The Borderline Corner

Starlight Glimmer is a unicorn who is very gifted in magic. She is initially introduced as an antagonist, motivated to force equality on a town by her childhood best friend abandoning her. She later becomes a student of friendship and eventually, the headmaster of the School of Friendship. Starlight shows several traits of BPD throughout the show:

Fear of Abandonment: This is Starlight's core. Abandonment pains her so much that it drives her to be afraid of making any more friends without controlling them. She struggles with feeling secure in her relationships, and she often believes people will leave her if they find out about her past. She consistently shows that she is very worried about the friends she has leaving her or liking her less than others.

Unstable Relationships: Starlight has a rocky past with relationships. She might have a Favourite Person, a common experience among those with BPD, where one person is idealized and loved above all others. A person with BPD wants to spend every second with their Favourite Person, which can easily lead to codependency and other unhealthy dynamics. When Starlight's Favourite Person leaves her, it devastates her to the point of her closing off all her walls to any future relationships unless she can control them and keep people from leaving her. When her Favourite Person comes back into her life, she is very possessive of him and feels insecure and abandoned when he spends time with others. Throughout the show, she begins to learn to spread out her love for multiple people and to avoid putting all of her value onto one person, and she ends the series in a much healthier place relationship-wise.

Emotional Dysregulation: Starlight has big emotions, and she can be prone to drastic mood swings or outbursts. She has an explosive temper, which she sometimes expresses unchecked and other times she bottles it up until she can't hold it in any longer. She is afraid of expressing her emotions freely because she fears that she will hurt someone else.

Black and White Thinking/Splitting: Starlight views people and situations as good or bad, and she can change her perception of things very quickly. She idolizes her friends and puts them on a pedestal, but if they do something that bothers her, she is very prone to intense feelings of loathing towards them.

Impulsive Behaviours: Starlight has a tendency to "go with her gut" and act without thinking, mostly expressed through impulsive uses of magic that typically have major consequences for others around her.

Today's skill is TIPP!

Type: Distress Tolerance

Description: In an emotion crisis? TIPP can help!

Temperature: Hold your breath and dunk your face in a bowl of cold water, or hold an ice pack up against your eyes and cheeks for thirty seconds.

Intense Exercise: Move intensely for even a little while. Anything works; jumping jacks, push ups, running, dancing, even just going up and down the stairs. Get yourself moving.

Paced Breathing: Breathe slowly. Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, and exhale for 8 seconds. Repeat this for as long as you need.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Starting in your feet, tense up your muscles for a few seconds before releasing them along with your exhale. Move up your body to your legs, torso, arms, hands, etc.

Useful when: TIPP skills are useful for when you are in an emotional crisis. When your emotions are too overwhelming, TIPP skills help to quickly change your body chemistry to reduce those feelings.

Louis is a corporate attorney specializing in financial law seen in the TV series Suits. Over the course of the show, Louis demonstrates several traits of BPD:

Fear of abandonment. Louis is afraid of people leaving him, and he has shown on multiple occasions that he is prone to buttering people up in an effort to prevent them from abandoning him.

Unstable relationships. Louis shows that he struggles with maintaining healthy relationships. He often tries to control other people's actions and manipulates them to try to avoid feeling rejection or feelings of inadequacy. He struggles with boundaries. He often overshares and inserts himself into other people's lives or cases, and forces them to come along with him to restaurants or to mud baths.

Black and White Thinking/Splitting: Louis views people as all good or all bad, and those views can change very quickly. He describes other characters as his friends one moment, and see them as completely evil the next.

Impulsive behaviours. Louis frequently acts without thinking, and these impulsive decisions often backfire on him.

Emotional dysregulation. Louis struggles with regulating his emotions. His mood can change very quickly, and his emotions are in an all-or-nothing state. He often reacts emotionally without thinking and lashes out at others. His anger is especially extreme and the slightest inconvenience can make him yell at the associates serving under him.

Delusional or Paranoid symptoms. Louis wholeheartedly believes that everyone in the law firm hates him and that everyone is out to get him. He believes everyone treats him unfairly, or that they are lying to him, or trying to get him fired, and he firmly believes this despite how many times the other characters prove otherwise.

Today's skill is Opposite Action!

Type: Emotion Regulation

Description: If your emotion does not fit the facts of the situation, Act Opposite of what you are feeling!

Acknowledge your feelings. Describe your emotion in words.

Identify your Opposite Action. Do the complete opposite of what your emotion wants you to do.

For example, if you feel sadness or depression, you can want to shut down and withdraw from people and situations. Instead, do the Opposite Action. Engage, get involved, be active and reach out to people.

Useful when: Emotion-driven behaviour can lead to destructive outcomes and acting on those impulses can often intensify the emotion. Doing the opposite of what your emotional impulse is can help regulate and change your emotion instead of intensifying it.

Borderline Personality Disorder is a very stigmatized condition. The general population and even some of the psychiatry world still believe that people with BPD are hostile, aggressive, and impossible to treat. It's important to help spread awareness about it so that people with BPD can have access to better treatment, to allow them to live without shame, and so that those without it can get a better understanding of what it is really about.

A great way BPDers can help spread awareness this month is by talking about it! Talk about your experiences, what it feels like, and what living with BPD is like for you. You can help those without BPD understand the condition more, and you can also help someone who is living with undiagnosed BPD recognize the symptoms and possibly seek help.

If you don't have BPD, now is the perfect time to educate yourself a bit more about it! Read up about how it presents and learn what's true and what's a myth. Learn how BPD affects someone and what you can do to help ease the pain that someone with BPD might feel.

