3 Steps to Evaluate Your Motivations and Determine Your Goals
When you are dealing with the many emotional ups and downs that often come along with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), you may feel that it’s difficult to set and achieve goals and to evaluate the motivations behind your choices. Take heart! Just because it’s difficult does not mean that it is impossible. It’s a matter of learning the right tools to help you successfully move forward into the future you desire.
Start with the End in Mind
Because emotions can be overwhelming, it can help to identify your desired outcome and work backwards from there. For instance, if you want your spouse to spend more time with you, and you feel like you are being abandoned and therefore feel like going into a rage against him or her, decide on a goal that will meet your need for togetherness, not your perceived need to lash out.
In this way, your behavior can honor your motivation, which in this case is to spend more time with your spouse, rather than heed your negative motivation, which might be to let him/her have it for not meeting your needs the way you would like. This takes power away from what can be a negative driver of an emotion. Let’s honor a healthier emotional motivation to be close to someone.
With this “end goal” in mind, you can then work backwards to formulate a healthy way that you can get this need met. Perhaps, it could be setting a goal that you will talk with your spouse tonight about how you would appreciate spending Saturday afternoons together at the park or watching movies at home on the couch.
Be as Specific as Possible
This leads to my second tip. Make your goal as specific as possible. For you to be able to get your emotional needs met in a healthy way, you need to know what you need. When you can put specific words to what it is that you are feeling and desire you can then put specific words to what the goal is that you want to achieve. This is just one of the ways you can embrace your BPD by paying attention to your intense emotions and examining the underlying motivation for them.
In my example of wanting to spend more time with your spouse, your motivation might be to assure you feel safe and connected to someone you love. When you let this goal of feeling safe and connected be your motivation, then you can intentionally identify what your “hoped for” outcome will look like. This also gives you a way to know that you are practically able to manage your motivations in a healthy way, rather than letting the motivation derail your behaviors.
Your desired goal might be that your spouse will hang out at home more with you. However, a more specific goal might be, “I will tell my spouse tonight at dinner that I am feeling a need for more time together, and I will ask if we can go out for a date to the movies on Saturday afternoon.”
In this way, you have embraced your BPD’s intensity of emotions in a healthy way, put words specifically to your feelings, and set a specific way that you and your spouse might be able to go about meeting that need for you.
Identify Your Feelings but Don’t Let Them Rule Your Actions
You feel what you feel, and that is neither good nor bad, it just is. However, what you choose to do as a result of having those feelings may turn out to be good or bad for you. So, while acknowledging your feelings and motivations is wise, acting based on how you feel can, at times, be unwise. This is why feelings should not rule your actions. If you can step back and identify what your feelings are and the need that they are telling you that you have, you gain the upper hand. At this point, you can then mindfully choose your course of action and set your goals.
When you have your goal(s) set, you can then work backwards to decide which actions you will choose to take to attempt to reach it.
Through the use of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), I help clients at Omaha Trauma Therapy to manage their feelings by connecting their feelings to their rational thoughts, a process of being mindful. I can also help you to learn ways to self-soothe when the emotional tide is just overwhelming. These self-management tools, and others like them, can help you to embrace the strengths of your BPD, like being able to strongly feel how you feel and an intense desire to get your needs met, but also to be able to harness those emotions and to guide them in the right direction to meet your goals. Contact me today to start your freedom journey today.