 I want to get back to making videos on borderline personality disorder, but before I do that, you and I need to have a quick little talk. What is up everybody? This is Chris from The Reward, so where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. One of my primary goals is to raise awareness as well as decrease the stigma, all right? And there's a massive stigma around borderline personality disorder. And yeah, so I'm at a beautiful park here in Las Vegas. I thought I'd switch up the scenery a little bit because it's going to be hot really soon here in Las Vegas, but it's gorgeous here at the park. There's like ducks or geese, something like that. Anyway, here's a footage of all of that going on. Yeah, so anyways, like I said, I'm going to get back to making videos about borderline personality disorder, but I wanted to explain why I started making those videos in the first place. So as many of you know who have been around for a while, you know I was working in a dual diagnosis mental health treatment center. Basically we dealt with addiction as well as mental illness, all right? So people who had co-occurring disorders had addiction as well as a mental illness. And I actually had never heard of borderline personality disorder before, but working in the treatment center, I started to learn about this diagnosis. You know, other employees would be like, hey, this person has borderline personality disorder, or like when they were going to have me do a one-on-one with them and things like that. And there was a couple of things that I noticed. The first one was that there was a lot of therapists who did not want to work with clients who had borderline personality disorder, who had symptoms of BPD. A lot of therapists did not want to work with these men and women. And I'm like, well, that's weird. We're in a mental health treatment center. Like, shouldn't you want to work with everybody? But you know, the other thing I realized was, for some reason, I always had great relationships with the clients who were diagnosed with symptoms of BPD. And a lot of them would confide in me when therapists realized that I had a way of talking with the clients struggling with this disorder, like they would say, hey, Chris, can you talk with this client? Da-da-da-da-da. And I'm like, okay, cool. And I always had just amazing relationships with that. But it always kind of bugged me just hearing about how people, you know, certain professionals didn't want to work with this population. And anyways, you hear those geese, like, squawking in the background? I'm legit waiting for these geese to chill out. It's like walking. It's just walking over there. Yeah, you guys want to see which geese are messing with me? What? Can you guys see that? Anyways. So I wanted to educate myself about borderline personality disorder. The more I educated myself about what this disorder is and this dysregulation of emotions and all the other symptoms, such as, you know, this intense fear of abandonment, you know, impulsivity, that's why a lot of them ended up coming to treatment, I started to relate to a lot of the symptoms. So I wanted to educate myself more about it. I want to see what, you know, what helped people with borderline personality disorder so I can help out the clients who I was working with and all that. And I started making videos about it when I realized there was such a stigma around borderline personality disorder. I started hearing from the clients that, you know, friends and family members think that they manipulate them or they're embarrassed or ashamed of their diagnoses and all these other things. And I was like, I want to make videos about this and kind of spread awareness. You know, I started making videos about them and, you know, one of the reasons I'm going to get back to making these videos is that you can see right here, you can see right here on the screen, like these videos were very well received, like if you just look at the, the like to dislike ratio, people were liking them and it wasn't even really about that, but it was more about the comments. It was the comments I was receiving. It was people saying, you know, thank you and they were thanking me for making videos on this disorder and they were sharing their experience and people felt less alone and I'm like, okay, all right. So, you know, I ended up making a video discussing my BPD story and in that video I discussed, you know, at the very beginning, I discussed how I've never been formally diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. I ended up talking to a psychologist and asked her the best way to kind of go about it, you know, because here's the thing. Diagnoses aside, you know, and a lot of people with borderline personality disorder who I've met in my experience, they prefer talking about the symptoms rather than the actual diagnoses and that's, that's why I want to get back to making these videos because I can relate to those struggles. I can relate to the emotional turmoil, the stigma that, you know, people not wanting to be around you, you know, just that, all of it, right. And the video I made on my BPD story also very, very well received as you could see from, you know, the comment section on that video. So, what I wanted to talk about in this video is it's difficult and I put up a poll right before making this video about how many of you with BPD have experienced the stigma and all of that and, you know, I know there's a lot of people who don't want me to talk about this and here's the thing, like when it comes to borderline personality disorder and