Stop Getting BPD Wrong

Moving Beyond Stigma Into System-Level Change: Teens & BPD

Bio: Katie K. May is a licensed therapist, author, speaker, and group practice owner. She founded Creative Healing, a multi-location teen support center in the Philadelphia area, and wrote the #1 Amazon best-seller You’re On Fire, It’s Fine. With lived experience as a teen who turned to self-harm, Katie is one of only 11 Linehan Board Certified DBT Clinicians in Pennsylvania, the gold standard treatment for self-harm and suicidal behaviors. She equips parents and clinicians with practical, trauma-informed tools to decode behavior as survival and create lasting change.

Description: This training invites clinicians to move beyond traditional, pathology-focused frameworks of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) toward a systemic, stigma-informed model of care. Drawing from current research and clinical practice, this training integrates family systems theory, relational models, and trauma-informed principles to reimagine how clinicians conduct intake, assessment, and treatment planning with clients experiencing BPD symptoms.

Participants will examine how standard assessment processes can unintentionally reinforce stigma, contribute to diagnostic ambiguity, and overlook critical family dynamics. Through demonstration, discussion, and applied practice, attendees will learn a structured framework for engaging the entire family system from the first session. Emphasis will be placed on increasing diagnostic clarity, identifying environmental and relational contributors to symptom expression, and applying system-level interventions that complement DBT and other evidence-based treatments.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify how traditional intake and assessment processes inadvertently perpetuate stigma and miss critical family system dynamics in BPD treatment.
2. Demonstrate the integrated family framework for conducting intake conversations that bring the whole family system into the therapeutic space from the first session.
3. Differentiate between individual pathology-focused approaches and system-level interventions that address environmental factors impacting BPD behaviors.
4. Apply practical techniques for achieving diagnostic clarity while understanding how family dynamics and environmental stressors influence symptom presentation.
5. Evaluate the effectiveness of family-integrated treatment approaches versus traditional individual-focused BPD interventions.

Beyond the Label: Understanding CPTSD and BPD Through a Trauma Lens

Bio: Cassidy DuHadway, LCSW, is a trauma specialist, author, and EMDRIA Approved Trainer with more than 15 years of experience as a licensed clinician (licensed in 2009). She is the founder and CEO of Purple Sky Counseling, a trauma-focused group practice in Utah specializing in complex trauma, attachment wounds, emotional neglect, and ADHD. Cassidy trains therapists nationally on EMDR, dissociation, CPTSD, and trauma-based case conceptualization, helping clinicians move beyond symptoms and diagnoses to understand the nervous system, attachment patterns, and lived experiences driving client presentation. Her mission is to help therapists become deeply authentic and highly skilled in their work so they can become the therapist they are meant to be, confident, aligned, and deeply effective in the room with their clients.

Description: Borderline Personality Disorder is one of the most misunderstood and stigmatized diagnoses in the field, often viewed through a behavioral rather than a trauma-based lens. Yet many clients who meet criteria for BPD are carrying complex trauma histories that shape how they attach, regulate, and respond to threat.

This masterclass bridges the gap between BPD and CPTSD, helping clinicians move from judgment to understanding and from fear to skill. Together we will explore how trauma adaptations show up as emotional dysregulation, relational instability, and identity confusion, and how to distinguish between personality structure and trauma response. You will learn how to conceptualize cases through the lens of attachment, implicit memory, and nervous system dysregulation, and gain practical strategies for what to do in session.

Therapists will leave with deeper compassion, clear clinical frameworks, and actionable tools to support clients once labeled “too much,” “too hard,” or “too unstable.”

Learning Objectives:

1. Differentiate key features of CPTSD and BPD and recognize where they overlap.
2. Identify how attachment trauma and implicit memory contribute to emotional dysregulation and relational patterns.
3. Conceptualize BPD behaviors as adaptive trauma responses rather than character pathology.
4. Apply trauma-informed interventions to stabilize and build safety, including EMDR, DBT, and parts-based approaches.
5. Use language and treatment framing that reduce shame and promote self-compassion in clients.

BPD or Autism: A Differential Deep Dive

Bio: Jamie Roberts is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Jamie is AuDHD (Autistic & ADHD) and Dyslexic, and actively shares her experiences with her later in life diagnosis as the Neurodivergent Therapist across social media and is an active speaker on Neurodivergent and Teen topics. She is the Founder of NeuroPebble Corp, a continuing education platform for neuroaffirming clinical training from instructors with lived experience.. As well as the founder of Equilibrium Counseling Services, a teen and young adult group practice in Southern California. She is the author of Mindfulness for Teen Anxiety, and her second book will be out spring 2026 titled Neurodiversity for Teen Girls. 

Description: This training explores the nuanced overlap between Autism and BPD through a neurodiversity-affirming lens, highlighting shared traits such as emotional intensity, rejection sensitivity, and relational challenges—while clarifying key distinctions in developmental origins, sensory processing, and identity formation. Autistic traits are often misunderstood or misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder, especially among clients assigned female at birth or those who mask effectively. Clinicians will learn practical strategies to improve diagnostic accuracy and tailor interventions that honor neurodivergent needs rather than pathologize them. 

Learning Objectives:

1. Differentiate core features of Autism and Borderline Personality Disorder by analyzing developmental histories, sensory processing patterns, and relational motivations.

2. Evaluate the impact of masking, trauma, and diagnostic bias on the misidentification of Autistic traits as BPD within clinical assessment.

3. Apply neurodiversity-affirming frameworks to improve diagnostic formulation and treatment planning for clients presenting with overlapping Autism and BPD traits.

Destigmatizing Borderline Personality Disorder

Bio: Sabrina Longley is a queer, fat, Black, multiply neurodivergent Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Born and mostly raised on Mánu: Yį Įsuwą (Catawba), Lumbee Skaruhreh/Tuscarora, Cheraw, Occaneechi, and Shakori lands (colonially known as the Triangle Area of North Carolina), Sabrina obtained her bachelor's in Psychology from North Carolina Central University and her masters in Social Work from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

She is most passionate about offering lived and clinical experience support to both clients and other mental health providers related to topics including racial justice, neurodivergence, fat liberation, queer liberation, teen mental health, and DBT. She works to honor her own lived experience and the lived experiences of other marginalized folks to promote ethical and just mental health care.

Description: Borderline Personality Disorder is a highly stigmatized diagnosis(go ahead and re-read the name of the diagnosis) and as a provider it can be hard to know how to face that stigma and support your clients! This training is build to help you understand and begin to reduce harmful stigma against these vulnerable clients. In an effort to support neurodiversity affirming care for all neurodivergent clients, Sabrina Longley LCSW will share lived and professional experience with other therapists who care for this population!  

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to identify stigmatizing language related to BPD
2. Participants will be able to explain the negative effects of stigmatizing BPD
3. This workshop is designed to help you develop a destigmatized framework for understanding BPD