Introduction to Borderline Personality Disorder

Photo by flickr.com / Lali Masriera

Borderline Personality Disorder is a personality disorder which is characterized by difficulty in regulating emotions, instability in relationships and a problematic sense of the self. People with this disorder have difficulty understanding and expressing their emotions, they cannot easily invest in relationships with others and live with a fragmented sense of the self.

People with BPD experience intense fears of abandonment, anger and irritability that come to surface unexpectedly and are difficult to understand. These symptoms usually originate from traumatic experiences in childhood, which remained unexplained and unprocessed. All these experiences were so overwhelming that left a permanent influence on the person’s character.

Furthermore, people with Borderline Personality Disorder are quite sensitive to the emotional reactions of other people and they tend to respond impulsively and with anger before they clear out the others' intentions. This often leads to misunderstandings that are usually left unexplained and unresolved.

People with BPD often idealize and devalue other people in an extreme way. They change abruptly their opinions about others from admiration to disappointment, which makes it quite difficult for them to form mature relationships. Instead they create fragile and volatile bonds that are easily disrupted. This happens because people with Borderline Personality Disorder cannot perceive others as complete beings with positive and negative characteristics. They split their perceptions and create fragmented relationships.

Apart from that, when people with Borderline Personality Disorder face the possibility of rejection or loss they react with increased impulsivity and unstable behaviors. Since they don’t have a stable sense of the self that would help them process their emotions, they behave without thinking and they usually burst out their feelings to family, friends and coworkers. This creates a lot of stress to the people who live around BPD patients.

The above feelings and behaviors of the Borderline Personality Disorder are persistent, inflexible and mark the person’s life throughout a variety of contexts. Usually the symptoms of BPD start from adolescence or early adulthood and continue throughout the life span. However, some psychologists claim that we can identify a personality disorder even from late childhood. Similar to most personality disorders, once BPD is established it becomes an integral part of the person’s character and is very difficult to change. 

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