Even though I have a blog about BPD, a lot of people have a lot of doubts about it (about the symptoms, terms, etc). So here is a post about BPD and, please, if you are neurotypical don’t comment “wow I have it” just because you read my post.
Borderline Personality Disorder is diagnosed when there is a persistent pattern of unstable interpersonal relationships, mood and self-image, as well as distinct impulsive behaviour, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts. These difficulties are indicated by five (or more) of the following:
frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterised by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g. spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). This does not include suicidal or self-harming behaviour.
recurrent suicidal behaviour, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behaviour.
affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood - intense feelings that can last from a few hours to a few days.
chronic feelings of emptiness.
inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger.
transient, stress-related paranoid ideas or severe dissociative symptoms.
FP means, for someone who has BPD, favorite person. It is a term that refers to the person you most idealize, usually it is someone you have romantic feelings for, but it can be a friend, fictional character, someone in your family, etc. Not everyone who has BPD has a FP, but it is something common. Having a FP is not something beautiful and shouldn’t be romantized, your mood starts depending on that person, on the way they talk to you, you have a lot of mental breakdowns when they’re gone and it’s something that puts you in risk, because you’re willing to do basically anything for that person.
Splitting is the action of feeling extremely angry at someone who you usually idealize, for example, your fp (but it doesn’t have to be necessarily your fp). Someone who suffers from BPD usually has black and white thinking or feeling, loving or hating someone, doing something all the time or not at all, basically no harlf term. When someone splits, it means that they were from a extreme to another about their feelings to someone. It can happen for big and important reasons, when someone actually does a serious mistake or it can happen when someone does a “small” mistake and we react extremely, due to BPD hypersensitivity.
That’s what Wikipedia says: “In psychology, dissociation is any of a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experience. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality, rather than a loss of reality as in psychosis.”. Dissociation is the match of despersonalization (“Depersonalization can consist of a detachment within the self regarding one’s mind or body, or being a detached observer of oneself. Subjects feel they have changed and that the world has become vague, dreamlike, less real, or lacking in significance. It can be a disturbing experience. Chronic depersonalization refers to depersonalization-derealization disorder, which is classified by the DSM-5 as a dissociative disorder.”) and derealization (“Derealization is an alteration in the perception or experience of the external world so that it seems unreal. Other symptoms include feeling as though one’s environment is lacking in spontaneity, emotional colouring, and depth. It is a dissociative symptom of many conditions.”). Basically, it is feeling like YOU are not real + the WORLD is not real. Okay, I’m not sure about what I’m going to say now, please someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that there a lot of dissociative disorders, but in BPD people usually suffer just from dissociative symptoms.
Self-harm is when you intentionally hurt yourself. Okay, but why? Some people self-harm to relief the pain, a lot of people with BPD also relate they self-harm to feel real during dissociative episodes or to feel something when the emptiness sensations are acting out. For some people, self-harm is when you hurt your body tissue, for example, cutting or scratching yourself, but, personally, in my opinion, thre are different ways or expressing self-harm before it becomes something extreme, for example, starving yourself, triggering yourself, doing something you don’t want to just because you “deserve it”, etc.
“People with BPD are always abusive.”
That’s absolutely not true. A lot of websites make articles about BPD and, because of a lack of information, they mention we are abusive and things like that. The truth is that no one is automatically abusive JUST because their mental illnesses. Abuse is something related to someone’s behavior, regardless if they’re mentally ill or not. “Okay, so why a lot of people say BPD makes someone abusive?” Maybe it’s because PDs are not a very discussed topic and people are always afraid of the unkown, so it’s better if they just judge us. Also, maybe because people with BPD are often seen as “attention seekers”, which is not something bad, in my opinion, because everyone should receive enough attention, since they’re not using bad mechanisms to get it.
About some other symptoms
Mood swings happen when someone goes to an emotion to another. For someone who has BPD, it happens a lot of times during the day. For example, if you got a friend and they have BPD they can talk about suicide and how hopeless they feel and a few hours or minutes later they can talk about future plans and how excited they are about things. It impacts our affective instability too, so sometimes we get lost thinking if we like someone or not. We can easily “get tired” of someone and then becoming totally dependent on them after some time.
Our instability also impacts our sense of self, sometimes it makes us question even if we are real (going back to the dissociation aspect). That’s why is so hard for us to do things like choosing a career, because today I can feel like becoming an actress and then tomorrow I want to be a doctor. Our decisions and moods are constantly changing.
Our fear of abandonment controls our lives, we can do things that we don’t even want to just to have someone by our sides. Also, some people with BPD can get too clingy or too distant to someone they love, clingy to avoid the abandonment and distant because of a “leave them before they leave me” thought. That’s why our relationships are very unstable.
Compulsion and impulsivity is a form of expressing our confused feelings, like if we need something to rely on. We can drink too much, eat too much, waste too much money, etc. It can happens for a lot of reasons, for example, to fill the feelings of emptiness or to avoid a breakdown, specially when someone leaves.
Quiet and explosive borderlines
Explosive borderline is someone who is the “classical” borderline. They will act out, they may yell at people, they may get involved in fights and etc. Someone who is a quiet borderline will act in, holding their pain agaisnt themselves, for example, with the self-harm. They may not usually yell at people or get involved in fights, but, instead, they will do terrible things with themselves. There is not a “worse or better type of borderline”, they’re just different types. We all suffer a lot.
Sorry if my grammar wasn’t very correct. English is not my native language. I hope it was a helpful post for some help here on tumblr.
Stay strong, borderline community!
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