Buddha and Borderline Press Release

Photo by David Tucker
A fascinating inside look at what it’s like to
live with borderline personality disorder.

“If you met me, you’d never suspect the suicide
Kiera’s attempts, hospitalizations, and diagnoses. But
Inspirational if you saw me in a relationship, you’d know
something isn’t quite right. I’m always good in the
Story beginning, but after that first flush of romance, my
lipstick will be smeared like a clown’s and I’ll revert
to the dismay of a child lost in the department store,
curled up and wailing on the floor.
THE BUDDHA & THE BORDERLINE is the riveting account of Kiera Van Gelder’s
struggle with borderline personality disorder (BPD), a condition that affects more than
ten million Americans and which for most of Kiera’s life went undiagnosed.

Shrouded in mystery, BPD is considered by many to be the most stigmatized of all
psychiatric disorders, and only recently have treatments like dialectical behavior
therapy (DBT) been developed for this “incurable” condition that causes chaotic and
unstable moods, self-injury and/or suicide attempts, and reckless, impulsive behavior.
Kiera’s story is one of a young woman who, despite being a star athlete and prize
winning artist at a prestigious boarding school, ended up addicted to drugs and living
on the streets by age seventeen.

Even after numerous hospitalizations, diagnosis and treatments, it would be almost
twenty years before Kiera learned about the condition at the root of her lifelong emotional pain and received
effective treatment for it. In The Buddha & the Borderline she offers an intimate look into her struggle, as
an adult, to gain control over her emotions and reclaim her life through DBT, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT)
and Buddhism.

Now an international advocate and educator, Kiera reveals how the combination of education, support,
treatment, and spirituality taught her to transform such BPD symptoms as self-destruction, self-hatred, and
anger into a compassionate kinship with all human beings. The reader will come away not only with an
understanding of what recovery involves, but with the belief that recovery is possible for anyone willing to
learn and grow.

“[A] triumphant account of coping with an elusive mental disorder.” — Publishers Weekly

NEXT: About the Author & Suggested Interview Questions

THE BUDDHA & THE BORDERLINE
F O R A N I N T E RV I E W R E Q U E S T o r
My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder Through
M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N C O N TA C T:
Dialectical behavior Therapy, Buddhism & Online Dating
Earlita Chenault 510-594-6142 Kiera Van Gelder / August 2010
earlita.chenault@newharbinger.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57224-7109 / Paperback/ $17.95 / 6 x 9 / 280 pp

newharbingerpublications, inc. | 800-748-6273 | newharbinger.com

Photo by David Tucker

THE BUDDHA AND THE BORDERLINE

My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through
Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating

KIERA VAN GELDER, MFA, is an artist, educator, and writer
diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. An international About the
speaker and seasoned conference presenter, she is featured in the documentary “Back from Author
the Edge: Living With and Recovering From Borderline Personality Disorder.” As one of the
nation’s foremost BPD advocates, she is endorsed by and collaborates with leading academic
and mental health experts, while her unique blend of candor, wit and lived experience has made
her a much sought after media figure. Trained in dialectical behavior therapy, Kiera is also a practitioner of
Vajrayana Buddhism. Currently she lives in Massachusetts at a Buddhist meditation center. For additional
information, please visit www.buddhaandborderline.com and www.kieravangelder.com.

“To those looking from the outside, it might seem this illness took possession one day out of the blue, as
signaled by some specific behavior: Kiera’s cutting herself; Kiera’s doing drugs; Kiera shaved her head. But
that’s part of the whole problem—no one saw, knew, or understood how long I was suffering and sick. Even
my mother thinks it started later, when I went to the private school and began cutting and burning myself. But
I disagree. As soon as I read the symptoms, I realize the seed was there all along, watered by pain, secrets, and
inattention, and by my own desperate need for relief.” — Kiera Van Gelder

1. What is borderline personality disorder (BPD)?
Suggested
2. In your memoir The Buddha & the Borderline you call it “the disease that dare not
Interview speak its name.” Why is that?
Questions 3. Looking back, when would you say you first started to display symptoms of BPD?
4. You attended the prestigious private school Groton. How did having BPD affect your
behavior during this time of your life?
5. What effect did your symptoms have on your family and how did they respond?
6. You found out many years later that you were diagnosed with BPD, but the doctor chose not to tell
you or your family. Do you have any idea why a doctor would keep a diagnosis a secret in that way?
7. What were the years between when you were secretly diagnosed and formally diagnosed like?
8. What led to you finally getting the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder?
9. How did you react to this diagnosis?

Continued on next page

F O R A N I N T E RV I E W R E Q U E S T o r THE BUDDHA & THE BORDERLINE
M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N C O N TA C T: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder Through



My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical Behavior
Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating

The Facts About BPD Suggested 10. When did you first attempt
suicide? What was that time
*BPD afflicts approximately Interview of your life like? What drove
12 million Americans you to that point?
Questions
*BPD is more common 11. You have also battled alcohol
than schizophrenia and drug addiction. Did addiction
*10% of adults with BPD contribute to your BPD, or was it a result of
commit suicide the BPD?

*55-85% of adults with 12. In spite of the debilitating symptoms of
BPD self-injure BPD, you were often extremely functional.
How was that possible?
*A 30-year old woman
with BPD typically has the 13. If you could give advice to parents or
medical profile of a woman other family members of someone with BPD,
in her 60s how would you advise them to help their
loved one?
*Over 50% of people with
BPD are severely impaired 14. What is dialectical behavior therapy
in employability (DBT)? How did DBT help you cope with your condition?

