Borderline Personality Disorder

walking on eggshells

trauma and recovery (one theory of BPD is that it is a form of PTSD)

Hi OP,

Best of luck sorting this one out.

Mental Illness is super tough. You can't really understand it unless you've experienced it yourself.

And mine really hurt my relationship with my family and has wreaked havoc on my life.

Unfortunately I don't have any good resources for you, (hard to find quality help, mental health is the "ghetto of medicine")

I just wanted to say good luck, and suggest DBT Dialectical Behavioural therapy as that can be pretty helpful. Maybe if you look into that yourself it can give you more insight into your daughters condition.

ze guy wrote:

I just wanted to say good luck, and suggest DBT Dialectical Behavioural therapy as that can be pretty helpful. Maybe if you look into that yourself it can give you more insight into your daughters condition.

This is what I was going to suggest. DBT is the most effective treatment for this.

Borderline Personality Disorder is not an actual mental illness although the distinction has been almost completely blurred.. It's an Axis II diagnosis which is used for, well, personality disorders, i.e., "flaws" in the development of personality as opposed to something malfunctioning in the brain's biochemistry. There are implications for treatment (because there is theoretically nothing wrong with brain function there was once an idea that it was inappropriate to prescribe psychoactive drugs though I imagine that's no longer the case) and insurance reimbursement (insurances used to refuse to pay for treatment of personality disorders as they weren't considered illnesses so we were always required to give personality disordered patients an Axis I diagnosis (a mental illness) whether we thought the patient had one or not in order to qualify for insurance reimbursement.

You might want to check the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual, it must be online now but a library would have it if not. There are quite a few personality disorders. The best definition I ever heard of personality disorders is that they're what happens when a person overuses one particular type of coping mechanism, e.g. attachment, anger, self involvement, etc. All of these are things we normally do but not excessively and in balance with other coping mechanisms. The overuse of one sort of behavior is what makes the condition pathological.

A real hallmark of someone diagnosed with BPD is a nearly desperate desire for closeness while simultaneously being threatened and frightened of having them. That creates a constant pattern of behaviors which draw people close and then doing things that push them away. They'll develop other problems, substance abuse is pretty common, so is suicidal gesturing. They're manipulative in tying to pull this off and generally makes them one of the least liked population among mental health professionals and honestly, I've seen lots of people assign that diagnosis to patients they don't like and find difficult. I generally refused to use it because it was generally prejudicial to the patient as they passed through other parts of the mental health system My guess is that your daughter did not make a good impression on whomever evaluated her. I never thought the mental health system did much for those people that was useful, maybe because most of them were in treatment because someone else thought they needed to be and they thought everyone else was the problem. And frequently they are at least partly correct.

Having had a BPD family member myself, I'd cut all ties as quickly as possible. Tough to do, but you'll be better off in the long run.

"

A real hallmark of someone diagnosed with BPD is a nearly desperate desire for closeness while simultaneously being threatened and frightened of having them"

Should say "...desperate desire for CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS while desperately..."

Kate Van Buskirk is very open about her BPD. You may be able to find articles where she has shared her experience.

Do a search on here, I remember there being a very excellent (and lengthy) discussion on this topic on LR a few years back.

cap wrote:

Hi - so, this is an odd place to post for help but it is the only message board that I frequent and you guys seem to know a lot about many things so, here goes.

My daughter was diagnosed with BPD two years and her and our lives have been sh*t for quite some time - mostly because I can't wrap my head around what she is going through.

Do any of you know and books or other resources that I can read or access so that I can begin to understand things? My background is in accounting so things that aren't overly medical would be preferred.

Thanks in advance.

I am a frequent let's run visitor and a therapist. I value this board a ton and I want to try and add to this. Most therapists are turned off by BPD becuase unfortunately the patients just don't really respond much to treatment. I don't want tone a jerk but I want to be honest and up front about it. I don't want to start some insane debate on here but if it weren't you daughter I would tell you to just distance yourself from that person as soon as possible. I was just having a drink with a friend of mine who is a surgeon and we were talking about someone who has BPD and he made the remark "are you kidding all my friends who are psch/therapist loathe patients w BPD. It's essentially untreatable." I for the most part agree. I have seen some absolutely horrid behavior from people with BPD. It's a mess.

Imagine being in a relationship with someone who is boring. With BPDs you won't have that problem. It's always exciting.

Psych/therapists are fixing problems for money. They would probably like to resolve the underlying source of conflict, etc. But maybe they can't.

A calm and caring person can live with someone exhibiting all the signs of what is labelled as BPD.

fred wrote:

Imagine being in a relationship with someone who is boring. With BPDs you won't have that problem. It's always exciting.

