What is a borderline personality disorder?
The truth behind the most misinterpreted mental illness of all the time.
Despite being more prevalent than schizophrenia and bipolar disorder fused, borderline personality disorder remains one of the least recognized and most stigmatized mental illnesses.
An estimated 2% of the population has BPD, a variety of personality disorder that is portrayed by intense and fluctuating interpersonal relationships, inadequately controlled emotions, self-destructive impulsivity, and fissiparous self-image. People with BPD often suppress an intense fear of being ostracized by the ones they love, suffer from lingering feelings of desolation, engage in suicidal behavior or threats, and have complexity controlling anger.
BPD emerges when one of these emotionally vulnerable people is defied with an environment that doesn’t validate their emotions — that is, recognize them, make them feel recognized, and help them handle them. In many cases, kids who develop BPD have been mistreated or undervalued. But the dysfunction can also come about in children whose loving, well-meaning parents depreciate their spontaneous reactions because they seem unrealistic or unsuitable.
Many complex things are happening in the BPD brain, and researchers are still disentangling what it all means. But in reality, if we have BPD, our mind is on high alarm. Things feel more scary and stressful to us than they do to other people. Our fight-or-flight switch is readily tripped, and once it’s on, it seizes our conscious brain, triggering fierce survival impulses that aren’t always relevant to the circumstances at hand.
“Walking on eggshells” is a general expression people use to describe what it’s like being around a loved one with BPD. Their sensations experience rapid transformations that they have hassle controlling, and a harmless comment can seldom spark an angry eruption. What they’re feeling can be so intense that “some borderlines feel that they will literally blast if they cannot in some way release this anxiety.”
Their fractionable sentiments, like all BPD symptoms, are a consequence of a psychiatric illness that arises from neurological asymmetries and environmental factors. People with BPD seem to have been born with a hyperreactive panic system, or their fear system became hyperreactive in rejoinder to early fear-provoking trauma or both. This could describe any of the spontaneous outbursts that seem unbalanced to the inducement.
Despite the barriers and difficulties, overcoming BPD is achievable, even likely, based on the statistics. The patient has to discern, though, that even with pills, restoration is a tough process that needs stubborn work and transformation.