How do you explain borderline to someone who knows nothing about mental health?
I was trying to explain it to my partner tonight and he kept thinking it was the same as multiple personalities.
I basically said it was a diagnosis given to people who react negatively to emotions/bad situations. They have low self esteem and usually have suffered some form of abuse or Ill treatment.
^ this maybe wrong as I don't suffer from borderline.
Anyway he seem interested so I want to tell him the truth but I'm struggling to explain it to him because he cannot understand why borderlines react so extremely to certain situation.
Can you help?
Thanks for any replies.
The average,
well-adjusted adult
gets up at 7.30am feeling just plain terrible.
Call me Kate.
I have dyslexia so please excuse my poor spelling and sometimes poor understanding.
Generally it can be an attachment disorder. Like you get in kids, but the grown up version. Relationships went wrong during the years when you form a separate sense of self able to bear difficult emotions, and things got sort of frozen there.
I have bpd but no attachment issues. In fact I almost have the opposite.
I see it as a disorder where someone was unable to learn healthy or positive ways of dealing with emotions and therefore struggle to balance or manage them.
Attachment disorder is a separate condition. Mine has been explained as having developed coping mechanisms in childhood (that were understandable at the time) that now need to be adapted e.g whilst I can withdraw emotionally when I'm angry instead I need to express how I feel in a safe way.
To me, I see BPD as being unable to cope with stressful/upsetting situations in a healthy way, thinking in very black and white terms, risky behaviour, (self harm is usually a part of a bpd diagnosis), fear of abandonment (this may be what they mean by attachment issues?), and unstable self imagine.
I do have the diagnosis, but I do not believe its right for me, but I've looked into it a lot and that's my understanding of it.
There is no such thing as a clinical diagnosis of adult attachment disorder, to clarify. It's rather strange, but that's the DSM for you! People who grew up with attachment difficulties as a child, for whatever reason, tend to end up with symptoms associated with the personality disorders [commonly Borderline] as an adult. All of the pds express difficulty with relationship in one way or another, that being relationship with self and others.
[Source - psychotherapy training and personal experience].
I once heard it described as "emotional dyslexia" and I think that's quite accurate. For me, it's like I struggle to react sensibly or rationally to things that are scary, confusing or difficult, it's like everything becomes jumbled up and I push all my support away and just freak out. Often I know that I shouldn't be behaving as I am, but I just can't stop it.
To be honest, I think I was mostly diagnosed on the strength of my self harm and "risk taking" and "impulsivity", which are a big part of BPD for a lot of people that I know (spending your entire student loan on DVDs, sleeping around, drinking too much, walking home from clubs at 2am etc etc). I think my prime example of this was deciding that I wanted to go to South America and booking flights to Ecuador within 24 hours. The idea that this was completely bonkers didn't even strike me.
So yeah, I hope that helps, apologies that it's turned into an "all about me", but I sometimes think explaining through different people's experiences can be useful.
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Make us all feel wonderful. We'll never forget."
It has been noted that I don't have attachment or relationship difficulties, I have never had problems making and maintaining relationships or with trust issues. Indeed, my inability to fit in the "unstable relationships" box of the DSM for BPD was what stopped them for a long time officially diagnosing me.
I push support away because I view my behaviour as "my mess, so I'll sort it" and to a degree because I am ashamed to be using services when there are many people who need them more that I do. Also, because of the way that my family is, the way I was brought up means that we don't really talk about important things, and we're naturally quite private people.
Really, though, I don't think this thread is the time or the place for a discussion of whether or not you perceive me to have "attachment issues", and I also really don't think it appropriate for you to be essentially diagnosing me (and I use the term loosely, because I can't think of a better word) on a website, based on a single element of a response.
Ballerina123, apologies for sidetracking your thread, but BPD isn't as black and white (oh the irony) as it can seem.
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Make us all feel wonderful. We'll never forget."
Attachment disorder may lead to BPD, but it may not. I think people can only say what it means to them as if you worked it out statistically the different combinations are something like over 200. None of us are exactly the same with it because of this!
It certainly wasn't my intention to 'diagnose' or upset in any way. Simply to convey [in a clumsy way, perhaps, for which I apologise] that there can be more than meets the eye to certain symptoms, and expand concepts of attachment, something I know a lot about, having studied it intellectually and experientially.
I did say 'generally', not all, and I did say that my view was but one perspective.
My therapist once described like a mirror being smashed into lots of pieces. You try piece them back together but they don't always fit right and things become disjointed in my mind. These broken pieces show themselves as emotional issues and dissociation. Therapy was like trying to make sense and order of all te broken bits.
My psychiatrist's explanation of my EUPD was that because of my parents' irregularity of responses to my emotions (ranging from denial to "you're not experiencing [insert emotion], you're just doing this to hurt me!", etc), I didn't learn to regulate my emotional responses as well as non-EUPDs do when they mature from children to adulthood. That's personal to me, though, because he implied that most of my issues stem from my lack of ability to deal with my and others' emotions, whereas others may suffer the other symptoms more strongly.
inability to cope with emotions...fear of abandonment is a symptom. I'm fighting this diagnosis because of the negative reaction it gets from professionals, but I think it is the current "in" diagnosis, in the past couple of years it seemed like everyone was getting diagnosed with bi-polar, it now seems to be shifting to bpd. I think it's a lazy diagnosis that doesn't properly fit a lot of people who have it. it can also feel patient blaming.
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