Was recently diagnosed and I still don’t really have a grasp of what it essentially is. Specifically the symptom “Unstable view of one’s self image”. But the whole thing kinda still confuses me.
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BPD people are typically pathologically over-dramatic.
Most people’s emotional level tends to hover around 4-6 out of 10, with occasional spikes up and down. Shit happens, oh that’s annoying. Yay cookies. Few things are the end of the world, few things are the best thing ever.
For BPD people, they’re either on 1-2 or 9-10. Emotional effects are much more intense. When they’re happy, they’re over the fucking moon. When they’re sad, it’s stage-IV cancer of the puppy. When they’re in love, it’s every romantic thing crammed into one, and when they’re angry they are r a g e.
And as a big part of this, they are *super* fragile, prone to tip from one state to another with every passing breeze.
Most of all they have a massive, all-encompassing fear of being abandoned and rejected, and tend to feel that they’re barely tolerated by people (so they’re *extra super nice* and overly clingy to people who are nice to them, in order to keep hold of them), until there’s some little slight, some sign that it’s all a sham, some proof that their being-valued was all a hollow shell that comes crumbling down… and they become anger and heartbreak incarnate.
They will go crying to their *real friends* about how awful their now-dead-to-them *fake* friends were, garnering allies to take vengeance upon them.
And when they start out a romantic entanglement, they’ll often ‘love-bomb’ the object of their affections… with if not the actual intent then at least the *effect* of maximising codependency upon them *so they will never leave*.
They don’t set out to be bad people, but they can easily fall into extremely toxic patterns, because their emotions kick them in the teeth with every little bump in the road… and they can end up clinging to whoever they can, and punishing those that upset them.
Watch the show *Crazy Ex-girlfriend* sometime – it’s frighteningly good portrayal.
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