How Your Mentor Can Help
If you have not yet read the earlier written article, “How To Find Your Mentor” take a moment to review its contents to ensure clarity of the following information.
Once you have uncovered the right Mentor for you, you and your Mentor should examine the Recovery Exercises and Journal Entries you have completed thus far. You and your Mentor should learn how best to apply the suggestions and exercises from past and future articles to your daily life. Your Mentor can help you implement a plan that helps you to cut back, and then eliminate addictive behaviors. Additionally, he or she can also assist you to practice SDB (Slow Deep Breathing) and other SACRED skills (Soothing, Affirmation, Control, Reinforcement, Equality, Determination). Your Mentor is your recovery partner who can help you stay focused and motivated as well as confront your psychotraumatic feelings and memories.
The act of accepting help from a Mentor helps you to build your capacity to trust others. It brings you into closer contact with all the reasons why you find it so difficult to trust another person. It helps you to see how quickly you tend to blame others for your “bad luck.” It also helps you to realize how you go about pushing others away from you as you simultaneously try to hold on to them. It’s as if you are testing their love for you, and you are seeing how hard you can push them before they give up on you; only to prove a point, and start an argument. The contradictions inherent in borderline behavior become crystal clear to you within the give and take of a Mentor relationship. However, these contradictions, and the powerful emotions they evoke, can also destroy the Mentor relationship if you allow them to do so. If you want your relationship to last, then you have to work to keep it going. You have to reinforce your Mentor’s commitment to the partnership. You have to learn how to control your anger and impulses to lash out at others or risk losing your Mentor. You have to learn how to give something to the relationship as well as take what you need from it. Most of all, you need to open your heart, with all of its pain and shame, to being cared for and loved by another. All these demands may stress you out, and it’s crucial to remember this type of stress is designed to help you heal your angry heart.
Advice to Mentors
Assisting someone with borderline and addictive problems is a wonderful and overwhelming task. It will put your capacity to be fully human and compassionate through a stress test that very few experiences can match. It will pull out of you every fault, hidden pain, weakness, and vanity that you have carefully concealed from others and even those you have concealed from yourself. It will assault your emotions, arouse your anger, and break your patience. One Mentor wrote of the struggle into the Recovery Zone: “I tried. And I tried. And I tried. The more I tried, the more it hurt. The more his actions hurt me. His resentments. His anger. His lies. His manipulations. His failure to stay on a healthy course for more than even two weeks at a time.”
If you are someone in search of the right Mentor for you or feel confident in your abilities to help another, please reach out to one of our staff members today at BlueSky Behavioral Health. The Recovery journey will be hard, and no one should have to endure the process alone.
You can live well! Start your journey to recovery with BlueSky Behavioral Health. Get the best mental health treatment by visiting https://blueskyrecovery.com or call (888) 822-7348.