*BPD is implicated in 17% 15. You became an international advocate for borderline personality disor-
of the prison population der at a time when no one admited to having the condition. What has that
processs been like?
*38% of those with BPD
have substance abuse/de- 16. What is it like to now have “come out” with such a personal and candid
pendence disorders memoir?
18. Your book describes your introduction to Buddhism. What first attracted
you to this practice?
19. How has Buddhism contributed to your recovery?
Source: Research presentations at
NEA-BPD Conferences 2002-2010
20. What do you hope readers of your book learn from your story?
(www.borderlinepersonalitydis-
order.com) National Education
Alliance for Borderline Personality
Disorder, May 2010
NEXT: Excerpt from The Buddha & the Borderline

Earlita Chenault 510-594-6142
Kiera Van Gelder / August 2010



My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical
Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating

Kiera Van Gelder
Prologue
I am fifteen when I meet a boy named Jimmy at the summer (1985)
arts program. We smoke hash in the graveyard at the far end of
the Bennington campus. We dare each other to order margaritas at
the local Mexican restaurant, and when we are actually served, share
salty kisses over plates of rice and beans. I give him a blow job in the back of a classroom, and he says he
has feelings for me but he doesn’t know what they are. Jimmy is pale and wears eyeliner and is as close to a
boyfriend as I’ve ever gotten. When he confesses he has a “real” girlfriend back in New York, I spend a long
evening sniffing liquid paper out of a plastic bag. Passing out and waking up to the exploding lights in my
head, I finally throw up my dinner.

I consider cutting off my pinkie finger and giving it to him. I’d go to the art studio where they have those
paper cutters with three-foot blades. Lop it off, wrap it up. Here. Look what you’ve done to me. You’re
leaving me, and taking me with you. But I like my fingers. Even the somewhat useless pinkies.

So instead I make myself bleed, as I’ve learned to do. The instrument can’t be too sharp, or it will go too
deep and sever important bits. It can’t be so blunt as to be useless. I like the thin, flexible razor blades that
can be taken off a disposable plastic shaver—ubiquitous and easy to remove from the plastic casing. I enjoy
the slide of metal into giving skin. Each line eases the rage and sharpens the colors of the room. Regular
cutting means you have to rotate the areas, so as not to overtax the skin too much: forearm, then wrist,
then upper arm, then back to the forearm. After the razor passes over, there’s a moment before the blood
when the faintest film of clear liquid rises, as though the flesh itself is weeping for you. Then garnet beads
of blood rise and elongate into the thin tracks you’ve laid between pain and release.

I wipe and blot the wounds with the calm patience that always follows the bloodletting and think, I could
paint with this. I could write with this. I must have cut a lot—enough blood to fill five notebook pages with
finger-painted words: “Please.” “Don’t leave me.” “I need you.” I put the wet pages on the floor to dry. In
the morning, the large words are maroon and waxy, with my fingerprints captured at the beginning and end
of each letter’s stroke. The pages go into an envelope with Jimmy’s name, and the letter is placed on his bed
in the neighboring dorm. I have known him two weeks.

After lunch, I am pulled from poetry class by the counselor. In a degree-paneled office, the stack of papers
sits on the desk like a thesis I must now defend. The counselor asks me why I’d do such a thing. I cannot
explain it. I have no words. “Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment” does not readily come
to mind. And if this counselor sees borderline personality disorder, he doesn’t say it. He calls my mother. She
drives to the campus and they talk. Then she goes back home.




Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating, by Kiera Van Gelder

(continued)
Prologue
I remain at the program but must agree to check in with the counselor
(1985)
during the last two weeks. He gives me back the blood letter, perhaps
to remind me that it holds a part of myself that I am always inflicting on
others, a part of myself I am always throwing away.

Years later I ask my mother, “What were you thinking when you drove away?”

She says, “Adolescence is always difficult; I thought maybe it was just a phase.” She says, “I didn’t know what
to do; the whole thing was overwhelming.” She says, “The counselor told me you would be okay.”

The truth is, I have borderline personality disorder. But it will take many therapists, many diagnoses, many
medications, and many treatments before a name is put to this suffering and I can start down the path to
recovery.

This is the story of how it happened.

• Prologue: (1985 flashback, age 15) in which Kiera suffers from all the BPD symptoms
as a teenager but doesn’t know it.
Timeline
• Part I: Love Bird (2000-2001, age 30-31) in which Kiera has her umpteenth breakdown
and finally gets the right diagnosis

• Part II: Last Resort (2001, age 31) in which Kiera spends the summer institutionalized three times
and attends a cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) outpatient program. In fall, she begins therapy with a new DBT
trained therapist and starts to regain a foothold.

• Part III: Shifts in Light (2002, age 32) in which Kiera attends DBT group and therapy, gets a job, a
boyfriend, a room of her own and learns to ride a motorcycle.

• Part IV: Emergence (2002-4, age 33-34) in which Kiera learns to keep a job, experience her feelings,
deal with her issues, practice mindfulness and not freak out on her boyfriend.

• Part V: Transformation of Suffering (2004-2006, age 34-36) in which Kiera discovers Buddhism,
becomes engaged, breaks off engagement, returns to online dating, and eventually finds her place and
purpose within a community of Tibetan Buddhists.
NEXT: Kiera Van Gelder photo history




Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating, by Kiera Van Gelder

Life in
pictures

Below, Kiera at age 15, when The

Buddha & the Borderline begin

As a 14 year-old student at Groton School

Above, Kiera, aged 5, with her brother Ben.
Above, Halloween 1978. Below in 1989.

Below Kiera at age 18, after ﬁrst hospitalization.

Lett, Kiera in1985, captain of the varsity

soccer team

Kiera Van Gelder today

Graduating from Empire State College, 1995 2008 In 2005, at the race track

My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder Through
M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N C O N TA C T:


Buddha and Borderline Press Release

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