How would you explain what borderline personality disorder is to someone who doesn’t have it?
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Imagine your emotions as being a ball. For a normal person that ball is on a flat track and can go left and right depending upon how much emotional stimulus is applied. For someone who is borderline that ball is on a plate floating in water. When emotional stimulus is applied to the plate there are no guidelines to restrict where the ball can go and trying to correct for that stimulus will only increase the risk of the ball flying into the water.
Basically you feel that you are a burden to everyone around you and that you are all around unlovable but you do everything in your power to keep those around you close whether it be attacking them to start a fight to get attention, threatening suicide, or all around trying to avoid any suspected abandonment. Also, they feel things intensely because they were never taught how to cope with emotions and they tend to split their thinking into black and white as in “you don’t want to hang out tonight?” Then you never liked me, you never make time for me, you never cared etc. It’s essentially living life as an empty person with really big emotions but feeling like you and everyone else hate yourself so you deserve it all.
Time and past experiences don’t limit your emotional intensity.
A person with BPD may have a severe emotional reaction to someone they haven’t invested much time in. They might have an extremely negative reaction or feeling of abandonment for a short time without contact. That may happen even if they’ve been close to the person for decades. How long you’ve known someone is supposed to play a large part in limiting these emotions but that limiter is practically gone, resulting in reactions that seem drastic or nonsensical to someone without BPD.
My wife has bpd we’ve been together for 7yrs. I can say you need very thick skin to be with someone that has it and you have to be able not take things literally. She’s said some of the worst most hurtful things anyone has ever said to me but they were all said while she was having an episode so I know she didn’t mean it. People with bpd are unable to control there anger and rage. They can be very mean. When the episode is over though they are super apologetic and embarrassed. They will then say that they are the worst person in the world and that you should leave them. You don’t deserve this. They deserve to be miserable and alone. Self harm is also a huge issue. It’s not like how some people do it to get attention. They usually don’t. They self harm because it’s a release to them it let’s them know they are still alive. Since allot of the time they are just numb and feel nothing. My wife has a problem with this. She has tons of scars on her legs from her calves to her thighs. She stopped cutting when I really got on her about it so now she burns herself with cigarette butts in inconspicuous areas. Allot of bpd people are sex addicts my wife included mostly just for the feeling of being wanted. It’s extremely difficult to be married to or in a longterm relationship with a bpd person as they almost never last. I can attribute allot of why we have been together so long at the fact that I decided to educate myself on bpd and being in a relationship with a bpd person. Once I knew I wanted to stay with her I read everything thing I could. One of the biggest thing when being friends or in a relationship with a bpd person is setting boundaries as they can be the most manipulative people you could ever know. Even setting boundaries is tricky though. Like you tell them from now on when you do A to make me feel bad for you. im not going to play into it anymore. I’m just going to leave. You have to explain though each time that just because I’m leaving it does not mean that I don’t love/like you. Or that I’m not coming back because I will. It just means that I will not tolerate this behavior. I have to tell my wife everyday multiple times a day that I love her and I want to be with her and I won’t leave her. The worst part is there isn’t really any medication for bpd and it’s usually permanent. There are allot of therapies that can help keep it in remission. Having our daughter actually helped my wife allot. It gave her a purpose and to have someone that lives you unconditionally no matter what your flaws are helped her to.
Just wanting to share this as a support if you have someone with BPD in your life. We had a therapist recommend us to read “Stop Walking on eggshells” (Mason & Keger) to help us better cope.
It was a very insightful read that my partner and I both felt was helpful.
Threads like these can be very difficult for folk like myself with BPD to read. I’d like to remind everyone that you are **not** your diagnosis and that people who have been hurt by someone with BPD are doing their best to justify their pain.
I just want to say thank you to OP for asking this and everyone else responding to it. My partner has BPD and he’s never really explained it like this. It really puts things into perspective, now; and gives me a better understanding of what he’s going through.
I said this in a different thread a while ago, but will copy it here:
BPD is an issue which almost always stems from past trauma and is rooted in a very deep foundational fear of abandonment, leading to anxiety, inappropriately extreme emotional interactions with partners, fixating on a singular “favourite person” for a while followed by “splitting” on them when the reality doesn’t match the (impossible) imagined ideal, etc. The person is often very prone to misinterpreting innocuous and innocent things as signals that someone is about to abandon them. Some people with BPD also show traits of narcissism, becoming so fixated on their own emotional priority that they seek appeasement to the detriment of others, or simply don’t intuitively account for anyone else. Think the stereotype “emotional terrorist” girlfriend who will emotionally blackmail a partner by having breakdowns if the partner doesn’t fall in line and do as expected or instructed, doesn’t acknowledge her partner’s feelings because she’s so focussed on her own, etc.
BPD is a highly stigmatised condition, mostly because if unaddressed it ends up being an extremely high risk for emotionally abusing partners. HOWEVER it is also one of few conditions people can genuinely learn to manage and even completely move on from. With help. My best friend has BPD and you would never know it because she’s reached a point of being extremely emotionally self aware and manages things before they even begin.
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