Music. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy, the podcast that empowers you to transform life's challenges into opportunities for personal growth and healthier relationships. We're your hosts, Tim and Ruth Olson, licensed marriage and family therapists and trauma experts. As experienced therapists with backgrounds in addressing trauma and mental health disorders, we believe there is hope and there certainly is healing.
We've spent our lives supporting people through the ups and downs, and we want to share these insights with you. Together, we'll unravel the layers of personal growth, healing from trauma, and building healthy relationships. Each week, we'll bring you engaging conversations, expert insights, and practical strategies to help you heal from the past, foster healthy communication, and develop enduring love.
This podcast is your guide to transforming adversity into triumph, healing wounds and past trauma, gaining wisdom and insight, and creating meaningful, fulfilling connections. So if you're here to heal, to better understand yourself or your relationships, you're in the right place. So sit back, get comfortable, bring your trauma and your drama, and let's start healing. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. Music. Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. We're excited to have you here with us today.
We're going to be continuing on with the series where we're talking about mental health disorders that are caused by trauma. In the last episode, we talked about post-traumatic stress disorder, acute stress disorder, depression, anxiety disorders, and dissociative disorders. Before we get started, if you haven't joined our Facebook community, we have a link down in the description below that you can click that will connect you with our group. All right, so let's dive right in.
So the first diagnosis that we're going to be talking about is borderline personality disorder or BPD. Some of the symptoms of BPD are instability in relationships, self-image issues, deep emotional reactions, impulsive behaviors, and episodes of anger, depression, and anxiety that can last between a few hours to several days. Now borderline personality disorder can be a very chaotic disorder to work with or to live and experience. When somebody has BPD, CD.
They're operating with a negative belief system of I cannot trust anyone or I'm not in control or something along those lines. And a lot of times what you'll see them doing is they almost will set up or put out tests for the people who are around them to make sure that they care about them or that they love them. And these tests oftentimes will look like they're pushing you away.
They're going to do things like they'll yell and scream or tell you to get out of the house or things along those lines where it'll seem very clear that they want you to be away from them. But then when you leave, then what they view that as is a rejection of them. Oh, you left me. You didn't really care. You should have stayed. You should have fought. You should have tried to be here with me. And there's this constant message that people who have BPD are putting out there.
It's I hate you. Don't leave me. And actually, there's a book written about borderline personality disorder that's named that. And so for everybody who is around that, they seem like they are always getting pushed away. But then when they seemingly listen to the person who has a disorder, and then they do take a step back, then they've done the wrong thing.
And then they get even more anger or even more chaotic behavior from that person, because you've accidentally poked at their deepest concern and their deepest internal worry that they have that the people who are around them don't really love them or don't really care about them. And it's not necessarily based on how the people around them are actually acting, it really is more of an internal negative belief system that they have received and developed through trauma.
Right. So a lot of times those fears of not being loved or wanted, like Tim said, really do stem from trauma. But oftentimes the trauma they're enduring is some kind of abuse or abandonment. And that's not always, but oftentimes you can see those abandonment wounds, right? And those fears of not being loved or not being wanted, Like Tim said, they really do stem from trauma.
But for people with BPD, oftentimes that trauma happens early on in life, and it often has to do with abuse or abandonment. Which that makes sense because later on, you begin to see that instability in relationship because of that fear of abandonment that they experienced in the past. And now they're afraid it may happen again and again. And so they do like what Tim was saying, I hate you, don't leave me.
So they push people away and yet they're so afraid that you will follow through and that you'll leave them. But it's almost like a protection thing where they're going to push you away also before you leave them. And so in a certain way, it can make them feel a little bit more in control. But ultimately, at the end of the day, they still feel the same way. They still feel abandoned, whether it's because of their own actions or it's because of the actions of the other person.
Now, something that I think is also important to know, you might yourself have BPD or a loved one might have BPD, and you might be thinking, well, I wasn't really abused or abandoned, but I think the abandonment can also be emotional, where somebody might be physically present, but then might not be emotionally available for you.
And so especially if it's a parent or caregiver in that role, and you feel like, oh, even though they might have been physically present, but they were never really there for me emotionally, you can still develop this disorder from that type of experience as well. The next one we're going to talk about, is substance use disorders. And there are a lot of different substance use disorders classified in the DSM-5, but we're just going to address it and talk about it as a whole.
And so a lot of times with substance abuse disorders, when we look and we see that there's some kind of traumatic experience in the background, oftentimes they're using these substances to numb or escape those traumatic memories or the pain that comes up from it. And that's not always the case with substance use disorders. There's a lot of reasons why people get started to use substances.
But just like we said in the last episode, one of the main reasons we're doing these episodes is that these diagnoses that often just kind of get brushed to the side and say, oh, they're just suppressed, or he's just an addict, to look a little deeper and see, really what the root cause is because if you can work on that, if you can heal that, then this other stuff that really is the byproduct of that, can be helped and can be decreased if you can get to the root of it.
