Customer Reviews

Borderline and Beyond, Revised

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Laura Paxton's book, Borderline and Beyond, is a welcome addition to the literature, for the treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. Her view of people, who suffer with this disorder as being "courageous and full of creative potential," is refreshing and offers hope. Borderline and Beyond integrates symptom descriptions with related coping skills, worksheets, and goal directed journal pages. The book is well organized, clearly fitting symptoms to areas for healing such as self-nurturing and identity. Laura Paxton's approach is one of gentle encouragement; acknowledging the difficult journey, yet believing in the reader's ability to heal. As a therapist who leads Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills groups for clients with Borderline Personality Disorder, I have found integrating the arts into groups, along with skill demonstrations, to be enormously helpful. As Laura Paxton notes in her book, people learn best through practice and experience. Her blending of personal experience, poetry, and metaphor from movie and books, make this book particularly readable. The reader is provided the opportunity to grasp the lived experience of a person with Borderline Personality. I will be recommending this book, as well as Laura Paxton's web site, to colleagues and clients. The book will be expecially useful for people with Borderline Personality Disorder to feel understood, and for its provision of guideposts and concrete skills for healing. For therapists, the book can be helpful in guiding treatment and I believe would also augment other therapeutic modalities, including Linehan's Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

I ordered this workbook after having read the glowing reviews for it here at Amazon. If you've been looking for books on BPD, you realize how few there are, and even fewer that offer concrete suggestions and exercises. After reading through the workbook, however, I was very disappointed in the amount of actual information in it. Without counting the exact number of pages, I would estimate that a good 2/3 of the book is filled with copy after copy of worksheets to fill out. In my opinion this book would have been far more helpful if it had been filled with information and the reader was given the opportunity to make their own copies of worksheets. Also, it is not a "book" but rather a stack of paper copies bound with a plastic ring. While I believe that every piece of information available about BPD is useful, I was disappointed in the amount of information relative to the cost of this workbook.

Having suffered with this disorder for so many years I am always on the look out for new information and ideas. Borderline and Beyond, is filled with refreshingly simple ideas to help the Borderline ground him/herself during episodes. The book is set up in a way that readers can implement the ideas both during a crisis as well as on an everyday basis in our journey to healing. Paxton has writen words that touch at the very core of our lives, but doesnt just leave the reader saying "yeah thats how I feel", she gives follow-up work so we can learn to cope with those feelings and move towards healing. Paxton is quick to point out that the book is not to stand on its own but rather goes hand in hand with psycotherapy, a reminder for both the borderline and the therapist. This is a wonderful book.

By far the most helpful, pro-active book and infomation on BPD I've yet to come across. At first I was skeptical about this book, I think it would just be a lot of hippie jargon from reading the website, but as I read on I was pleasently surprised! Paxton's book, unlike any of the other BPD books out there, actually gives concrete, simple advice on how to deal with the painful, daily struggles of Borderline Personality Disorder. She doesn't merely inform the readers about the disorder, but instead also gives solid, helpful, and very intuitive advice on how to get over BPD. Anouther great and very powerful aspect of this book is the hope Paxton gives to those living with BPD actions. Paxton suggest the the same energy used to destroy with BPD, can be channeled in a different diretion that leads to not only recovery, but creative, active happiness. I really think if you are looking for a book on BPD, this is the only one to buy at this point in time-as not much is really known on how to effectively treat this disorder. All of the other books on the topic just seem to touch the surface of what Laura Paxton acually understands and has changed.

For those just starting to accept the BPD self and are willing to take responsibility for moving towards wellness, this book is definitely one to keep close by. I have personally found it a self-soothing tool, even before I started attending a DBT - based therapy group. The simply presented, easy to understand exercises, along with the mid-level BPD information and positive affirmations from the author make this book a nice stand-alone for those frustrating nights when you need a gentle reminder, or as an adjunct to DBT. Definitely worth the modest investment. There is also a workbook available separately that can be helpful as well.

While it is possible to find information that I have not found in other publications, and while it is very helpful since it apparently was written by someone who has been through all this, calling it a "book" is just a little misleading. It has been published with a plastic spiral, no harder covers or nylon for the endsheets, there are pages to fill in that have been reprinted as many as 30 times (the journal page for example) with statements such as e "Bare your soul" with four lines to do it in...