Change Your Brain Every Day - 10 Common Signs of Personality Disorder

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

If you or someone you know experiences drastic mood swings, erratic behavior, or dramatic shifts in self-image, it may be a case of borderline personality disorder. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen discuss the 10 common signs of personality disorder.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. And stay tuned for a special code for a discount to Amen Clinics for a full evaluation, as well as any of our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Welcome back. Today, we're going to talk about a very controversial subject and one that has tormented a lot of people, both from people who struggle with this and people who love them. We're going to talk about borderline personality disorder.

Often people who really struggle in relationships. So I have a story about this, actually. I actually didn't know anything about borderline personality. And long before I met you, I went out with someone who I thought I kind of liked. It didn't go very far, though, because this person was so traumatized by someone that he went out with who he said was borderline, and he didn't know she was borderline and he began to tell me all about how crazy this person was and made his life this person made his life just like hell and crazy and was like and he was he he asked me he's like are you

borderline I'm like what do you I how do you even answer that like I was like so stunned but I realized he was so traumatized and he had such PTSD from this whole experience that nothing was ever going to come of this situation. So it just sort of ended before it started. He just couldn't trust anybody. So is that normal for someone who's ever gone out with someone with borderline personality? It's a nightmare. I mean, dating them, living with them, having them work with you, it's a nightmare for them, but it's also a nightmare for the people who are around them. So let me talk about the 10 most common signs of borderline personality. So one is impulsive and risky behavior, such as risky driving, unsafe sex, gambling sprees, or illegal drug abuse.

That's just one. So impulsivity and risky behavior. Two, awareness of self-destructive behavior, including self-injury, but often feeling unable to change. So self-injury like cutting? Like cutting. Okay. Burning yourself, asphyxiation, choking yourself, wide mood swings is number three. Four is short but intense episodes of anxiety or depression. Five, very common, inappropriate anger and antagonistic behavior, sometimes escalating into physical fights, not associated with drugs or alcohol. Six, difficulty controlling emotions. Seven, suicidal behavior. Eight, feeling misunderstood, alone empty very common or hopeless 9 fear of being alone I hate you please don't leave right 10 feelings

of self-hate and self-loathing I often will begin to suspected in the office if someone tells me after meeting me for 20 minutes, you're the best psychiatrist that ever lived, because I know usually in about three sessions, they're going to say, you're the worst psychiatrist that ever lived. So they tend to overvalue and then undervalue. So I have a question. I'm assuming there's also a continuum.

Not everyone is like to attend on this scale and not everyone's zero. Right. And just so people know, the term borderline actually came because psychiatrists were having trouble sort of, is this a psychotic disorder And it's sort of on the border of those where sometimes their behavior is so irrational that you wonder if they're not going to a place. Well, I've known someone who has, in my mind, all 10 of those traits. And it's really hard to get through to someone when they're in one of their episodes. So what causes it? So there are a lot of theories about it that early abandonment, very early trauma, sexual trauma, physical trauma, almost always early either abandonment or trauma. When I actually don't like giving people this diagnosis, I do it very rarely because for therapists, when they're dealing with someone who has borderline personality disorder,

they'll often give people that diagnosis when they know they're not going to get better. And so they justify that, well, it's not my fault as a therapist that you're not getting better. It's your fault because it's your character. It's your personality. So here at Amen Clinics, we actually very rarely give people personality disorder diagnoses because that doesn't really honor the brain. But what does that mean? When you say you rarely give it, is that because you're saying that personality disorders rarely

get better? That I would much rather see this from a brain perspective. And what I often see is they have abnormalities in their left temporal lobe, which go along with violence and the irritability and the dark negative thoughts, they often have low frontal lobe function, which goes with the impulsivity and the risky excitement-seeking behavior. And they often have high activity in their cingulate gyrus, which we've talked about is where they get stuck.

You're the best person. And they're inflexible. Now you're the worst person. now you're the worst person and these people can actually become stalkers. And so I'm all in thinking... The couple that I've known of also like sex addiction was huge. So is that a common thing? Common.

