People with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) often have a difficult time maintaining friendships because of their tumultuous personalities. But these friendships can offer a source of stability in the midst of emotional turmoil.
It can be challenging to make and keep friends if you live with any mental illness. If you have borderline personality disorder (BPD), your unpredictable behaviors, tumultuous emotions, and fear of abandonment can drive others away. However, managing your BPD symptoms can help you to stabilize your friendships.
BPD splitting destroys relationships because the behaviour can be impulsive or reckless in order to alleviate the pain, often hurting loved ones in the process. It can feel like everyone abandons or hurts them, often causing them to look for evidence, and creating problems from nothing.
For instance, a person with BPD is not trying to be manipulative; they are scared of being left or abandoned. 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.
People with BPD feel firmly attached to their favorite person and may depend on them for comfort, reassurance, and guidance. In many cases, someone with BPD may rely entirely on their favorite person. As a result, they may idealize them and expect them to always be available.
Passionate and emotional – When a person with BPD loves, the love is deep, highly committed and loyal to the relationship. Even though there may be struggles with attachment and fears of abandonment, these are ultimately manifestations of love.
Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) often has trouble maintaining friendships. They tend to search for emotional caregivers and have difficulty grasping the idea of friendship. In any sort of friendship, they have unreasonable expectations for attention, validation, and compassion.
People with BPD are extremely sensitive to their own, and others' emotions and feelings. This makes them incredibly compassionate and empathetic as they really can feel what someone else is going through. As such they make great listeners and tend to be the kind of people you want around after a bad day.
Yes, those living with BPD often experience heightened emotions and fears of abandonment, but that certainly doesn't make them unlovable, let alone monstrous. A relationship with someone who lives with BPD is just like any other; it depends on many of the same factors such as trust, understanding and communication.
A friendship with someone who has borderline personality disorder (BPD) is not always easy. There may be times when your friend feels totally hopeless or out of control, causing you to feel helpless as well. Although BPD has no cure, people with BPD can get better with the right treatment and support.
While relationships can be challenging when one or both partners have BPD, healthy bonds are still possible. Learning more about the condition and seeking professional support can be helpful steps.
Training Professionals about BPD
A key characteristic of high-conflict people (HCPs) is that they have a target of blame, who they focus all of their frustrations and anger on, so that their conflicts often remain stuck or get worse and become obviously high-conflict.
A person with BPD is highly sensitive to abandonment and being alone, which brings about intense feelings of anger, fear, suicidal thoughts and self-harm, and very impulsive decisions.
Research from 2017 points out that feelings of loneliness are common in people with BPD. Many people with BPD have a strong desire to be close to others. However, fear of abandonment or a skewed sense of self may cause them to act impulsively or aggressively in an effort to keep loved ones close to them.
Individuals with borderline personality disorder often experience intense and overwhelming emotions that they struggle to regulate. As a result, they may exhibit extreme behaviors, such as lashing out in anger toward others or withdrawing from others, in an attempt to cope with their emotions.
Research indicates that BPD is linked to above-average intelligence (IQ > 130) and exceptional artistic talent (Carver, 1997). Because your partner with BPD may be exceptionally bright, they digest information and discover answers to problems more quickly than the average person.
This clinical study of 23 borderline outpatients and 38 outpatients with other personality disorders provides evidence that individuals who become borderline frequently have a special talent or gift, namely a potential to be unusually perceptive about the feelings of others.
We compared the results of thirty clinically diagnosed BPD patients to a matched sample of healthy participants. Our results show that the BPD group's selfishness expectations significantly outweigh the expectations of selfishness in the HC group (U = 269, p = 0.007).
Anyone living with BPD can still lead satisfying lives and take pleasure in long-term relationships and even life partnerships. With the proper treatment and support, people with BPD can and do have healthy and happy relationships.
Favorite person in the borderline personality disorder community. FP has a unique meaning in the BPD community. A FP is a person who someone with BPD relies heavily on for emotional support, seeks attention and validation from, and looks up to or idealizes.
But there is another quality displayed by many borderline individuals that is often left out of the diagnostic picture: individuals with borderline personality disorders can also love intensely, although somewhat erratically and egocentrically.
Superpower of Borderline Personality #1: Resilience.
Regardless, you've had very challenging experiences that other people may not have had. You have been to the darkest points in your life, and you may go back there frequently. You've had challenges and experiences that not many people around you can identify with.