David P Robbins

I developed this theory with colleagues starting in the 1980s, and it became the scientific foundation for ACT. I want to explain it plainly, because it answers a question most people have never thought to ask: why does language create suffering? Relational Frame Theory is a scientific account of how human language and thinking work. The core finding is that humans, uniquely among animals, learn to relate anything to anything else in an almost infinite number of ways: this is like that, this is better than that, this causes that, this is the opposite of that. This ability is what gives us science, art, and civilization. It also means we can never fully escape painful experiences by changing our environment, because any situation, any word, any sunset can trigger an entire network of connected meanings that brings pain back. A dog can learn to avoid a hot stove by touching it once. A human being who has been hurt by someone named Michael can feel anxious meeting a new Michael who has done nothing wrong, simply because the name carries the relational network forward. That's RFT in action.

🚨NEW: A new paper argues that BPD should be "queered." This one starts from the claim that LGBTQIA+ people are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at higher rates, then uses "the sociology of diagnosis and queer theory" to reinterpret the diagnosis itself as a product of stigma, norm enforcement, and insufficiently "affirming" care. It argues that clinicians are wrongly pathologizing "identity exploration and self-expression" that depart from "cisnormative and heteronormative expectations," and that even ordinary clinical judgments are being distorted by assumptions about "appearance, gender expression and sexuality." Yes, let's make already subjective clinical judgments even murkier by subjecting them to a queer-theory reinterpretation. Progress surely lies in that direction.

Do we have to blame things like this on Borderline personality disorder? This is clinically reductive, harmful to people who genuinely suffer from this pathology(and the people who love them), and it's just plain ignorant.