wtf is bpd

Believe it or not, people with this affliction, at their very core, are the inverse of the narcissist. People with BPD start out 'too sensitive', too empathetic. People with borderline personality disorder empathize to the point of pain.

When the highly sensitive person grows up in a very non-validating and/or abusive environment, with a history of trauma, BPD can manifest.

In order for borderline personality to develop, an invalidating environment with and a highly sensitive person MUST BE present.

What is going on in a Borderline Personality Disorder sufferer's mind and how they are acting can be two entirely different things.

To the sufferer, BPD is about deep feelings, feelings often too difficult to express, feelings that are something along the lines of this:

• If others really get to know me, they will find me reject-able and will not be able to love me; and they will leave me

• I need to have complete control of my feelings otherwise things go completely wrong

• I have to adapt my needs to other people's wishes, otherwise they will leave me or attack me

• I am an evil person and I need to be punished for it

• Other people are evil and abuse you

• If someone fails to keep a promise, that person can no longer be trusted

• If I trust someone, I run a great risk of getting hurt or disappointed

• If you comply with someone's request, you run the risk of losing yourself

• If you refuse someone's request, you run the risk of losing that person

• I will always be alone

• I can't manage by myself, I need someone I can fall back on

• There is no one who really cares about me, who will be available to help me, and whom I can fall back on

• I don't really know what I want

• I will never get what I want

• I'm powerless and vulnerable and I can't protect myself

• I have no control of myself

• I can't discipline myself

• My feelings and opinions are unfounded

• Other people are not willing or helpful ________________

To the family members, BPD behavior is often very frustrating can feel unfair and punitive - something like this: 

• You have been viewed as overly good and then overly bad

• You have been the focus of unprovoked anger or hurtful actions, alternating with periods when the family member acts perfectly normal and very loving

• Things that you have said or done have been twisted and used against you

• You are accused of things you never did or said

• You often find yourself defending and justifying your intentions

• You find yourself concealing what you think or feel because you are not heard

1. Recognize the truth in this statement: Feelings are not facts. Your BPD loved one likely has a range of intense emotions which compel him to say things that feel unkind, unfair and even cruel at times. Recognize your BPD loved one’s reality: he has a mental disorder. His extreme feelings are highly changeable, as you have seen over and over. They are so changeable because your loved one has BPD, and because they are feelings, not truths. Try your best to keep this in perspective no matter how emotionally volatile your BPD loved one may become.

2. Recognize your part in disputes. It is easy to point the finger at the one with the diagnosis, especially when that diagnosis revolves around interpersonal dysfunction, but it is important to recognize that demonizing a person with BPD is unhelpful and is likely adding to the creation of chaos in your relationship. Likewise, seeing your BPD loved one as a “victim” of an illness or disease is also unhelpful. No matter who we are, we must learn to be accountable for our behavior, and that includes people with BPD as well as those who have a relationship with them.

3. Have a self-check in place for the potential feelings of FOG – fear, obligation, and guilt – in response to your BPD loved one, and a plan for handling these ungrounded responses. Susan Forward, PhD, coined the acronym “FOG” for the emotions likely to arise in people who are repeatedly emotionally manipulated. These feelings are unhealthy and unproductive. Change your reality until you have no true cause to fear your loved one; recognize that because your BPD loved one is an adult, no matter her relationship to you, so you are in no way obligated to remain in her life; and understand that guilt serves no healthy purpose. It can be used as a form of subtle manipulation, but manipulation, from someone with BPD, is more a matter of desperation, not real forethought or planning. She is seeking desperately to ensure she will not be abandoned (even while doing things that push you away from her).

4. Recognize, always, the degree of reaction your BPD loved one is likely to have in response to perceived or imagined abandonment. Because this is the deepest fear of someone with BPD, be careful and wise with potentially abandoning or rejecting words or phrases. If you decide to warn your BPD loved one that you may no longer maintain contact with him for any reason, be certain that you: 1) absolutely mean it, 2) are not saying it out of anger or cruelty, 3) are prepared for the potential fallout. No amount of fallout should keep you from going no-contact if this is what you believe to be best for you, but always be aware of the extreme ways your BPD loved one is likely to react, and be prepared.

The youtube video is buffering? I should go kill myself.

It’s raining today? Even the weather wants me to die.

My friend is at the dentist and can’t talk to me? They’re lying, they just hate me.

And that’s why it’s so awful when people say things like “Wait, you want to kill yourself over a piece of cake?” Yes, you want to kill yourself over the piece of cake that you can’t have, because you can never have anything without everything going wrong!

Everything is an attack, the world is against you. You feel so invalidated, so stupid knowing that you want to end your goddamned life because you couldn’t have cake, because you broke your pencil, because you lost your keys, over the most ridiculous things! Because everything! is! a goddamned! attack!

by Bon Dobbs - July 2009 Based on the book “When Hope is Not Enough: a how-to guide for living with and loving someone with Borderline Personality Disorder” Mistake #1:  Setting up “boundaries” and “limits” that are really rules for their behavior. Boundaries are the most misunderstood concept in the BPD supporter community (sometimes called the Non‐BPD community). The problem with boundaries is that most people do not understand to whom the boundary applies. Boundaries are about you and can only be applied to your own behavior. Your boundaries are for you, the supporter of a person with BPD, not for the person with BPD.  A popular book on Non‐BPs uses the example of telling the person with BPD that you will not take phone calls after 9 PM. This “boundary” (or limit as it’s called in this book) is supposed to be “respected” by the person with BPD. However, when emotional dysregulation gets a hold of the person with BPD, it is unlikely that the boundary will be remembered and respected. The problem with this boundary is that it really a rule that governs the other person’s behavior. With BPD, rules are made to be broken. Only you can respect your own boundaries. If you decide not to answer the phone after 9 PM then that is a boundary, because you are applying it to your own behavior, not expecting the person with BPD to comply with your rule. The misunderstanding of boundaries and to whom they apply causes much confusion and leads to frustration. The frustration is born out of trying to control another person’s behavior with a rule, which is impossible. Likely reactions to “boundaries” that are really rules includes rage, saying ”you are trying to control me” and impulsive behavior, such as running away at times when it is unsafe or having unsafe sex. Mistake #2: Judging them as ‘Crazy’. People with BPD are not crazy, despite their reactions and behavior that might indicate that they are. The name “borderline” is a vestige from an earlier time of psychotherapy that connoted that a person with BPD was on the “borderline” between neurosis and psychosis. Today, most researchers consider BPD to be primarily a disorder of emotional dysregulation and impulse control. 

