Cycle 13 - Smarter Than BPD - Main Text Quiz

Understanding Self-Destructive Beliefs and Patterns of Thought and Behavior

• Self-destructive beliefs (SDBs) can be invented or adopted by a person going through an unhealthy childhood experience or other abusive experiences later in life.
• People may suffer from more than one type of self-destructive belief simultaneously.
• The main reason for holding on to self-destructive beliefs is to create a sense of security and emotional comfort.
• Humans often remain dependent on these beliefs to function in everyday life in the absence of a consistently warm and constructive attachment experience.
• Knowing which type of beliefs you regularly turn to can help you understand which kinds of feelings you need to practice identifying, tolerating, working through, managing, etc.
• Activities that nurture self-discovery and self-awareness (e.g., mindfulness) can help build awareness of patterns of thought and behaviour that tend to make life more complicated than necessary.
• When you start noticing your beliefs in real-time as life unfolds, you begin to have more power to live differently, make different choices, choose different paths, and have different reactions.
• People with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) may depend upon several self-destructive beliefs to function.
• The most common self-destructive beliefs for people with BPD are “achievement,” “demandingness,” and “submissiveness.”
• Emotional avoidance behaviours connected to beliefs get so interwoven into our everyday life that we don’t even notice they are there.
• Lack of awareness and understanding is why people are often confused about why their lives aren’t going well or why they aren’t getting the results they had hoped for in relationships and other areas of life.
• Self-destructive beliefs (plus all associated emotional avoidance behaviours) do not work even to produce temporary relief/ contentment, and the avoidance behaviours themselves create more consequences than relief.