Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness that severely impacts a person’s ability to regulate their emotions or the way you think and feel about yourself and others. This loss of emotional control can increase impulsivity, affect how a person feels about themselves, and negatively impact their relationships with others.

Borderline personality disorder is a mental health condition in which a person has long-term patterns of unstable or explosive emotions. These inner experiences often result in impulsive actions, self-image issues, and chaotic relationships with other people.

Signs and Symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder

–Affects how you feel about yourself, how you relate to others and how you behave.

-Intense fear of abandonment or instability, and you may have a hard time being alone.

-Intense mood swings and feel uncertain about how they see themselves. Their feelings for others can change quickly, and swing from extreme closeness to extreme dislike. Tend to view things in extremes, such as all good or all bad. Their interests and values can change quickly, and they may act impulsively or recklessly. Uncertain about their identity. 

• Efforts to avoid real or perceived abandonment, such as plunging headfirst into relationships-or ending them just as quickly.
• A pattern of intense and unstable relationships with family, friends, and loved ones.
• A distorted and unstable self-image or sense of self.
• Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating. Note: If these behaviors happen mostly during times of elevated mood or energy, they may be symptoms of a mood disorder and not borderline personality disorder.
• Self-harming behavior
• Recurring thoughts of suicidal behaviors or threats.
• Intense and highly variable moods, with episodes lasting from a few hours to a few days.
• Chronic feelings of emptiness.
• Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger.
• Feelings of dissociation, such as feeling cut off from oneself, observing oneself from outside one’s body, or feelings of unreality.
• Intense fear of abandonment
• Cannot tolerate being alone.
• Feelings of emptiness
• A pattern of unstable relationships, such as idealizing someone one moment and then suddenly believing the person doesn’t care enough.
• Rapid changes in self-identity and self-image that include shifting goals and values.
• Periods of stress-related paranoia and loss of contact with reality
• Wide mood swings, from happiness to irritability and anxiety to shame.

This may result in:

• Repeated job changes or losses
• Not completing an education
• Multiple legal issues, such as jail time
• Conflict-filled relationships, material stress, divorce
• Self-injury
• Involvement in abusive relationships
• Unplanned pregnancies
• Not everyone with borderline personality disorder may experience all of these symptoms. Often occurs with other mental illnesses, such as PTSD, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, eating disorders.

Types of psychotherapy that may help:

• Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)-DBT includes group and idivdual therapy designed specifacally for BPD.
• Schema-focused therapy-individual or group setting. Helps you identify unmet needs that have led to negative life patterns, which may at sometime have been helpful to survival, but as an adult are hurtful in many areas of life.