As well as talking about the dark parts of her illness, she made light of it, making us all laugh.
She hopes her parents, who are in good health at 90 and 93, do not read the book.
When I left the Giant supermarket, after meeting downstairs with Chris, Susan, and Gloria, Talya was sitting over by the fireplace speaking with one of the participants.
We had a full house.
Talya - an Italian name pronounced Ta-LEE-a - would get unhealthy highs - endorphins - and told us healthy ways to get endorphins, the feel-good brain chemical.
- Exercise - runner's high
- Spicy Foods
- Orgasm
My endorphins leap for joy when I book a great speaker like Talya, Raj Mago, or Bob Sadoff and people attend the program.
Debbie Moritz of NAMI Bucks County sends us more people than anyone. I'll write her a thank-you.
People hung on Talya's every word. She reminded us: Turn off phones and no cross-talk during the talk.
B/c we're a nonprofit, Giant donated coffee, hot water, and fresh fruit to us. Someone was sposed to bring the fruit downstairs for us to nosh on at table.
Vat hoppened?
Talya sees private clients in her Center City office. Contact her at 267-357-5565 or bpdsupport@comcast.net.
Excerpts from her talk:
Talya had no validation from her parents. They would gloss over her problems. She had no parental figure to turn to, to console her or explain what life was about.
How does a child figure out what the world is about?
She was always in a state of terror. "I felt walls, like waves, were barreling toward me. No one taught me how to deal with it."
She didn't feel comfortable among her peers. People scared her. And she also scared them.
One day, as a child, she was in the powder room of the large house in which they lived. A classmate was with her. "I want my teeth to be pretty like yours," said Talya.
Looking in the mirror, she smashed her front teeth with a hammer she got from the basement.
She told mom she fell against the radiator.
She was 9 years old. She felt ugly and disgusting.
"I always had a fear of annihilation," she said.
Our instinct is to survive, so she hit upon a series of behaviors to keep herself alive. Behaviors that kicked in her endorphins.
As a kid, she discovered shoplifting. Her rule: Always leave the store with something.
At age 8, she discovered the game of TP. Taking pills. She was not trying to kill herself, just have peace and quiet in her brain and not to feel "evil to the core" and filled with "shame."
At age 12, she began thinking about Death. "Did I wanna be breathing or not?"
She needed progressively more drugs to make herself feel okay about who she was. She graduated from weed at age 12 to her favorites which were meth and coke. She would've tried heroin but her dealer died from an overdose.
She also developed an eating disorder: she would binge-eat and then starve herself.
When she'd come home from school, her schoolmates would follow her, taunting her.
"Look how popular you are," said her mother.
"My parents saw what they wanted to see."
One day she and her friends were in their usual hangout, a fallen-down factory with broken glass on the sidewalk. Talya got an idea. She began to cut herself, slightly at first at the wrist. But she needed more adrenaline, so she began making deeper cuts.
This is the self-injury part of borderline. Talya had all 9 symptoms.
They say there's a bit of borderline in all of us.
At 16, her teachers called her parents up. They were shocked by her behavior. "I cursed at my teachers, walked out of the room whenever I felt like it, and never did my assignments."
This was the start of Talya's treatment for borderline personality disorder.
To put it mildly, the treatment she received was terrible.
From the movie Jane Eyre.
Both Jane Eyre and Talya got better and married well. Talya has three children, all doing fine. The oldest is in college.
Talya's last hospitalization - she calls her hospital stays "incarcerations" - was at age 22.
Hospitals are not places to get better. Read about it in her book, which took her five years to write. Talya does intensive research to keep up to date on the latest findings about BPD.
She was told her disorder was "incurable." But a switch "flipped" in her brain and she became more independent from her parents.
She worked for a year in a family-owned office-supply company where she suffered intense levels of panic and nausea but she endured them.
She also made herself a rose garden - in her mind - where she could find peace and quiet any time she wanted.
The flowers we gave her from Kremp Florist are Lantana.
