Beyond the Chaos: Christian Counseling for Borderline Personality Disorder?
At times a client come in with a mental health disorder that needs clinical treatment. A licensed counselor is qualified to diagnose personality disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). They are usually more knowledgeable about symptoms and treatment or can readily access this information . They are also able to provide billing information to clients for PPO (out-of-network providers). If they work with insurance, licensed counselors can directly submit claims to insurance companies (HMO providers).
What are the symptoms of Borderline Personality?
Like all personality disorders, the symptoms develop in adolescence and young adulthood. A partial list of symptoms are:
Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
A pattern of intense and unstable relationships - with idealization or devaluation of the other person
Unstable identity, ie sense of self or self-image
Impulsivity in at least two areas (sex, spending, binge eating)
Affective instability - reactive moods
Inappropriate, intense anger
Much of what ensues are entrenched thought patterns about the nature of the world and people.
Possible Christian Counseling Approaches to Borderline Personality Treatment
Having a Christian counselor who is a licensed counselor will give you the advantage of someone with a broader scope of knowledge and experience with mental health disorders. They can diagnose the severity of borderline personality and come up with an effective treatment plan that is based on current research and practice.
One important step to recovery is refocusing your locus of control from outward to inward. You can think about what you know is true about your identity in Christ and the God that loves you. You will be replacing thoughts of abandonment and distrust with God’s promises and descriptions of His nature, his faithfulness and presence. As a child of God, He has promised to never leave you. He is "compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (Exodus 34.6)." Having an internal locus of control helps your overcome the extremes of people-pleasing and/or reacting to perceived slights.
If you use your knowledge of God as revealed in Scripture, then you can experience secure attachment and the safe haven of God’s presence. “And under His wings you will find refuge; His faithfulness is a shield and a wall (Psalm 91.4).” You will find many more verses and stories of God’s care and protection as you begin to search. Try doing word searches in a Bible app such as the Bible app or Bible Gateway. When you start looking for God’s interventions, remember them with daily journaling.
This is a process of changing your thoughts, which determine your behaviors. It’s a relationship with God where a Christian seeks to know God’s thoughts and ways. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth. So are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55.9). This is an element of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) where thoughts and actions are interwoven.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a third wave of CBT therapy, uses behavior analysis. You will be starting with problem behavior, move to the prompting event, describing what made you vulnerable (i.e. intense emotions, physical illness, alcohol or drug use, or stressful events), describe the chain of events that led to the problem behavior, and then finally the consequences of the problem behavior.
An outline of supports that DBT offers are:
General skills and analyzing behavior
Mindfulness skills
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Emotional Regulation skills
Distress Tolerance skills
How does a Christian counselor help?
In summary, some Christian counselor will treat mental illness by exclusively applying principles from the Bible. They take the Sermon on the Mount as the complete example of mental health and focus on pursuing God in addition to spiritual warfare for attaining wholeness. Many licensed mental health professionals who are Christians will take what they know from Scripture as the foundation for implementing what the science of psychology continues to explore and reveal about the human body, emotions and mind. The trinitarian God is the center and source of a Christian’s life; instead of a mechanical application of a set of therapeutic tools.
Ready for Christian counseling for Borderline Personality Disorder?
If you are feeling lost in working through your relationship patterns on your own, call 720-577-5985 for a free consultation from your Christian counselor in Denver.
Resources:
Amplified Bible, Bible app on the App Store - Retrieved from https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bible/id282935706
Linehan, Marsha M. (2015). DBT Skills Training: Handouts and Worksheets, NYC, NY: Guilford Press.
American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5 (5th Edition). Arlington, VA.
