Borderline personality disorder (BPD), also known as emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD), is the most commonly diagnosed personality disorder in clinical practice. BPD is a mental health condition typically characterised by abandonment anxiety, severe emotional lability (mood swings) and emotion dysregulation. Symptoms also include impulsivity, psychological splitting (rapid love-to-hate and vice versa), anger, paranoid jealousy, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and a series of unstable relationships.

Speaking from experience, your internal world spirals out of control and, without the psychological tools to handle it, you’re left at its mercy. Indeed, being caught in the emotional storm that BPD is infamous for is nothing short of torturous. Many friendships, relationships, and jobs were ruined as a direct result of being entangled in the poisonous stream of thoughts my mind generated about my partners, friends, and myself. Alongside these thoughts, an accompanying tsunami, precipitated by emotional machinery, produced intense emotionality that likewise consumed me in seemingly uncontrollable waves of abject misery. Once my emotional switch was activated, self-injurious chaos ensued.

Does any of this sound familiar? You, too, may be all too familiar with a mind that, when caught up in its sticky web, catapults you into desperate, fiery anguish. You may feel hypersensitive, particularly to rejection, primed to detect even the minutest changes in body language, facial expressions, and vocal intonation signalling potential abandonment or betrayal. Your mind rapidly sounds the alarm on any anomaly - real or imagined. Your partner or friend doesn’t text you back, for example, and, on cue, your mind emphatically tells you they despise you and are most certainly going to leave you; it’s just a matter of when and how.

Ensnared by your mind and its stories of relational catastrophe, wholesale buying into its content, you become petrified, defensive, argumentative, reactive, and say and do things that fill you with mountainous waves of regret, all to desperately protect yourself from the unspeakable pain of abandonment. It’s a vicious, agonising cycle of trying to control, eliminate, or modulate our feelings, and without emotional regulation skills, it escalates into a perfect storm of immiseration—rinse and repeat.

However, as much as it feels hopeless, and as much as you may be filled with a seemingly boundless sense of emptiness, BPD is a treatable mental health condition. Indeed, most people, through psychotherapeutic treatment, go into remission, no longer meeting the diagnostic criteria to warrant a BPD diagnosis after a year or so of sustained therapy, whether that be Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) or Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT).

If you suspect you may have BPD, or have been diagnosed by a psychiatrist, please know that help is available. Specifically, ACT, a form of CBT, in combination with person-centred counselling, will help you understand your mind’s core beliefs, triggers, emotions and behaviours in context, and formulate a strategy to build self-efficacy and mastery, and introduce a collection of empirically verified tools to create a life based not on your mind or your emotions, but on your chosen values.

Get in touch today to arrange a free thirty-minute consultation via email, contact form or telephone.