Presentation by Katherine Walpole, Validation and Connection: How the arts assisted my recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder. Presented at the Western Australian Mental Health Conference 2019.

1. Validation and
Connection
How The Arts assisted my recovery
from Borderline Personality Disorder

2. Borderline Warrior
• Arty childhood
• My dream
• Music as career and medicine.

3. Main points
DSM markers
Dialectic
Behaviour
Therapy

4. Three of the DSM Criteria for BPD
DSM V 4:
Impulsivity
DSM V 7:
emptiness
DSM V 9:
dissociation

5. Overcoming impulsivity that is potentially self-
damaging
Don’t stop it, swap it!
Validating behaviours
Soothing
Shostakovich
Mozart
Bach
Mahler

6. Overcoming
chronic feelings of
emptiness

7. Overcoming
Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms

8. The role of Dialectic Behaviour Therapy in my recovery
MINDFULNESS DISTRESS
TOLERANCE
EMOTIONAL
REGULATION
INTERPERSONAL
EFFECTIVENESS

9. Mindfulness Skills
‘Describe’
‘Participate’
‘Self soothing’

10. Distress Tolerance Skills
Distracting
Improving
the moment

11. Emotional Regulation Skills
Describe Build Mastery
Accumulate
positive
emotions
Pleasant
events

12. Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills
Appear
confident
Build
relationships

13. Dr Olivier Sacks
Music imprints itself in the
brain deeper than any other
human experience….Music
brings back the feeling of
life when nothing else can.