I also bought her a sunflower
Before the presentation, I stopped at my son's house and gave my 4-yo granddaughter Grace a sunflower.
"Bubby," she said. "They're growing down the street." Sure enough, when I took off with 20 minutes before the presentation, there they were.
Here's Grace and Max, snatched off FB.As Talya said, Kids notice everything. I also gave sunflowers to "Gloria," who is mourning the loss of her psychiatrist, and to Suzanne of the Giant who set up the room.
Talya said that as a teenager, she watched TV and wanted to be the people on the sit-coms. Anyone but herself. She was finished with the cutting behavior, which showed itself to the public, so she continued to binge and starve.
Sounds like Jane Fonda, I thought.
Talya went to college, earning her BA in psych in six years. Good for you, Talya! It doesn't matter how long it takes.
Now Talya is a Fellow at a Philadelphia psychoanalytic institute. She is also a frequent guest lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and LaSalle University, as well as an educator for professionals on how to understand and work with borderline personality disorder, self-injury and trauma.
Her term is UTS - unresolved trauma. "Sounds like a urinary tract infection," she quipped.
She currently sees clients only if they have failed in conventional treatment.
She is not afraid to undergo, with her clients, the intense unresolved trauma they must speak about in order to free themselves of the significant abuse they underwent in childhood and in later years.
She can tell just by the posture of a new client if they've been sexually abused. One woman sat, arms covering her crotch, but had no memories of her father sexually assaulting her at night. Which is why the client could not sleep at night.
There is always a reason for a person's behavior.
Many of Talya's clients have had multiple diagnoses. Clinicians have a hard time pinpointing borderline. This is one of the things Talya teaches them.
She and her psychiatrist/mentor Richard Kluft are detectives ferreting out the trauma so they can improve the lives of their fragile patients.
Dr Kluft has written a number of books.Men and women with borderline react differently. Women are more willing to seek treatment. Men may self-harm by punching walls or picking fights with other guys. Many end up in prison.
When Talya was treated by Dr Kluft she said it was unbelievably painful, as she relived her trauma.
Both Talya and Dr Otto Kernberg, below, believe it's a Band-Aid that doesn't get to the source of the problem.
Otto Kernberg was the first psychiatrist to describe borderline and other personality disorders
He was born in 1928 and is still practicing and teaching at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Originally from Vienna, like Freud, the Jewish Kernberg emigrated to Chile in 1939 when the Nazis came to power. Read about his fascinating life here.
Kernberg discovered the cardinal symptoms of borderline which include abandonment issues, rage, unstable relationships and self-harm.
What about DBT for borderline personality disorder?
Both Talya and Dr Kernberg think of it as a Band-Aid, that doesn't get to the deep issues of the individual.
Some of Talya's clients have dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as split personality disorder. Many people with severe trauma have it and need a specialist to treat these individuals who protected themselves from intense childhood trauma by developing different personalities or alters.
The Three Faces of Eve, a 1957 movie, based on a book by two psychiatrists is a great film, available at your local library.Other therapies for borderline:
EMDR can be helpful in the hands of a skilled practitioner. Be careful, though, not to flood the mind with too many memories. They should trickle in slowly so as not to overwhelm the individual.
I'm thinking now of those traumatized soldiers America has sent to various battlefields, such as the Civil War - World War I - World War II and Iraq and the Afghan.
Just as Rajnish Mago, MD, said that the older he gets, the more he believes in genetic dispositions to various disorders, so, too, did Talya say there is a predisposition to BPD. Her grandmother met the criteria.
Talya recommended the book "I'm Not Sick, I Don't Need Help" by Xavier Amador et al.
Yes, I had three delicious hot cups of coffee. The gentleman sitting next to me was partaking of our fruit tray.
B/c I have insulin-dependent diabetes, I could eat nuffin! BUT I was gonna ask for one measly bite of a banana, but when I looked over at him, there was nuffin left but the banana skin.
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