If you live with strong emotions and/or borderline personality disorder and are looking for a community that “get you” the Super Feelers Club may be the perfect virtual place for you!
The Super Feelers Club is a free, inclusive, drop-in peer support group where we discuss skills, life as “super feelers” and connect with others like us.
You can find Laurie and Sara on Instagram to follow their day to day lives even further @laurieanned and @saraswellnessway. You can also find the podcast on IG @boldbeautifulborderline
You can also find Sara's business as a Mental Health Clinician and mental health coach at thewellnesswayllc.com
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You can find Laurie and Sara on Instagram to follow their day to day lives even further @laurieanned and @saraswellnessway. You can also find the podcast on IG @boldbeautifulborderline
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Hi, everybody, and welcome to the bold, beautiful borderline podcast. My name is Laurie. And as always, I'm here with Sara. And today e're going to just do a quick romo about our super feelers lub support group for people ho have BPD, or just struggle ith strong emotions. So we've ad two of our little virtual lubs so far. And it has been ncredible and amazing. And e've met some really cool eople. So I just wanted to come n and make sure that everybody hat listens to the podcast is ware that it is open to verybody over the age of 18, oesn't matter what country you re open to all genders, not iagnosis specific. And free, if didn't say that already.
Sara Amundson:
Yeah, so we've had so much fun with these first two super feeler clubs. And I think the thing that we're finding is, regardless of your skill level, or your like, how you experience your emotions, the severity of them, whatever the sense of community that people are finding is so normalizing because I don't know about you, Laurie, but I feel like my whole life I've just been having to hide my super strong emotions, because they're so overwhelming to people. And here, we're all just like, we have strong emotions. So what, like everybody is so validating, and kind and loving and supportive. And it's just been so incredible to watch this thing blossom.
Laurie Edmundson:
Yeah, I agree. And my absolute favorite thing so far has been so we don't require people to be on video, we don't require people to speak out loud. And so if you want to talk in the chat, that's fine. And then often we'll read out like kind of, you know, introductions or like main things to the group in case people aren't monitoring the chat. And I remember last time, like our second super feelers club, we had just me Sarah and one other person who had their video on at the beginning. And throughout the hour and a half that we were there, every, like 10 minutes, an extra person would put their video on. And by the end of it, every single person had their video on it, every single person had spoken out loud. And you could just see the level of like comfort and community building throughout. And it was incredible, like, gave me goosebumps at the end when I was like, Look every single person's faces here. And they're all comfortable to share who they are and where they're from, and all of that. And yeah, it was awesome.
Sara Amundson:
Yeah, one of the coolest parts of that for me was we had a participant who said they were really anxious all day leading into super feelers, and they regretted signing up. And they were just feeling all of this anxiety and discomfort and whatever. And then when they attended, they really opened up, they were super expressive and whatever. And then literally, that same evening, they registered for all the future super feelers events. And that just to me, is a testament of that community, right of like, this is a group of people that just wants to love and support one another. Because, you know, maybe they haven't always felt loved and supported the way that they needed to, up until now.
Laurie Edmundson:
Absolutely, yeah, that was incredible. And Sarah and I have talked about it in other episodes before where we're saying, like, why is dialectical behavior therapy? Why doesn't it have like a peer support model? And I know, I've advocated for that before up in Canada. And the answer has always been like the liabilities. Just kind of general, I think stigma of not being able to kind of manage ourselves. And it's not managing ourselves. The group is so incredible, like Sarah and I lead it, but we're not doing really much to manage, like, we're just like, literally sitting there just in awe of how amazing everybody is and how supportive they all are. And that's kind of it like, it's just so awesome. I love it so much.
Sara Amundson:
I think we're just there for like, a brief check in and a few bad jokes and they're doing the rest. Totally. Okay, so guys, in terms of how to attend all of the future super feelers for the next maybe two or three months. Laurie are live on Eventbrite, you can see that link in both of our BIOS on social media. It's also going to be of course, in the show notes for this podcast episode as well. And just in terms of your participation, of course, it's free. Of course, it's low barrier, the only thing that we do need from you is a one time consent form to participate, just to make sure that you understand, like what we're here to do, we're not here to counsel. Well, we're just here to kind of create community and support for one another. But yeah, event right. We'll get you to us and then we'll get you the consent form and then
Laurie Edmundson:
Come join us, please register as soon as you can, because they will start selling out pretty soon, I think. And we did get some feedback about the dates and the times. And so I know that for people in Pacific Standard Time, it is falling kind of like right around dinnertime, which was not ideal. We are monitoring that feedback. So please do let us know if you really, really want to attend and you just can't attend those specific nights. Sara and I are trying to manage our wellness and our like availability and not get too excited. And you know, host these every day. So just keep in mind that we are listening to that feedback, we just kind of need to figure out what we're going to do there. So at this point, it's usually Monday nights at 6pm PST. But all of the information is on Eventbrite.