But if you're just working on the symptoms, you could miss that there's a deeper problem and there's a deeper root there. One of the things I think is very interesting about addiction is that a lot of times we have a tendency to focus on the chemical addiction portion of it, where our body is craving that substance.
But ultimately, a lot of times what ends up happening is, for example, if somebody does get clean and sober, whether they go to jail and don't have access to that substance anymore, more, or they've had a time or a period of sobriety, you can get completely clean of that chemical addiction, but then still struggle with going back to that addiction. And so a lot of times we associate it as, well, once you get that chemical addiction, that's what causes it to be really hard to kick it.
But ultimately, what I think is the harder issue is that you have learned emotionally that I can get away from my negative feelings from using this substance. And so even if you've gone years without that chemical addiction, and it's no longer a factor anymore, more, you can still crave that substance because of what it can do for you emotionally.
And one of the things I always tell people is that the problem with any type of substance use in order to manage how you feel is that it very quickly erodes your ability to use healthy coping skills. Because that substance is so much easier to use than healthy coping skills. So you will jump and run to use that very frequently. And I think a major problem that people have is that they then get addicted to the ease of use of managing their emotions.
And the more you use it to manage your emotions, you're not really managing them. You're just kind of kicking the can down the road. Then the more and more tidal wave of emotions you have waiting for you once that substance wears off, then it causes you to want and need to use it more frequently in order to keep managing those emotions.
And substance use disorders are a little different, when you're treating clients, because there probably is a chance of comorbidity, where there's multiple diagnosis at once, where if they're struggling with a substance use disorder, there's a good possibility that they're also struggling with PTSD or depression or anxiety or some other diagnoses as well, which makes it important to really understand it because Because oftentimes
it requires concurrently managing the trauma as well as the addiction. And another thing you want to make sure that you consider is making sure that you are giving them resources and helping them figure out different tools and coping skills. Because if it is due to trauma, a lot of times this has been their coping skill. And this has gotten them through a lot of the pain and the things that anytime that trauma comes up or rears its ugly head, they're able to kind of numb it with this.
And so as you address the trauma, it's going to come up. They're going to experience these feelings that they've been probably running from for a long time. So you want to make sure that they have the resources and other coping skills in place to be able to help them manage this. The last one we're going to talk about is eating disorders. Now, eating disorders can have kind of a wide range of things that are underneath that umbrella. So it can be anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating.
And this isn't necessarily a diagnosis, but I think this is something that a lot of people struggle with would be comfort eating. And so just eating to help manage your emotions, but not necessarily in a binge type state. But people who are struggling with eating disorders, a lot of times it involves trauma with bodily autonomy. So if there's some type of sexual abuse or physical abuse that happened, in particular, I think with anorexia and bulimia, it's trying to take control over something.
And when you have been physically or sexually abused, you feel at a place where you're out of control. And so you want to try to take control over something that you can. And you can take control over what you put in your body or whether or not you leave that food in your body or not. And so it can give people a certain sense of control, but then they can control themselves all the way till the point of death.
And when you look at somebody who's extremely anorexic and they're still thinking or feeling like they're still overweight, it's because they're still trying to maintain a sense of control. I need to control this. I cannot let up on this. If I let go of this, it's almost like the last string of sanity. If I let go of the control over what I'm doing with my body, I just won't be able to handle it anymore. I will feel completely out of control.
But this is an interesting thing I always tell my clients is when you have a control issue, the more you end up trying to control, the more you run into the idea, I can't control everything. And so when you run into those different things that you can't control, it makes you feel more out of control. But then the inverse is true also. The less you try to control things, the less you run into things that you can't control, and actually the more in control you feel.
And so even though somebody who's struggling with anorexia or bulimia and and they're controlling what either goes into their body or what stays in their body, they still actually don't end up controlling how they feel. They actually end up making themselves still feel more out of control because what they're doing isn't really resolving the underlying emotional trauma that they have. And so that's why they never seem satiated.
And just like the substance use disorders that we were talking about, this is something that you have to also be careful to concurrently manage. The traumatic experiences that you're going to dive in and start to work on alongside the symptoms of the eating disorder. Because anorexia actually has one of the highest mortality rates in mental health. And so it's something that you have to monitor closely. They may need a higher level of care and they may need inpatient treatment.
And that's because it's very complex and complicated. So it's not something that you want to take lightly, but you have to make sure that if you are going to address the underlying cause, if you find trauma, that you're also really careful to manage the other symptoms and that you're also, like we said in the last diagnosis, that you're helping them obtain coping skills and different ways to manage trauma.
As you begin to bring the trauma to the surface. Now, we definitely want to reiterate, not every single situation where somebody has one of these diagnoses does that mean that they have trauma. But it definitely is something to look into. And we do think that a major source and way to get over the majority of the mental health struggles that people have is by diving into and helping to work at resolving the trauma. All right, guys, that's about all that we have for today. Thank you so much
for listening. And remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Music. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend? Also, we'd love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It lights us up to know that this podcast is helping you. If you have any questions or a topic you'd like discussed in future episodes,
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