Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

With BPD you may struggle with maintaining stable and healthy relationships. You may idealize someone one moment and drop them the next. Intense and shifting emotions lead to impulsive, often regretful behaviors. This can lead to intense and rocky relations.

Borderline often comes with a poorly defined or unstable “sense of self.” Boundaries can be a real issue. You may experience rapid changes in self-identity, self-esteem, and self-worth. It leaves you wondering “who am I?” without my partner, my family, my friends. It can feel like we are walking around with a gaping hole inside and we’re unable to look away.

Impulsive behaviors are a common and very challenging hallmark to Borderline Personality Disorder. This can be everything from reckless driving and road rage to substance abuse, binge eating or jumping from one sexual partner to the next. The intensity and constant changing of emotions leads to impulsive, sometimes largely out-of-proportion reaction.

BPD is marked by intense and fluctuating emotions. You may experience episodes of anger, anxiety, or depression that can last for a few hours or get dragged out for days. The severity of feelings is blaring, stressful and relentless. BPD makes a roller-coaster out of every daily life.

People with BPD often have a profound fear of abandonment and may go to great lengths to avoid real or imaged rejection. This intense fear wreaks havoc on maintaining stable relationships, creating a constant sense of worry and foreboding. It interferes with how much and what your willing to share with someone, effects what you allow yourself to do or say and often stops you from truly enjoying the moment.

Borderline Personality Disorder is often associated with extreme behaviors. Some engage in self-harming behaviors, such as cutting or burning. Some express rage, vengeance and terrible anger. These behaviors are usually impulsive and can be dangerous.

REMEMBER - If you or someone you know is in crisis, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) or visit a local hospital for immediate help.

Many individuals with BPD report a persistent sense of emptiness or loneliness, which can contribute to the search for external validation. This means we look for someone else to make us feel okay about ourselves. Which means we feel like we are always reaching, always uncertain and somehow never enough.

Some individuals with BPD may experience dissociation, where they feel detached from reality or our own emotions. It can be very frightening and a lot like an out-of-body experience. To help us manage our overwhelm, our perception can shift into the background, away from whatever is, too, much. It almost feels like a movie.