Order The Borderline Personality Disorder Workbook by Dr. Fox: https://goo.gl/LQEgy1

Defense Mechanism Worksheet: https://www.drdfox.com/worksheets

The things that drive you to engage in your beliefs, behaviors, and patterns are what makes up your core content and we’re going to identify it for you today in this video, and discuss what make it so hard to get to and change.

What thoughts, feelings, and memories impact you most? Which of these tend to drive you engage in your unhealthy beliefs, behaviors and patterns that’re causing you to hurt yourself, your relationships, and disrupting your personal and work life?

There are two parts of anyone’s personality: core content and surface content. Surface content is the result of the activation of your core content. Surface content tends to be your beliefs, behaviors, and patterns you engage in and can be adaptive and maladaptive. Individuals with PD, for this video BPD, tend to engage in maladaptive beliefs, behaviors, and patterns that perpetuate BPD. Most videos and stuff you hear about on BPD tend to address surface structure, but what about what’s underneath? What about what is at the root of your BPD, your core content?

Core content are those parts of you that when activated drive you to believe, behave, and fall into beliefs, behaviors, and patterns, and for those with BPD they tend to be largely self-destructive. As we go forward in this video, it’s important that you know that it’s ok to turn it off or pause it if it brings up too much. Core content is like that, because it’s linked to parts of you that are very central to your psychological make-up related to past hurts and experiences and it’s linked to your psychological defenses, or what are called defense mechanisms.

This a common behavior you engage in? This could be cutting yourself, refusing to let go of a loved one or idealized other, drinking and drugging, punching walls or other people, and so on. What is a feeling related to your past that drives you to behave that way? You may have to dig deep to find it, and through some uncomfortable content to get there, but it’s important to get there. For some folks, it is best to do this with a mental health provider, someone who can help guide you, if you don’t feel comfortable doing this on your own and that’s ok.

One of the first things I do with all of my clients, PD or not, is to find their core content. Some common ones for my clients with BPD are worthlessness, loneliness, vulnerability, abandonment, emptiness, but also being able, independent, determined, having integrity and so on. Notice that not all of the core content listed is negative, because it isn’t. All parts of your psychological make-up is not negative. Your BPD wants you to believe that it is but that’s just not possible or true. Remember, you BPD lies to you and distorts your view, remember the video on the BPD Lens?

When you feel your core content, or when your therapist, friend, or whomever taps into your core content what do you do? Do you act out, put out that hateful energy onto someone else who is safer, do you use humor, rationalize it using statistics, refuse to believe it’s true or block it out of your awareness, or do you split – see it all good or all bad? These are defense mechanisms that keep your core content safe, hidden and intact. To overcome your BPD, you have to get to core content, but because it is well defended it’s difficult. I’ll put a link to a worksheet of common defense mechanisms to help you identify your own. In this list you’ll see a checkbox to the left so you can mark off your common defense mechanisms. Don’t check ones that you use rarely, but check the ones you use often that are part of your default behaviors, remember that video?

We’re moving through this video quickly, but this is by no means a simple or quick task. Now that you know how to identify your core content and the associated defense mechanisms, you can use this information to help you recognize what beliefs, behaviors, and patterns are associated with it and instead of falling into maladaptive surface content, you can identify and use adaptive ones to help you lessen and control your BPD.

Dr. Fox maintains a website of various treatment interventions focused on working with and attenuating the symptomatology related to individuals along the antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic personality spectrum (www.drdfox.com).

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0:00 Introduction
0:44 THE 2 PARTS OF PERSONALITY
2:56 FINDING YOUR CORE CONTENT
5:50 YOUR CORE CONTENT & DEFENSES
8:41 WHAT NOW DR. FOX?