Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

Editorial Reviews

If you are reading this book, chances are that you, like Valerie, come to this moment and these pages not by choice. You come desperate, having already traveled a long and arduous road as you sought answers, explanation, and the possibility of real help for your loved one with borderline personality disorder (BPD). You seek an understanding that is only possible among those who have stood in your shoes, who need no words to truly get the horrors you have faced, the fear as you consider the future, the profound sadness and grief, and the yearnings of your heart. You come hoping against hope that perhaps you will find the way out of the hell you and your loved one have endured.

However you got here, whatever your own path has been, you have arrived well. You can take comfort in knowing that your guide, Valerie Porr, has devoted decades of her life scaling the mountain tops far and wide, also searching for answers and explanations about BPD, and for a way out, for those she loves and for those she may never meet. She has applied her brilliant and creative mind, her seemingly endless and bountiful energy, and a determined passion to the pursuit of gathering, piecing together, distilling, and disseminating all that is known scientifically about BPD. This book, a compilation of all she has learned and now teaches to those in her family classes, is a labor of love if there ever was one. Valerie has read scientific journals copiously, often making connections unseen by researchers themselves until hearing her astute observations. She and her members attend scientific conferences throughout the world on an annual basis (American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy, International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders, to name a few). She engages deeply in these meetings, fearlessly asking hard questions, and reminding the scientific community that our research “subjects” are her and her members’ sons, daughters, wives, and husbands. You can expect to find Valerie seated near the front, with camera in hand, taking digital images of the presenter’s slides so she can immediately incorporate what she has learned in her next class or workshop. There is no time to wait. People are dying and lives are being destroyed by the disorder of BPD.

I originally met Valerie shortly after she formed TARA, her non-profit organization that seeks to assist and support loved ones of those afflicted with BPD. She had applied to attend a 10-day Intensive Training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a scientifically-proven treatment for BPD developed by Marsha M. Linehan, Ph.D. at the University of Washington. Her application sparked a number of interesting and important conversations for our training organization about the role of families in “treating” individuals with BPD. DBT, like those it seeks to treat, is difficult to learn, even for well-trained mental health professionals. DBT is a comprehensive treatment built on multiple theories, containing numerous principles, strategies, procedures, and skills. Linehan’s primary treatment manual (Linehan, M.M., Cognitive and Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, New York: Guilford Press, 1993) is thick, tedious, and technical. How could family members with no training in mental health treatments be expected to learn DBT, let alone use it well? Furthermore, was it even ethical for them to do so? Over time, I discovered how naïve and wrong I was. I learned that in fact the most ethical and effective approach to treatment is, when possible, to actively engage families who seek to help in the treatment. Indeed, few others will go the distance as will family members of those with BPD.

The contents of this book have their roots in that DBT intensive. Valerie’s team returned to the second part of the DBT Intensive Training having established TARA’s first DBT psychoeducational program f