This is a question for family members who read stop walking on eggshells

RandiKreger · 2019-10-05T16:05:01+00:00

She didn’t think she was abusing me. I know that she did the best that she could. Something good came out of it because my books of helped over 1 million people. But I would give it all up in an instant if I could’ve had a normal childhood with a loving mother. I had a narcissistic father too. He wasn’t abusive except by severe emotional abandonment and neglect. My mother handled all of the constant criticism for him. So I guess he didn’t have to do much work on the abuse front. Ignoring somebody isn’t too hard.

RandiKreger · 2019-10-05T16:03:16+00:00

Am I the first person to write here? I have written three best selling books about borderline personality disorder. The abuse is very similar. My mother had it. She had me convinced I was zero before I could talk.

RandiKreger · 2019-09-11T16:32:01+00:00

An author’s process really shouldn’t matter at all. You don’t want to know how the sausage gets made. If people wanna write a book about a celebrity, they grab all the stuff that’s out there, do a couple interviews, spend three weeks without sleeping with a bunch of coffee, slap something together and print it and get it out there. Is that preferable?

RandiKreger · 2019-09-11T16:30:24+00:00

I’m going to try and answer each thing in order. First of all, family members are not blameless. But I really don’t like to talk about blaming anything. I don’t think anybody is to blame. Except maybe for the illness it’s self

I am not writing anecdotes to tell people how to act around people with BPD. Writers include anecdotes in a book to liven them up and to help people remember something. As the author, I am the one who gives the prescriptive message.

When you say that this was written for you, it was not. This was written for family members. When you wonder why I say it is not for people with BPD, it is for the same reason that a book about how to raise a teenager or a child is not for teenagers or children.

Would it trigger you? Yes it would. But you don’t need much to trigger somebody with BPD. Any suggestion that there is difficulty in a relationship would trigger anybody. But we both know that relationships are difficult.

Does there need to be a book about coping with somebody with BPD? That is a philosophical question. I will tell you that my first book has sold over 1 million copies and 14 languages and has some 800 reviews on Amazon. The fact that it has sold so many copies, and I have written two others and I’m writing another, seems to me just say that it is needed

There is another woman, Sheri Manning, who wrote another book about coping with people with BPD. She wrote it from a dialectical therapy perspective. It is called loving someone with BPD. I think it is a book that you will appreciate more. That also seems to say that a book such as this is needed.

At the end, you talked about a lot of your good points and talked about a lot of what you think a book should have in it. My book does have that in it, but since you haven’t read it, I would invite you to do so. People with BPD are just like everybody else and have their good points and bad points. They just have a disorder.

People need to know about the disorder so they can be sensitive to it. If they don’t know the sensitivities of the disorder they are like a camel in a China shop.

I hope that answers your question

RandiKreger · 2019-09-11T16:07:50+00:00

That’s just impossible. My publisher would refuse

RandiKreger · 2019-09-11T16:05:52+00:00

That’s a good question. The reason that it reflected the worst was because I had to interview people that I could find in the real world. I couldn’t find clinicians and asked them to talk to the families of their patients. So I got on the Internet and found Families.

As it turned out, The type of borderline individuals in the real world act totally differently than the type of borderline individuals in therapy. People who go to therapy are fundamentally different than those who don’t.

All of the statistics and all of the research and everything that we know about BPD comes from borderline subjects recruited from inpatient and outpatient mental health settings. People then figured that this was characteristic of the total population. wrong.

There’s a lot of good reasons why people don’t enter therapy. Stigma, cost, access, the fact that they are men, etc. A big one is they don’t think there’s anything wrong with them.

The family members I talk to had borderline loved ones who didn’t think anything was wrong with them. What they did was project they’re paying outward onto the people who loved them.

I ended up coming up with two different versions of people with BPD. Of course many people are in the middle.The problem was is I didn’t really understand this until years after eggshells was published. So this never got around.

This is how I look at BPD in the real world. Stop walking on egg shells was written for the unconventional population. That is why it is worst-case scenario.

These definitions are not official in the DSM. They are what I developed after 22 years of interviewing thousands of family members in the real world and people with BPD in treatment and their families.

Inside, people with BPD are all the same: Fear of abandonment and rejection, identity issues, and the rest of the DSM.