Psych/therapists are fixing problems for money. They would probably like to resolve the underlying source of conflict, etc. But maybe they can't.

A calm and caring person can live with someone exhibiting all the signs of what is labelled as BPD.

The problem with your last sentence is that people carrying that diagnosis rarely present themselves for treatment. They're almost always referred by school counselors, courts, even calm and caring people who live with them. "I Am a Therapist" has pretty much nailed it. It's a difficult condition to treat and most professionals would rather not. That's based on many years of being in staff meetings where new patients are being assigned and watching everyone dive for cover when one of them with a BPD diagnosis turns up.

fred wrote:

Imagine being in a relationship with someone who is boring. With BPDs you won't have that problem. It's always exciting.

Psych/therapists are fixing problems for money. They would probably like to resolve the underlying source of conflict, etc. But maybe they can't.

A calm and caring person can live with someone exhibiting all the signs of what is labelled as BPD.

Ok lemme give you one example of what a guy with BPD did and please tell me how nice this would be to live with.

Firstly he convinced himself that adderall was the answer to his BPD problems so he would get it from a friend of his and be jacked up on adderall all the time.

He kidnapped one of his children becuase he hooght that his baby's mother was going to leave him.

In a separate incident when his baby's mom didn't want to be with him but they were hooking up on and off. He found out that she was going on vacation with a guy she was dating. When he found this out and felt he was being rejected, he decided to take a video that he had of her performing a sex act on him and he sent the video to his own mother, her mother, his bother and sister and her therapist becuase he wanted to "prove" to them that they were still hooking up and that was his "evidence". He also smoked crack that night and sent his baby's mother naked pictures of every girl he had slept with that year and a list of their names.

Yes, any calm and caring person can live with that. No problem at all.

fred wrote:

Imagine being in a relationship with someone who is boring. With BPDs you won't have that problem. It's always exciting.

Psych/therapists are fixing problems for money. They would probably like to resolve the underlying source of conflict, etc. But maybe they can't.

A calm and caring person can live with someone exhibiting all the signs of what is labelled as BPD.

Delusional you are

His baby momma seems like she didn't mind.

I dated a person with BPD for over three years. It was the worst three years of my life. She had me arrested twice (I was subsequently released without charge), she was arrested twice for assault, two DWIs in that time span, struck me on several occasions, abused drugs and alcohol daily, attempted suicide three times in this time, cut herself, ran through jobs, and had problems with bulimia/anorexia as well. Near the end of our relationship, she found out she had Hepatitis C. About six months after we finally broke up in the therapist's office, she died of a heroin overdose.

I don't know if people with BPD are treatable or not, but I never saw any change or growth in her whatsoever. Distance yourself if you can. I found the book "I Hate You, Don't Leave Me" illuminating.

Sounds pretty standard for BPD.

Stagger Lee wrote:

I found the book "I Hate You, Don't Leave Me" illuminating.

That was the first book that came to my mind, but it's been in print for a long time. (Perhaps there have been updated editions over the years.) In any event, I would think that there might be a number of fairly recent books on BPD. I'd check on amazon.com.

Although it's the diagnostic bible of the psychiatric profession, I doubt that you'll find the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) to be very useful, except to the extent that it provides a list of symptoms that are characteristic of the disorder and an estimate of its prevalence within male and female cohorts. What you likely need are resources that discuss how to deal with the disorder. I would expect that a number of support groups exist; it's not an especially uncommon disorder.

cap wrote:

Hi - so, this is an odd place to post for help but it is the only message board that I frequent and you guys seem to know a lot about many things so, here goes.

9/10 you really fooled a lot of well-meaning idiots.

There is no objective way to define a personality "flaw." Psychology is a pseudoscience whose driving force is the manufacture and sale of pharmaceuticals and therapeutic services. It so blatantly fabricates demand for these products and services that today a huge fraction, if not a majority, of the population could be "diagnosed" with a disorder of some kind.

I'll probably get tons of angry or condescending replies by offended people, on the grounds that this is a mean answer or whatever. I will point out in advance to them that if you were serious, you would - and should - have taken the few minutes necessary to find a nicer forum sometime within the past two years. You also probably wouldn't name yourself after one of track's freakiest people.

I'd probably agree with you more than I'd disagree. But I'll also point out that nearly all professions and businesses fabricate demand for their products and services. How many people now buy a new TV only when their old one doesn't work anymore?

That said, many people do the sorts of things that manage to land them a psychiatric diagnosis including BPD. If you live with or are close to someone who acquired that label you have to deal with those sorts of behaviors and probably with people who treat the person who's gotten the label. The day when we only discussed running here has long passed and I think the OP has gotten some reasonable responses but yes, s/he should expand the search and find some specialized sites.