosis that carries perhaps more stigma than any other. It is a diagnosis that often goes hand in hand with the labelling of behaviours as ‘attention seeking’ and ‘manipulative’. And it is given to three times more women than men.

What happens, Janina asks, if we follow what the research has been telling us about Borderline Personality Disorder since the 1980s?

What happens if we take BPD out of the category of ‘personality disorder’ and consider it instead in terms of traumatic attachment?

What happens if we see the above symptoms as resulting from an internal struggle between the attachment drive and the drives to flee or fight?

Janina’s one-hour presentation is a clinically essential guide to understanding and working with Borderline Personality Disorder through the lens of trauma and disorganised attachment. Punctuated with profoundly moving client testimonies, it helps us to see how this “worst of all diagnoses” can function for female therapy clients as an “abandonment and betrayal on top of abandonment and betrayal” – and how powerfully that stigma can start to shift when we try to see the wounded little girl inside the adult client.

Understood as a trauma-related disorder, Janina argues, Borderline Personality Disorder also becomes significantly easier to treat.

In her free presentation, we learn about the characteristic “push and pull” of disorganised attachment, and how this shapes our autonomic systems.

We hear why triggering is a “brain and body” problem, and why subtle experiences of disappointment or empathic failure can lead to “tsunamis” of feeling. 

We discover which aspect of borderline experience is absent from the diagnosis yet encountered again and again in clinic.

And we make sense of the association between suicidality and self-harm and diagnoses of BPD – in the context of which such behaviours are frequently misunderstood and stigmatised. 

“Think about your clients who carry this diagnosis,” says Janina, “and think about the symptoms that tell their story…”

Watch this free video now to respond to Janina’s invitation, and to help your own female clients with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder end the devastating pattern of abandonment and betrayal, yearning and despair.