I'm, I'm somebody who looks at the data, I look at the data with, with people who are liking these videos and people who are thanking me for these videos, my duty is to those people. It's the same reason why, you know, I'm still here on YouTube. It's for the people who are getting help and that's the thing with borderline personality disorder. When all this stuff happened, you know, with the, the drama surrounding me, I, I saw there, there was a handful of subscribers I had who have a borderline diagnosis and when this stuff happened, I noticed that black and white thinking and I empathize with it because black and white thinking is still something I struggle with to this day. It's something that I work on with my therapist. For those of you who don't know what black and white thinking is, it's somebody is either all good or all bad. There's no gray area, right? Person does a bad thing. They are a bad person, right? Person does a good thing. They are a good person and it flip flops and changes. So like watching some of my like really loyal subscribers switch, right? I empathize with that, but I know that there's a bigger mission at stake here, which is that we need to increase awareness. We need to provide tips and tools and there's so many different things. Um, going on with borderline personality disorder. I'm actually reading a new book called the Buddha and the borderline. And that's kind of what inspired me to make this video right here and come back to it, because so many things being talked about in that book, I can relate to like, I'm only a few chapters in, but a lot of it's talking about, you know, just relationships and that intense, like basically what the other book, the biggest book on borderline personality disorders called it, I hate you. Don't leave me. You know, when I read that book, I really, really could relate because that's what my relationships were like. And, you know, I, I want to share my experience. I want to share what the research says. I want to talk about the stigma. I want to talk about things that we can do and work on together. Most of all, you know, even though I'm not a licensed professional, I want to talk about things like, since I have experience dealing with a lot of these difficulties, I want to talk about various things that have helped me throughout my journey. So some people aren't going to be happy about it. That's cool. More than happy to have discussions in the comments. It'll give me more, you know, things that we can talk about and discuss. But the fact of the matter is like, I'll tell you this, I really decided to make this video when I got to the part in the book where the young woman discovered her diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and everybody in her life are saying, no, you don't have that. You don't have that. People with BPD, they're crazy, right? And she started looking at online forums about borderline personality disorder and how many loved ones of people with BPD were saying that, you know, the person with this diagnosis like ruined their life and their manipulative and this and this and this. And I'm like, oh, my God, like having BPD can feel really isolated and alone. And I have my own experience with, you know, some of the stigma and things like that. But yeah, we need more people talking about this, not less. Same thing with mental health. We need more people talking about it, not less. So yeah, there's going to be disagreements, different thoughts, different opinions and all of that. But that's OK, because we just we need more people talking about it. And my my mission and my goal and my promise to all of you is that I'll do my best to do it in the most respectful way possible. I feel that, you know, I've tried to do that to my best ability. But through this process, I've learned a lot as well. So I'm going to try to be doing better at it. But if there's anything that you disagree with or you think something I said or did was insensitive when discussing the subject, feel free to let me know. Like we might have a disagreement about it, but let's just have a conversation. You know what I mean? Because we need to increase awareness and decrease the stigma, especially with so many people with BPD afraid to even seek mental health help in fear of being turned down because of their diagnosis. We need to talk about it. We need to do something about it. All right. But anyways, thank you for dealing with my balding hair flip flopping around. Thank you for dealing with the lovely animals squawking in the background and all of that. But yeah, I have some video topic ideas. And if you have things down below in the comments sections that you want me to talk about, let me know. If you want me to talk about certain aspects of the stigma, if you think there are things that we can help educate more people about. If you're looking for coping skills and strategies, let me know. If you're looking for book recommendations, if you're looking for evidence based, you know, tips and tools to manage your symptoms, like let me know down in the comments below. And, you know, the thing is at the end of the day, most people, most human beings struggle at some point with one or more symptom of borderline personality disorder. So all of these videos should be able to help a lot of people. All right. But let me know down in the comments below what kind of videos you'd like to see and all of that. But huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. If you're new, like, subscribe, ring the notification bell, all that good stuff. And I'll see you guys in the next video.