Sara Amundson:
And just thinking out loud here, Laurie, and maybe teasing a future idea. Who knows, maybe we will put together some sort of open forum or group where everybody can join online, maybe it's a Facebook group, maybe it's a slack page, who knows, but we can get everybody together and keep having that sense of community, even if it's not in a former formal super feelers club event. Just an idea. We'll see where that one girls,
Laurie Edmundson:
Sarah and I have a lot of ideas. Even the super feelers club was like a one off, like, what if we did this? And then the next day, here we are, like, registering people and getting going. So yeah, we're so excited. I don't know, it might be helpful. Sarah, if we kind of talk about the general format, just because I know like, especially for me, I have anxiety. And sometimes if I don't know what I'm getting myself into, I'm not very likely to register. So we kind of start just with names pronouns, where you're from indigenous land recognition, and kind of a prompt question, usually. So I think in the past, it's been just things like, why are you here today? What are you hoping to gather from this? And the prompt changes may change? But of course, you're always welcome to not answer the prompt question if you don't want to. And then we kind of just go into an open floor. So if anybody has like, I can't remember how sir awarded it last time, like a win a struggle, or just anything, they want to talk about that how you said it. Oh, when
Sara Amundson:
a struggle or any kind of peer support that they're looking to just get like advice or thoughts on. And we do this, of course, according to a pretty clear set of community guidelines that we've developed. And we always open that to the group so that the group can add in any community guideline requests that they have as well.
Laurie Edmundson:
And the way that it worked last time was really great, because there was somebody who kind of wanted to start, and they just shared how they were feeling and why they were there. And then the group just all kind of started to chime in about their experiences with similar things. And it just went from there and an hour and a half flew by. It's just incredible. Honestly, it's so much fun.
Sara Amundson:
Yeah, every like every night after super feelers, either Laurie or I will text each other and just be like, I can't believe we did this thing. This thing. It's just, it's like filling us up. We're just so happy. So yeah, we want everybody to join and feel the same sense of like, you're really seen here, right?
Laurie Edmundson:
None of us came down through this life. And certainly none of us who are super feelers can go through this life alone. Absolutely. And it is dropping, so you don't need to attend every single one. You're not like committing to anything. Of course, we found that the people that attend one often want to attend multiple and so eventually, it'll probably end up being like, generally speaking, a similar group. But no, no problems if you only want to attend one. And that's it. I'm trying to think if there's anything else we should talk about. It's just really fun. And we hope to see you all there is really what I'm trying to say.
Sara Amundson:
And if any of you our listeners who have heard us talk about skills before and would really like to hear us talk more on skills, we have a whole kind of portion of super feelers every month designated for skills talk. And this last, this last week, for example, we started talking on like the tip skill, the please skill, and I'm sending all of the listeners, core values inventory tool that I use with all of my clients because we started talking about behavior and if it's values based or not values based, so there really is some strong takeaways and some tools as well. Of course, we're not DBT clinicians. We're just people who have lived experience with DBT and, you know, a unique knowledge of DBT but that is a skill stock is a big part of super feelers for sure.
Laurie Edmundson:
Yeah, that's a great point. So not everybody that attends has taken dialectical behavior therapy before, but because the group generally resides like it usually listeners or people with BPD A lot of us have and so it's a great opportunity if you're on a waitlist for a DBT person. I'm not sure if the DBT program is good for you, or you're working through the material on your own, it's a good opportunity to just kind of like hear examples of how people are using the skills and, you know, celebrate successes or talk about challenges that you've had trying to implement these skills. So in that sense, it's got that group vibe that I found really beneficial in DBT. So other skills are totally able to be talked about, it just happens to be that we talk about DBT skills most of the time.
Sara Amundson:
Yeah. And as many of you know, if you've been through DBT, you know, that often, they certainly don't promote. And even sometimes they don't allow you to remain friends with or connected to people that you've gone through treatment with. And so this program, this non program, this group, this informal group that we're developing really isn't that, like, the idea of CO healing, right? We're healing, we're finding recovery together. And we don't want there to be any reason why you all can't grow and expand and be friends in group and outside of group. So that was just something that was really important to us. And, and it was something that frustrated us when we went through DBT years ago.
Laurie Edmundson:
Absolutely. Yeah. And I because I totally broke that rule. I already know that there's people that I did go to DBT with that are interested in joining this group, which just kind of shows the connection that you make when you meet people who get you because I mean, I graduated DBT like and I don't even know how many years ago over like six years ago, right? So those people are still around and still hoping to build connection with other people. So it's awesome.
Sara Amundson:
a side note, did you get to choose like a rock or any kind of weird like, item when you graduated as like a sign of your graduation?
Laurie Edmundson:
I have a certificate.
Sara Amundson:
Okay. They don't give certificates in the States. But I got to choose like a rock or like a, like a quote or something as my like, my graduation thing. And it's just a cute like symbol of Oh, man. Tonight, it's my turn to choose the rock like, Damn, I really did this.
Laurie Edmundson:
That's cool. I like that.
Sara Amundson:
Yeah. All right, guys. Well, we hope to see you all as Super feelers we love you so much. Thank you for your love and support, as always, and we'll talk to you soon. Hi, friends. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the bold, beautiful borderline podcast, orient, I are so grateful that you're here with us on this journey. And we can't wait to dive into more topics in the future with you all about borderline, and even have some more fun and exciting guests to join us on the podcast. If you really enjoyed this episode, we would love if you would rate review and subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. We would also love to see you interact with us on social media and on our Patreon page, the links to that are included in the show notes. So check us out there. We would be incredibly honored to get to know you all as you get to know us and our recovery stories. We love you and we'll see you next time.