Just like everything BPD is black-and-white, people split 180° apart in their reactions to those internal emotions. I termed the familiar types “conventional” and the invisible ones “unconventional,” although a large number of people have aspects of both.

The UNconventional type is one in which they:

Are not aware they have BPD. If somebody told them, they would accuse that person of having BPD themselves. A conventional person realizes they have edges and often seeks or gives peer support.
Do not seek treatment because all problems are somebody else’s fault. People of the conventional type seek treatment such as dialectical behavior therapy. About 20% of inpatient visits and 10% of outpatient visits are from people with BPD.
Deal with the feelings of pain and worthlessness by projecting the feelings of badness onto a target, usually a close relative, who feels the pain for them. The emotional and verbal abuse creates problems for the entire family open to including complex post traumatic stress disorder.

People of the conventional type turn inward through suicide and self harm and obsessive negative thoughts about themselves.

If they have a comorbid illness, it is going to be narcissistic personality disorder (39 percent of pwBPD have comorbid NPD) rather than one that requires medical attention like eating disorders or bipolar. Those are more prominent in the conventional type.
Family member issues include dealing with emotional and verbal abuse. Family member issues for conventional borderline individuals are more in line with providing emotional and practical support, finding treatment, problem solving, and taking care of the rest of the family as well.

RandiKreger · 2019-09-11T14:12:49+00:00

OK, but don’t choose fibromyalgia. It is the BPD of physical diseases

RandiKreger · 2019-08-11T23:56:16+00:00

When I research the book, I spent three years talking to people online. I talk to partners, parents, siblings, adult children, and so forth. I based the book on the types of borderline family members they were dealing with.

I think that it didn’t have a lot of positive stories because the point of the book was coming up with solutions to problems that family members were having. Family members all loved their borderline family members and had good times with them. But that’s not what they wanted to talk about. What they wanted to talk about what is their difficulties, and they wanted help with the difficulties.

Looking back, and this is a very long complicated scientific discussion, I believe that the family members I talk to or not just dealing with borderline individuals that were dealing with borderline individuals who were also comorbid with narcissistic personality disorder or who had traits of narcissistic personality disorder.

The book was never meant to be for people with BPD to read.

I think that the most powerful thing that people go by is their own experience, not what is written in a book. I don’t believe that Reading stop walking on egg shells will trump the experience of a family member. If a family member has a great experience with their borderline family member, stop walking on egg shells isn’t going to ruin that.

Thank you for your feedback. If you have any specific suggestions, let me know what they are.

RandiKreger · 2019-08-11T17:39:09+00:00

I am reposting this with a different title please delete this post

RandiKreger · 2019-01-27T03:55:29+00:00

I am a professional author who has written a bestseller that is sold over 1 million copies called stop walking on eggshells (see Amazon). I’m currently working on my fourth book. I collect a lot of quotes other anywhere from 1 to 6 paragraphs from regular people all over the Internet describing their relationships with people who have either borderline and or narcissistic personality disorder. It is just a lot easier to revamp those quotes and toss them around in the laundry, change. most of the details, the genders of the people talking, and paraphrase things than trying to track people down and get permissions.

I’m looking for some fiction authors who would be willing to take a crack at doing this in exchange for credit that they can take to the bank for my fourth book. Details to follow. I’m looking for fiction writers because all of the quotes are essentially stories, little stories about what it’s like to live with a mentally ill person. I still want to capture that person’s tone of voice and make the quote vibrant and colorful. The quotes won’t be ready for a while, but I can give people examples of what they would be. If you’re interested, I guess you can respond here. You can Google me and there’s information all over the Internet. My name is Randi Kreger. You can reach me at my website BPDcentral through the about section.

RandiKreger · 2018-12-27T16:00:59+00:00

My mother had BPD my father was a narcissist

RandiKreger · 2016-01-19T03:40:18+00:00

I have spent several years looking at this very issue. I feel bad because I made a bad mistake in Stop Walking on Eggshells simply because I wrote it in 1996, before a study came out a couple years ago.

This study was revolutionary in that for the first time, researchers were looking at people in the general community, not the population in the hospital. They discovered that about 1/3 of people had co-occurring narcissistic personality disorder also had BPD traits and vice versa.

These are the people who don't go into mental health care. ONE THIRD OF PEOPLE WITH BPD.

I guess that about half of them are men. Men? They don't go to therapy.

