“I hate you - Don’t leave me” - Jerold Kreisman, M.D
BPD Therapy in NYC & NY
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) can make relationships, emotions, and your sense of self feel incredibly intense. You may find yourself alternating between all or nothing thinking towards individuals or yourself. Hate and love, fear and safety and more.
If you are struggling with BPD, you are probably aware of how hard it can be to find impactful treatment. I offer integrative psychodynamic and dialectical therapy for BPD, with the therapeutic relationship itself playing an important role in the treatment.
The relational therapy frame will eventually ask for you to tolerate an imperfect therapist.
BPD, Relationships and Emotional Processing
It can be common for individuals who are struggling with BPD to alternate between idealization and devaluation. Relationships can become intensely meaningful and then, following disappointment, conflict, or perceived rejection, feel suddenly unbearable.
Where I differ is that I don’t really think therapy is about “Regulation”. These shifts are not merely behaviors to be managed. They can tell us something about how you experience attachment, joy, rejection, anger, vulnerability, and yourself. Of course, we will do some skills based work when these shifts come up.
Using The Relational Container as Treatment for BPD
In therapy, we can pay attention to these patterns as they emerge, including within the therapeutic relationship itself. The relationship gives us an opportunity to experience stability and make room for both disappointment in the container and appreciation. These two things can be tough to hold.
My approach to BPD
DBT is often used to treat borderline personality disorder, I offer DBT skills eclectically and informally. Borderline personality disorder can be treated by other therapeutic modalities.
The therapeutic relationship itself, and the boundaries within that relationship, are part of the treatment.
For someone with a BPD diagnosis, the experience of a stable attachment and the ability to tolerate ambiguity within that attachment can be an important part of treatment. Erasing ambiguity does not help someone with BPD think dialectically.
A relationship can contain contradictory experiences. You can feel angry with someone and still love them. Someone can disappoint you without abandoning you. A therapist can have boundaries while still being emotionally present.
The goal is not to eliminate those contradictions, but to develop the capacity to experience and think about them without needing the relationship to become entirely good or entirely bad.
It is also worthwhile to examine major vicissitudes of mood as material to examine formative influences and other dynamics being acted out, for example.
Who I Work With
I work with adults seeking outpatient psychotherapy for BPD and related personality patterns. My practice is best suited to individuals who are able to participate in an ongoing therapeutic relationship.
While I respond appropriately to crises and offer intervention, my model is not an ongoing crisis intervention or a higher level of psychiatric care. If you are experiencing an acute psychiatric or suicidal crisis, a higher level of care may be more appropriate. This is not a disqualification of character, it is common for people with BPD to seek more relational outpatient therapy when they are ready to or after finishing more intensive treatment. It depends and we can assess on consult, which can result in me working with you or referring to another provider. In the first 3-6 sessions, we usually establish fit.
Let’s Work Together.
