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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My mother had this.
For an eli5 explanation:
Think of a time when you felt an extremely intense emotion. Maybe rage or grief or fear. If you have experienced an emotional extreme – and most of us have – you’ll notice it temporarily changes the way you think.
Most people know that thoughts create emotions, but the opposite is also true. When you’re enraged with someone, you probably can’t remember much you like about them. You could even forget every positive thing about them and wonder why you ever hung around with that person in the first place!
Now most of us have what’s called meta cognition, which is thinking about our thoughts. So when I get angry with someone and think ‘why do I even hang out with this person?’ there’s another part of me that says ‘yeah, you feel that way now, but give it an hour and you’ll remember everything you like about them’. This is a type of emotional regulation that we learn through experience of noticing our thoughts shift with our mood – we start to take them with a pinch of salt and that knowledge that not everything we feel is reality helps us stay relatively calm.
But I bet you’ve sometimes had emotions strong enough to override that, right? You’ve occasionally acted regrettably due to a very strong emotion? Most people have, it’s very normal.
People with bpd tend to experience very extreme emotions on a far more regular basis and are trapped in that state where the emotion overrides regulation, so they tend to take their emotionally driven thoughts as fact and they act accordingly. They also tend to lack meta cognition – often because they haven’t been in an environment safe enough to learn it – so can’t calm down. They often also deal with very high levels of shame derived from an abusive or troubled upbringing that add fuel to the emotional fire.
And that’s essentially what bpd is.
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