There's a reason that your rear view mirror is so small and your windshield is so big

because that rear view mirror focuses on what's behind you and that windshield that's all

the light into the moment of where you are right now.

And that's what we want to focus on is right now.

Well, good evening everyone. Welcome back to Phil in the blanks. I'm Dr. Phil, of course.

We've been talking about toxic personalities in the real world. You know, we covered narcissism

and then last week we started talking about borderline personalities. And this is the

second time I'm talking about borderline personality because you encounter a lot of people like

this. I know because you've asked me about it a lot. And if you didn't catch last time,

then it's in the library and you can go back and listen to it. Just a quick focus. Borderline

personality disorder is kind of what we're talking about when this is present in the extreme.

But remember, I said that all of us are on a behavioral continuum. And you may have a

lot of the characteristics that we're talking about with borderline personality disorder,

but you may not have them to the extreme or you might be married to someone or have a sibling

or someone you work with that has some of these characteristics, but they don't have them

at all where they don't have them to the degree that they would qualify as having the disorder.

So when I talk about it, I'm talking about it in the extreme when it reaches the level of being

diagnosable. And to be diagnosed, they are like nine characteristics for the borderline personality.

They went over last time. You can see them. I'll talk about quickly here in a minute. You only have

to have five of the nine to get the diagnosis, but we're talking here about patterns. You know,

somebody might have these traits or characteristics or symptoms pop up for a day or two or in crisis,

but not in pattern. So that doesn't mean that they have a borderline personality disorder.

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