Okay. And if you think of our sex addicts that they have high... They have compulsivity and impulsivity at the same time. So they're impulsive and compulsive. And so for me, I'll use either medicine or supplements to raise both serotonin and dopamine. Raising serotonin helps the compulsivity. Raising dopamine helps the impulsivity. I'll often use a mood stabilizer as well, something like Neurontin or Lamictal, to help decrease the rages. And to me, I've found when I balance their brain and then teach them how to manage their

stress in their relationships, they do so much better. And so I actually got to debate Otto Kernberg, who is probably, you know, people think of him as the founder of borderline personality disorder and psychoanalytic theory. And I'm like, we should be looking at their brains, because how do you know they didn't have a brain injury? Or how do you know they don't have a brain disease? Yeah, that's my question. How does it start? Because, you know, if you have a brain injury, it can totally make you look. That's my question.

We saw a movie last night that we loved, I Can Only Imagine, about the origin of this Christian song by Mercy Me. And the movie was just beautiful. But he lived in a lot of trauma. But Bart was the main character, was raised by a severely abusive father who beat him and whose mother left. And so Bart was abandoned. Bart was abused. Bart didn't have borderline personality disorder.

He was traumatized. And then as you looked at the dad, the movie really early on centers around football. And the dad, I guess, played in college and was really good. And I'm watching the movie going, the dad has CTE. I know, I'm getting mad at you. The dad has chronic traumatic encephalopathy from the repetitive hits to his head, which makes him ineffective at work with his family. And Jesus ends up saving him and transforms his life. And it's like, you're like, how can Jesus fix CTE? No, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I said. You said that. I said said if it were CTE,

he wouldn't all of a sudden for the last part of his life become this amazing person. See, I went to a Roberts University. Well, I went to Loma Linda. So same thing. Believe in prayer. Same thing. I do too. I'm just saying CTE, you don't usually see like reverse that radically. But what do we always talk about? That there are four main circles of illness, right? They're biological, so trauma. They're psychological, the trauma that Bart was raised in, and probably the dad. Social, you're really struggling in your marriage, you're struggling at work, you're struggling to be a good dad or a good kid, and spiritual. And often we find when people find their purpose, when they get connected to God, their community, their deepest sense of meaning and purpose, even if they have bad biology, it gets better. And one of my favorite stories is

about Byron Katie, who's a friend of ours. Oh, she certainly would have demonstrated a lot of this. She was a rager. She would have totally demonstrated borderline personality. She was an addict. She was a rager. She had eating disorders. Self-destructive behavior, right. Self-destructive. But she has this epiphany, which is really a spiritual experience. She wakes up on the floor of a halfway house. With a cockroach crawling across her foot.

And realizes when she believes her thoughts, she suffers. And when she doesn't believe her thoughts, she doesn't suffer. Because her thoughts are awful. And when we became friends, because her book was so helpful to me, we were actually published by the same imprint at Random House. And so I got to meet her and she came and got scanned. She had the brain of a murderer. I said, oh, by the way, if you murder someone, I can help get you off.

But she was the most peaceful person, right? So when you think about the transformation, don't forget that having a deep sense of meaning and purpose can help you feel better. Okay. So my question is, so let's just say you didn't experience all of that in childhood, but can experiencing like massive major stress later in life or some sort of emotional trauma later in life trigger that kind of behavior or can an infection or a head injury later in life yes okay actually if the stress is stuck okay so which means that there is hope

that you can be helped absolutely okay but if the stress is stacked you lose your job you lose your marriage, you've had a car accident, you have an autistic child, these start stacking. Your behavior is much more likely to get out of- Erratic and- More erratic. And there's hope, you have to just deal with each of these- And then you can balance that behavior. And then you can balance your behavior. So I would like to do another podcast on this because I think we should talk about people who love people with these personality issues. Stay tuned. Use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com

or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month.