The narrative about BPD is only going to change if we want it to.

Today's skill is Check the Facts!

Type: Emotion Regulation

Description: Test to see if your emotions fit the facts.

Ask yourself these questions:

What emotion am I feeling? What emotion do I want to change?

What is happening right now that's making me feel like this? Stick to the concrete facts.

What do I think or feel about the situation? What interpretations or assumptions am I making?

Am I assuming a threat? What is the threat and how likely is it to happen?

What's the worst case scenario?

Having answered all of these, does my emotion fit the facts?

Useful when: Check the Facts is useful for when you have an emotion that you want to change. It's an important first step in the process of changing your emotional response and regulating yourself.

Spinel is a gem given to Pink Diamond to serve as her playmate and best friend. When Pink Diamond grew tired of Spinel, she abandoned her. In the film, Spinel displays several traits of BPD:

Fear of Abandonment: Spinel's main trait in the film is her fear of abandonment. She was abandoned by her best friend, and we see throughout the film that she is afraid of Steven leaving her behind as well.

Unstable Relationships: Spinel struggles with keeping boundaries in her relationships. The film shows this by having her constantly beside Steven and invading his personal space. She never wants to leave his side and gets visibly distraught if he is away from her. It's likely that this contributed to why Pink Diamond left her.

Emotional Dysregulation: Spinel is prone to outbursts of extreme anger, which can lead her to becoming violent. Her mood shifts rapidly and frequently, and she can go from 0-100 in an instant.

Impulsivity: Spinel can be impulsive. She frequently acts without thinking, and her impulsive actions lead to other characters almost getting hurt at times.

Black and White Thinking/Splitting: Spinel demonstrates splitting, when her perceptions on people and situations are black and white, either all good or all bad. She loves Steven and views him as her best friend and, for a lot of the film, she thinks Steven is the best thing in the world. But, when she perceives that he no longer cares about her and is going to leave her, she lashes out and immediately turns on him.

Paranoia/Delusional Symptoms: Spinel firmly believes that she is not a good person and that other people are only waiting to leave her. When she sees Steven with a weapon, her paranoia grows and she believes that Steven will get rid of her as soon as he doesn't need her to save the planet.

Today's skill is STOP!

Type: Distress Tolerance

Description: Before you react, STOP!

Stop! Tell yourself to pause and take a second, you can even say "stop" out loud.

Take a breath. Inhale deeply and fully feel the exhale.

Observe the situation. What is happening? What are you thinking? What are you feeling? Stick to the facts.

Proceed mindfully. Ask your wise mind what actions will improve your thoughts and feelings and which will make them worse, and proceed effectively.

Useful when: When distressing situations arise, our emotions can get us to act without thinking. STOP helps keep you in control of your actions.

People with BPD do/are:

DO have trouble regulating their emotions and their impulses

DO struggle with healthy relationships and attachments to others

DO have an intense fear of abandonment and will do whatever it takes to avoid being abandoned

DO have an unstable sense of self and their identity

DO suffer from chronic self-harming and/or suicidal behaviours

DO experience feelings of emptiness or hollowness

DO have erratic moods and emotions that can change drastically from moment to moment

DO frequently engage in impulsive behaviours

ARE able to feel real love towards other people

ARE able to be treated

ARE able to live happy, well-rounded lives

ARE able to form healthy relationships

DO deserve respect

DO deserve support

DO deserve love

People with BPD do/are not:

DO NOT act the way they do for attention (the self-destructive behaviours people with BPD sometimes engage in stems from a need to cope with our emotions and thoughts, not out of attention-seeking)

ARE NOT intentionally or maliciously manipulative (manipulative behaviour is pre-planned and intentional. People with BPD engage in their behaviours as a reaction to their intense emotions. While we may act in ways that attempt to control how others behave, we are typically doing so to try to ease or prevent our own emotional pain, not to hurt others.)

ARE NOT dangerous or violent (people with BPD are much more likely to hurt themselves than others)

HAVE NOT all experienced childhood trauma (many people with BPD have experienced childhood trauma, but many have not. Childhood trauma is a risk factor, not a cause.)

ARE NOT all AFAB (while a larger percentage of those diagnosed with BPD are assigned female at birth, many of those who are assigned male at birth also suffer from BPD, and some evidence shows that it may be more equally distributed among both sexes)

ARE NOT untreatable (there are lots of treatment options available! DBT is the most common, but there are many other options as well.)

ARE NOT all abusers (abuse is not linked to any one mental illness. People with BPD may struggle to form healthy relationships and this can lead to abusive dynamics, however ANYONE can be abusive regardless of their mental health.)

ARE NOT all the same (BPD is a spectrum and it affects all of us a little bit differently. Not everyone is going to experience it exactly the same as someone else, and it's important to recognize that we're all individuals.)

ARE NOT rare (BPD is actually pretty common. It's estimated that around 1-2% of the population are diagnosed BPD. That's around 156,000,000 people, and that's not even counting those who are undiagnosed.)

ARE NOT horrible, unfeeling monsters (we are literally just people)

Helpful resources for all your Dialectical Behaviour Therapy needs! I will be updating this post as I find more.

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook by M. McKay, J. Wood and J. Brantley : A clear and concise guide to the basics of learning DBT skills.

The DBT Travel Guide app on the App Store and on Google Play: Quick list of DBT skills to try for your specific emotion, also includes an interface for diary cards.

DBTSelfHelp.com: A variety of tools including videos, articles, flash cards, DBT skills, etc.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy Official Site

Therapist Aid DBT Worksheets

DBT Tools: An index of DBT skills.