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This is a thread about Borderline Personality Disorder. I’ll be explaining a bit about the disorder from the perspective of someone that actually has it. It’s time to have this conversation. People with BPD need a voice.
There are 9 symptoms of BPD and you must have at least 5 to be diagnosed. These symptoms are fear of abandonment, unstable relationships, unclear/shifting self-image, impulsivity, suicidal behavior, emotional swings, chronic emptiness, explosive anger, and dissociation/paranoia.
With bpd, fear of abandonment turns into “splitting”. This is waking up hating your best friend and cutting them out of your life even though nothing happened. It’s your brain’s attempt to make sure no one can abandon you bc you will do it first. It leaves you always isolated.
Unstable relationships turns into something called a “favorite person.” This is when you become extremely close to a friend or partner to the point where you make your entire life about them. It’s very hard bc your fp controls how you feel every day by how they act towards you.
Unclear/shifting self-image is a nightmare. You don’t know who you are, what you like, what you enjoy doing, etc. This is when we turn to other people and tv-characters to find things to mirror bc we do not know who we are.
Impulsivity can include many things such as spending money, unsafe sexual acts, substance abuse, eating disorders, reckless driving, etc. I’ve met people with bpd who have had 1 or all 5 of these examples. It depends on the person, but this is a tough one to deal with.
“Suicidal behavior” can look different on everybody. It can range from suicidal ideation to self-harm to actual attempts. Most people with bpd have some suicidal thoughts at the least.
Emotion swings are huge. You can go from 0 to 100 real fast and it can happen with any emotion and last hours to days.
Chronic emptiness is a big one. It feels like you’re constantly searching for who you are, but you will never find it. It comes with a lot of boredom because you just don’t know how to fill that space inside. Since we don’t have a sense of self, it creates this emptiness.
Anger as a symptom can be shown many different ways in different people, but most of the time it’s an explosion of anger that’s way too big for the situation it’s aimed at because your mood will just swing and there’s nothing you can do to stop it even if you can feel it coming.
Disassociation is experienced as feeling cut off from yourself and seeing yourself from outside your own body or losing touch with reality. I personally don’t deal with this symptom often so I can’t speak on it too much.
I want to bring up literature. When you look up BPD, a big book that comes up is “I Hate You Don’t Leave Me.” NEVER buy this book. It portrays people with bpd as monsters and everyone in their life as victims. If you want to really learn about BPD, ask someone who has it.
The only person I personally trust to talk about BPD that doesn’t have it, is @blaisemd. I went to his program many years ago and it changed my life to be around someone who understood BPD the way he did. Look him up. He has some books and videos on BPD and is trustworthy.
There’s really only one treatment for BPD currently and that’s called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. There’s no medicine to treat the disorder, but some meds can treat individual symptoms. This leaves people with BPD feeling pretty hopeless, as there is no “cure”.
Every emotion someone without BPD feels is felt about 30x greater in the body of someone with BPD. Regular sadness is felt as grief, as if someone close to you had passed away. That’s how extreme it is. Day to day it’s pretty exhausting.
Before I was properly treated, BPD tore my life apart. It ruined my relationships, my body, and my mind. There is not enough help in this country for people with bpd. There are a few scattered centers. I was lucky enough to go to one of them, but without that I wouldn’t be alive.
It’s bad enough that BPD cannot be cured, there’s also a severe lacking of treatment centers in America. People with BPD can feel so hopeless about life and here’s huge reasons why. Having BPD is a very lonely thing. People don’t understand. I’m doing my best to explain, though!
There’s an embarrassment and shame that can come along with having BPD bc people with BPD have been portrayed as manipulative monsters that everyone around them needs to “walk on eggshells” around and that couldn’t be more wrong!
I want to leave this open ended for more people with BPD to add onto in the replies to help educate people! And if anyone has any questions, leave those in the replies too! It’s time for people to start understanding that we are just regular people who have a rough disorder.
