I’ve tried researching it and many explanations seem to be emotionally charged, judgmental, and non-factual. “They’re so evil and manipulative!” Okay, but can you actually describe what it is?
The the factual, non-biased explanations show what’s in the DSM-5, but it’s kind of vague. What exactly is it? What might people with BPD do to avoid abandonment? Etc.
Edit: Just wanted to thank everyone for their reply. Everyone has brought something of value and an interesting perspective.
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Personally, as someone who has been diagnosed with BPD in the past (and then read everything I could find about BPD and non-suicidal self injury in my university’s library) , I think it’s a reaction to growing up in unstable and abusive families.
Many of the diagnostic criteria involve insecurity about relationships with others, fear of rejection, rapid changes in self image, poor boundaries, manipulative behavior, and self harm. If you grew up with erratic and abusive parents, these things make a lot of sense.
– Some of the most important relationships in your early life *were* unstable. It’s common for abusers to be loving, caring, and apologetic in between abusive moments. If your relationship with a parent rapidly swings between extremes of love and rage, you learn to expect that relationships will be either perfect or catastrophically bad.
– You don’t have a strong sense of self because you have to change the way you act all the time to try to avoid upsetting someone who might suddenly fly into a rage over something that used to be fine. You learn to manipulate people because it can keep you safe from the abuse.
– People often assume that self harm is manipulative or a cry for help, but that isn’t always the case. For some people, self injury can help people become more grounded when dissociating (and dissociation is a fairly common response to trauma…). Some people learn to self harm to express anger that they feel unsafe directing towards others (like, say, abusive parents). Self harming behavior has also been observed in primates deprived of maternal care (Harry Harlow did some experiments around this. They are ethically troubling, but also pretty informative/scientifically significant)
A lot of borderline behaviors and emotional patterns are bad in healthy relationships, but they can be effective survival strategies for people with abusive parents.
In the long run, it’s not that borderline people need to avoid abandonment, it’s that they need to learn that not everyone will abandon them. (but in the short term, they need to get therapy to learn to have healthier relationships, because there’s kind of a catch-22 where people are more likely to abandon you if you’re not emotionally well enough to be somewhat stable in a relationship)
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