“Nothing Is Working” – Staying Strong When You’re Feeling Frustrated

It’s a very common refrain for people suffering from borderline personality disorder (BPD) – or their family members – to say something along the lines of, “I’ve tried everything, and it seems like nothing is working.”

When you’re dealing with that kind of frustration and frequent setbacks, it’s common to start to give up hope and assume that there simply isn’t a solution.

But there is hope, there is a solution, and you’re not the first or the last person to feel this disappointment and despair. Whether you’re suffering from BPD or high emotional sensitivity yourself or you’re helping a child or loved one through it, the process of seeking help and making progress with BPD coaching is often slow, gradual, and nonlinear.

But this post isn’t about the solution – if you’re here, you’re already taking some of the right steps in your coaching, as diagnosing the condition early is incredibly helpful. Rather, this is about how to cope and move forward when you’re frustrated or feel like you’ve hit a wall. Because no matter how high the wall, the solutions you seek are always on the other side of it, and you can always get over it.

Becoming Your Best Self is Difficult - Even With BPD Coaching

Medical dramas and movies have unfortunately given us a skewed idea of how mental health coaching – or coaching for any condition – is supposed to go. In movies, somebody has a condition, the doctors figure out the condition, they treat it, and then it gets better. There are some dramatic moments in there, but generally the resolution is getting that “it’s all better now” moment.

So it’s fairly common for an individual, family member or support of someone just starting out with a BPD coaching plan to become frustrated, bewildered, and upset when they don’t see immediate and consistent results.

The reality is that while there is help and coaching that will work for you, treating BPD isn’t like treating illnesses in the movies – you don’t just get a diagnosis and a treatment that makes it all better immediately. Undergoing  comprehensive dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a long-term process that is sure to have ups and downs, and it often takes several sessions before you notice significant progress (though not always).

On top of that, different types of coaching can work for different people! Just because you’ve struggled to get the results you want in the past doesn’t mean there isn’t an ideal solution for you out there for you if you keep trying. We can’t guarantee that any individual BPD treatment will work for you. The only guarantee is that nothing will improve if you give up.

With BPD Coaching, Progress Is Not Linear

This is where a lot of frustration comes from when people are undergoing coaching for BPD. They will have a few sessions, start to understand themselves better, but then run into an emotional trigger and slip back into old habits.

It is at these moments when people may get frustrated and think “nothing is working.” But maybe the most important thing to remember when getting coaching for BPD is that progress is not linear. Having a setback does not mean that you aren’t ultimately moving in the right direction.

It’s crucial to remember this whether you’re suffering from BPD yourself, or you care for someone who is. If, after some time, you see a return to the old habits and behaviors you’ve been working on, that’s okay! There is no treatment or coaching for BPD that makes everything just instantly get better and stay that way – improvement and recovery is a long journey and setbacks are going to happen.

How A Comprehensive DBT Coaching Plan Can Help

During difficult times where high emotional triggers are going off, a comprehensive DBT plan will help you learn strategies to ground yourself and mitigate those intrusive feelings.

With DBT-based coaching, progress may not mean eliminating those feelings altogether, it might mean managing them better in the moment, or understanding them better after the fact so you can rationalize and recover faster. It may mean having those extreme emotional reactions less often, or simply having reactions to fewer things.

Progress with your BPD coaching and treatment is measured in many different ways, and none of them are necessarily going to be consistent or immune to setbacks. If you can feel yourself regaining control but then you have a bad day or two, it doesn’t mean nothing is working – it may be quite the opposite, as you can recognize that your bad day is now an outlier instead of the norm!

Different approaches will work for different people. Between BPD coaching, therapy, and medication, some people may opt for just one or all three. Within that, different approaches to therapy or coaching and different types of medication may work better for certain people.

So if you find yourself hitting a wall, don’t give up! Giving up is the only truly wrong answer. It may feel like nothing is working, but if you keep working at it, something will.

You can contact us about our courses and group coaching sessions as different approaches to achieving the results you’re looking for. And if we can’t help you achieve those results, we can refer you to something else that eventually will, so long as you don’t give up and never let your frustration win out over your life worth living.

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blond woman with short hair wearing glasses and smiling | Lisa Bond Coaching | DBT skills and solutions for borderline personality disorder and high emotional sensitivity

Hi, I'm Lisa!

My mission is to provide high quality, evidence-based tools to meet the unique needs of individuals and families who want to create a life worth living, and coaches who want to help others do the same.

This practice is welcome and inclusive to all | Lisa Bond Coaching | DBT skills and solutions for borderline personality disorder and high emotional sensitivity

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