You may spend a lot of time feeling angry at yourself. Feeling suspicious or out of touch with reality. People with BPD often struggle with paranoia or suspicious thoughts about others' motives. When under stress, you may even lose touch with reality—an experience known as dissociation.
Feeling Out of Touch With Reality
Many diagnosed with BPD feel suspicious about events in their lives. They struggle with feelings of suspicion and paranoia about the intentions of people around them.
People with borderline personality disorders are aware of their behaviors and the consequences of them and often act in increasingly erratic ways as a self-fulfilling prophecy to their abandonment fears.
Physical touch can be interpreted as a sign of intimacy and closeness. For someone with BPD, who struggles with a fear of abandonment, touch might stir up feelings of vulnerability and fear, leading to avoiding physical contact.
In BPD, stress-related dissociation is a core symptom, closely linked to other features of the disorder [1, 49]. Up to 80% of patients with BPD report transient dissociative symptoms, such as derealization, depersonalization, numbing, and analgesia [1, 50].
Known to a few mental health professionals, emotional detachment is a common core feature of quiet BPD. Instead of feeling everything intensely, they may feel nothing, as if living in a world devoid of color and feeling (though many also find themselves rapidly flipping between the two states).
Your family member or loved one with BPD may be extremely sensitive, so small things can often trigger intense reactions. Once upset, borderline people are often unable to think straight or calm themselves in a healthy way. They may say hurtful things or act out in dangerous or inappropriate ways.
Borderline personality disorder is one of the most painful mental illnesses since individuals struggling with this disorder are constantly trying to cope with volatile and overwhelming emotions.
Relationships & Borderline Personality Disorder
“We also have intense and sudden mood changes, and we have severe difficulty regulating our emotions. Unintentionally, we tend to blame others when we make a mistake, which causes us to be manipulative and cruel to those we care about.”
The actions of people who have BPD can indeed feel manipulative. However, the word 'manipulative', with its pejorative suggestions of malicious scheming, does not capture the true nature of BPD-spurred behavior.
Some ways that a person with BPD thinks include having paranoid ideation, dichotomous thinking, and dissociation. If you believe that you might be experiencing thinking associated with BPD, talk to your doctor. They can evaluate your symptoms and refer you to a mental health professional.
The Victim
Individuals with BPD often feel helpless, hopeless, powerless, and ashamed. When in this state of mind, they may adopt a passive role and draw in others to make decisions for them and support them.
They are also not uncaring people. They do care about family and friends but find it difficult not to act selfishly when experiencing their own heightened emotions.
Romantic fantasization is a common feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD). The unpredictable emotional state associated with borderline personality disorder can cause confusing fluctuations in how borderlines view their romantic partners.
This lack of self-acceptance may also lead to feelings of self-hatred. Individuals with BPD who are unable to accept themselves may be particularly at risk for self-injury or even suicide attempts. It's also common for people with BPD who have a harder time accepting themselves to feel isolated or lonely.
These changing feelings can lead to unstable relationships and emotional pain. People with borderline personality disorder also tend to view things in extremes, such as all good or all bad. Their interests and values can change quickly, and they may act impulsively or recklessly.
While not one of the nine criteria for a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD), selfishness can be a symptom of the disease. Selfishness interferes with healthy relationships, worsens risky behavior and worsens addiction--all symptoms of BPD. How do we know when we're being selfish?
It is important to remember that while having a relationship with a person with BPD can be challenging, they are not intentionally trying to hurt you. Rather, they lack the ability to understand and cope with their emotional pain, which causes them to act in ways that hurt others.
Is narcissism a symptom of BPD? Narcissism is not a symptom of BPD listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). However, as many as 40% of people with BPD may also have narcissistic personality disorder,4 so people with BPD may also show signs of narcissism.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is one of the most damaging mental illnesses. By itself, this severe mental illness accounts for up to 10 percent of patients in psychiatric care and 20 percent of those who have to be hospitalized.
Dating someone with borderline personality disorder can be challenging. Your partner may have major difficulties with strong emotions, drastic mood swings, chronic fear of abandonment, and impulsive behaviors that can strain your relationship with chaos and instability.
A person with BPD typically has an unstable self-identity. Sometimes, lies help them bridge the gap between their true identity and the one they've adopted for the time being.
Instead of being honest and calmly expressing their needs, they turn to “manipulation” tactics like self-victimizing, blaming others, picking fights, making threats, etc. For instance, instead of saying “I've been feeling anxious.
Many people feel that their loved ones or relatives with symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) don't care how they feel because it is often not present in their behavior. This is because one frequent feature of those who experience symptoms of BPD is very weak empathy.
Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPDs) become overwhelmed and incapacitated by the intensity of their emotions, whether it is joy and elation or depression, anxiety, and rage. They are unable to manage these intense emotions.