Unfortunately for the person with BPD, the word “personality” is also in the current name of the disorder. Many supporters of people with BPD interpret that word as one of either a character flaw (just bad behavior) or that the person with BPD has a certain personality that is fixed and cannot change. Neither of these situations is correct. 

People with BPD are more emotional sensitive and more emotionally reactive than other people. I like to compare their emotional re-activity to that of a heat sensing control: yours is set to go off at 80 degrees Fahrenheit; a borderline’s is set at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. It is not a question of “crazy,” merely one of more emotional re-activity (or a lower emotional “tolerance” as they say in the controls community). The lower the tolerance, the more times the alarm goes off (even if it’s a false alarm to you). 

Judging a person with BPD as crazy actually contributes to the disorder. The reason comes down to shame. A person with BPD is likely to carry around much shame (see Mistake #4 below) and labeling them as crazy increases the shame. The biggest danger with shame is the option of suicide. If a person with BPD believes they are a broken/bad person (through shame), then what is the use in going on living? Other possible fallout from shame is the “giving up” on therapy, since shame makes a borderline believe that he/she can never be cured. 

Mistake #3: Getting caught up in the content, rather than the context. I see this situation occur in many Non‐BPs. Getting caught up in content, rather than seeing emotional context, is common and natural. Most people feel that they have to listen to the words, rather than the feelings behind a conversation. In the case of BPD, the feelings matter much more than what is being discussed. When I hear Non‐BPs saying, “but she said…” or “what she did was…,” it is a sure sign of being caught up in the details, the content, rather than seeking the emotional context of the conversation. Instead of getting caught up in the details, it is more effective to look for the primary emotional motivation of the words and actions of someone with BPD. Defending against, negating and/or arguing the details and/or accusations of someone with BPD will typically lead to more dysregulation and to an escalation of emotional behavior. Discovering the primary emotional motivations behind the words and actions of someone with BPD can help the person with BPD know that they are understood and heard. This feeling alone helps calm the waters in the interaction. 

Additionally, understanding and validatingthe emotional motivations can help facilitate meta‐cognition (or thinking about feelings) in someone with BPD, which in itself can build toward self‐mastery of his/her emotional states. That is, one can’t be all feelings and perform meta‐cognition at the same time. Each time meta‐cognition occurs makes it easier for it to reoccur. 

Developing mastery over the poorly‐regulated emotions is a goal unto itself, since, if the skill can be generalized, the person with BPD will almost automatically feel better without the intervention of the Non‐BP. If they feel better, the attacks, raging and manipulation that are motivated by feeling badly will subside, since they are no longer need to quell the negative emotional states. Mistake #4: Invalidating their Emotions. Everyone experiences emotions, and people with BPD experience them in spades – that is the very nature of emotional dysregulation. Dr. Marsha Linehan, the inventor of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), contends that BPD is caused by the “bio-social model” in which there are both biological and social factors that contribute to the development of BPD. The social component or “nurture” in this model is called the “invalidating environment.” When a loved one of a person with BPD invalidates the emotions of someone with BPD, the result is shame and mistrust in expressing their emotions. The shame comes from thinking of the borderline that: “My loved one tells me I shouldn't be this way, but I feel this way anyway, so I must be broken.” What is invalidation? Invalidation is essentially the expression of the idea that it is not OK to feel particular emotions, especially primary ones, like fear, anger and sadness. One should not do any of the following in an emotional conversation with a borderline at risk of being invalidating: • Make it about you. “I hated it when that happened to me.” • Try to one‐up the person. “Oh, you think you have it bad…” • Tell them how they should feel. “You should feel blessed…” • Try to give them advice. “What you really should do is…” • Try to solve their problem. “I’m going to call that girl’s parents and…” • Cheerlead (there is a time for this, but not now). “I know you can do it…” • Make “life” statements. “Well, life’s not fair…” • Make judgmental statements. “What you did was wrong…” • Make “revisionist” statements. “If you had only…” • Make it about your feelings. “How do you think that makes me feel?” • Make “character” statements. “You’re too sensitive…” • Rationalize another person’s behavior. “I bet they were just…” • Call names. “You’re such a baby.” • Use reason or the “facts.” “That’s not what happened…” • Use “always” or “never” statements. “You always get yourself into these situations…” • Compare the person to someone else. “Why can’t you be like your sister?” • Label the person. “You’re nuts.” • Advising to cut ties or ignore the situation. “Just ignore him.” 

Instead, learning to validate the person’s emotions is a very powerful tool and essential to relating positively with someone with BPD.  Mistake #5: Thinking that their Behavior is about You Most Non‐BPs come to my support list thinking something along the lines of “how is it possible that this person with BPD, who supposedly loves me, can behave toward me in such an abusive and disrespectful fashion?” In other words, the underlying feeling among “newbie” Non‐BPs is: “what about me?”