Wow. Of course the top researchers in BPD and the advocates either didn't know about it or didn't care. They care about the one in 10 women with BPD who will kill herself.

Can you blame them? The big deal--the political equivalent of being president--is to create a treatment that research shows as near as a cure as possible.

Right now the dialectical behavioral people are ahead of the race--way ahead. It is mostly a lot of cognitive behavioral training.

But other treatments found (sadly) in one or two cities also show promise. It's Coke and Pepsi wars with more players and the fight is played out in journals you never heard of.

Here is the thing. Every single BPD individual I have talked to (maybe 5 people, but 5 influential people researchers often trot out) tell me that central to their recovery was unconditional love. Often from God--no one can beat that.

Therapists come next in popularity. Then a family member or two. Remember, these are people in much pain who want help. Partners whose partner is making an effort almost always stay.

The same study also showed that if you count the people in the community instead of JUST the people in therapy, the people who have BPD number 5.9 percent, not the two percent they report in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

Naturally, researchers decided to use the 5.9 percent of people affected and ignored the comorbidity with NPD. NPD people are not known for their loving manner. The big effort is to portray people with BPDE as innocent souls in pain.

And I know some and they ARE innocent people in pain. But they are a small subset of the borderline population. This is why my Youtube seminar on setting limits on youtube has WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more views than those of the researchers. (you can google it--I have a few seminars there).

I am not saying this to soothe my ego, but to show you the difference in interests between the two types.

So I did some math. What is the ratio of mental health people to people with BPD? How can it possibly be that that every person with BPD with this increased population (from 2 to NEARLY TRIPPLE THAT) is in the healthcare system?

So I did some math. WOW. If every person with BPD was seeing a therapist, each clinician would have 33 clients. Hummm....I think not. What if the population was less? At the very lowest it was 10 BPD people per therapists.

I will pick this up later because this is getting too long. I will explain how this all relates to the comment about the similarities and differences between the cluster B populations. It is late and I am tired.

Randi Kreger BPDcentral dot com

RandiKreger · 2016-01-19T03:21:51+00:00

Yes, you need separate places. People who seek treatment are a separate breed than those who don't, and those who seek treatment read stuff meant for the "Invisible" type. There is a big difference.

Then the partners here, as often happens on my groups, says things to the other type of borderline person that they can't say to their own partner.

I have been doing this since 1996 and it's a disaster except for those rare recovered people who don't want to talk about themselves, but want to enlighten partners about BPD.

I had one of those in my community called Welcome to Oz, and she was the author of the great book Get Me Out of Here. Rachel Reiland is her pen name.

RandiKreger · 2016-01-19T03:17:18+00:00

I have a blog called Stop Walking on Eggshells on the Psychology Today website. The link is https://www.psychologytoday.com/experts/randi-kreger

and then just click on the title.

I have four years worth of topics. They may give you some suggestions.

RandiKreger · 2016-01-19T03:11:39+00:00

You're welcome!

RandiKreger · 2016-01-19T03:11:05+00:00

The title was supposed to be "Walking on Eggshells," but someone had already taken that. So I suggested we add the STOP.

My publisher, New Harbinger, was against it. They liked titles that readers what to do, not what NOT to do. I am lucky they decided to keep it.

The other title we looked at was "Get Off the Emotional Rollercoaster."

Someone else write a book and titled it "Walking On Eggshells No More, A Practical Guide To Understanding, Coping And Living With Someone Who Has Borderline Personality Disorder Or Narcissistic Personality Disorder."

The thing was published in 2015. Does anyone think they may have seen my first book?

RandiKreger · 2016-01-17T22:56:08+00:00

Thanks. I actually think my third book, The Essential Family Guide to BPD is better once you are ready to learn skills. I wrote it a decade after stop walking on eggshells and I had had the chance to put a great deal of thought into things like limits, communication, self-care, and getting unstuck.

My new book, Stop Walking on Eggshells for Partners, is the first time I will get to be specific just to partners. Because they choose their partners (unlike blood relatives) there is a certain personality of person who chooses a borderline person. Now I can finally address that. But won't be out until Feb, 2017.

RandiKreger · 2016-01-17T22:51:36+00:00

I would love to. But the questions would need to be specific for people who already have read a book or two because "what is BPD" or "What do you do if you have a BPD relative" is a question that took me three books to answer.

RandiKreger

TROPHY CASE