Borderline personality disorder

The affected person may experience the symptoms of borderline personality disorder to varying degrees.

Here are the most common symptoms:

• • fear of abandonment and rejection by others;
  • difficulty coping with loneliness;
  • low self-esteem or shifting self-perception: for example, the person may at one moment think of himself or herself as extraordinary and exceptional and then right afterwards feel worthless and incompetent;
  • permanent feelings of great inner emptiness : for example, the person says he or she has no feelings, thoughts or dreams;
  • boredom;
  • high sensitivity to negative criticism from others;
  • loss of contact with reality in certain circumstances, especially in extremely stressful situations.

Symptoms are wide-ranging and can range up to psychosis.

The characteristics of borderline personality disorder are expressed in four spheres:

• Interpersonal relationships

  Interpersonal relationships are usually unstable and intense. They may be characterized by alternating excessive idealization and devaluation. The person with borderline personality disorder has difficulty with loneliness and makes frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.

  Emotions

  Interpersonal relationships are usually unstable and intense. They may be characterized by alternating excessive idealization and devaluation. The person with borderline personality disorder has difficulty with loneliness and makes frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.

  Identity

  Marked and persistent identity disturbance is almost always present. It is often diffuse and characterized by uncertainty about several fundamental issues such as self-image, sexual orientation, career choices, choice of friends, or adoption of a value system.

  Impulsivity

  The affected individual tends to be impulsive, particularly in activities involving potential danger to self, such as: reckless shopping, drug or alcohol abuse, unsafe driving.

  Repeated suicidal or self-injurious threats, gestures, or behaviors are common in the most severe forms of the disorder. These behaviors may result from intense anger or be a reaction to apathy* and may be perceived as manipulative. It is important to remember that these behaviors are directly related to significant emotional suffering.

Borderline personality disorder does not have a single cause. It is often a combination of several factors that lead to the development of the disorder.

Some of these factors include:

• distressing childhood experiences: for example, neglect, physical, psychological, or sexual abuse;
• separations or bereavements that occurred at a young age;
• severe attachment problems that may result, for example, from a lack of continuity in the feelings of comfort and security provided by parents during childhood;
• heredity, i.e., the fact that others in the family have or have had borderline personality disorder;
• an impulsive temperament;
• high emotional sensitivity, present since birth;
• living in an unstable family environment and having greater difficulty adjusting to that environment.

The life of the person with borderline personality disorder may be punctuated by several hospitalizations, due to the frequency of self-destructive behaviors, which, however, tend to diminish as the years pass. Acceptance and the will to find an adequate way of functioning is an important factor in well-being. Without therapy, this disorder can give way to other problems such as alcoholism, depression or even suicide. Behavioral psychotherapy is effective.

Psychotherapy is a good way to reduce anxiety.

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