Gráfica 4: Estructura del capitulado según el muestreo etnográfico 14
4. EL DISCURSO INTERCULTURAL EN LA EDUCACIÓN PÚBLICA VERACRUZANA: ENTRE NORMALISMO E INDIGENISMO
6.2 El punto de partida: divergencia cultural inicial
Mindfulness Practice: Notice and Label Thoughts, and Let Them Pass
Throughout the book you have been learning and practicing the following three skills: noticing thoughts, labeling them nonjudgmentally, and letting them pass without reacting.
This exercise is similar to the previous one, only less active.
You may begin to notice paranoid thoughts when you are out with friends or at work. This might be a challenging
this practice is to notice when you are becoming paranoid, label your thought as “paranoid thought,” and then let it pass, bringing your mind back to what you are doing. When the next thought arises, label it for what it is. You may use labels such as “paranoid thought,” “worry thought,” “future thought,” and “past thought.” This practice helps you to avoid getting caught up in the spiral of paranoid thinking and behaving. As you notice the intensity of the thoughts decrease, you may find that you gain mental clarity and have an easier time looking at the situation in front of you or returning to what you were doing without being as distracted.
Using mindfulness skills to work on your dissociation and para-noia can be challenging. Practicing your basic mindfulness skills will make applying them to these symptoms much easier. You may find that working with another person, such as your therapist, will help you to better understand how to identify symptoms of cognitive dys-regulation and practice ways to use these mindfulness skills.
Chapter 9
Self- Dysregulation
D
ysregulation of self includes the symptoms of identity dis-turbance, chronic feelings of emptiness, and self- hatred.This set of symptoms can be particularly hard to treat, because it’s difficult to put precise words to such a deep and intense experience of who you are, especially an experience that causes such chronic misery. Using your mindfulness practice with these symp-toms can be very challenging, because many people spend significant energy trying to avoid attending to these feelings, many hold judg-ments about themselves and this experience, and many have devel-oped strong habits of avoidance to manage dysregulation of self.
If you want to end the symptoms associated with dysregulation of self, you need to have more than simply the desire to do so. You need to be willing. You have to be willing to see all of who you are: all of the parts, even those parts of yourself that you don’t like. Many people with BPD refuse to acknowledge that there is anything redeeming about them or that they are kind, intelligent, or loyal. We are asking that you consider accepting all of who you are. Accept that the feel-ings you have about yourself are a part of you, and that you are open to them. Don’t push them away. Until you can look at these feelings and see these parts of yourself, you cannot change them or view them dif-ferently. If you want change, you have to be willing to give your full attention. Freedom is living without fear and being able to face and ultimately accept the most painful parts of yourself. Emptiness and self- hatred are not you, but they are a part of you. Being willing to meet this process with love and compassion is your practice.
Identity Disturbance
Trying to figure out who we are is a developmental task normally found in adolescence and early adulthood. By age eighteen most people have begun to develop a cohesive and consistent sense of self.
People with BPD do not always follow this typical developmental path and, as a result, experience a lack of knowing who they are.
Amanda, a twenty- nine- year- old graduate student, described this:
I know I’m a student, but I really I don’t think I can answer the question of who I am or what kind of person I am. I am who is around me or what environment I am in, but I am never happy.
I used to fight with my parents about buying too many clothes in high school and how many clubs I was in. My parents wanted me to settle down and find my place; they didn’t under-stand that I never felt like I fit in. I tried being preppy. Then I hung out with the athletes, after which I joined the drama club.
In tenth grade I was “emo” and wore all dark colors. Then I joined the gay- straight alliance, and the community service and environmental clubs. I needed environmentally friendly prod-ucts, because I was a vegetarian and then a vegan. I never found my place.
Now, as an adult, I do the same thing by getting different graduate degrees and jobs, and frequently coming up with different plans for my life.
The concept of identity can be quite confusing. When you have a sense of who you are, you know it, but when you don’t, it can be hard to know what you are looking for. For years people have studied iden-tity by using research and presenting theoretical models. A study on identity (Wilkinson- Ryan and Westen 2000) concluded that identity has the following elements and that they are underdeveloped in people with BPD:
A stable sense of who you are, alone and in relationships
Self- Dysregulation
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A stable set of core values, morals, self- standards, and ideals
The development of a worldview that provides you with an understanding of what gives life meaning
Having others in your life who also recognize who you are and your place in the world
As we have discussed, people with BPD often lack consistency and report having different identities in different places and with dif-ferent people.
“Who Am I?”
We have talked about the definition of identity on a broader level, which includes values, morals, ideals, and place in the world, but you also experience yourself on a more basic level through your thoughts, feelings, and body sensations. Those are your basic building blocks for getting to know who you are. Do you see the problem? People with BPD often have great difficulty with managing these building blocks and, in fact, spend more time avoiding, judging, and suppressing these building blocks than using them.