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. You may feel foggy, spaced out, or as if you're outside your own body.
Paranoia as a Symptom of BPD
Stress-related paranoid ideation is one of nine possible diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder. In one comprehensive study of patients receiving mental health services, 87 percent of participants with BPD reported experiencing the symptoms of paranoid ideation.
Paranoid ideation in BPD is usually triggered by stress. Finding ways to manage stress levels can be an effective way to cope with paranoid thoughts. Some strategies you might try include: Deep breathing: This is a common stress management technique that involves taking slow, deep breaths.
People with BPD may believe that others have hostile intent toward them. They may see signs of this that reinforce this belief all around them. For example, they might believe there are hidden meanings in people's words, gestures, body language, and eye glances.
Of patients with BPD about 20–50% report psychotic symptoms. Hallucinations can be similar to those in patients with psychotic disorders in terms of phenomenology, emotional impact, and their persistence over time.
Recent findings: Both auditory hallucinations and delusional ideation (especially paranoid delusions) are relatively common in individuals with BPD.
Adult patients with BPD experience a wide range of other psychotic symptoms in addition to AVH, including hallucinations (11% visual hallucinations, 8% gustatory hallucinations, 17% olfactory hallucinations, 15% tactile hallucinations [19]), thought insertion (100%), thought blocking (90%), being influenced by another ...
For example, an adolescent with BPD might see two of his friends talking in the hallway and develop the paranoid belief that his friends all secretly hate him and are planning to humiliate him.
Intense outburst of anger. Repeated involvement in risky, impulsive behaviors. Lack of a stable or clear self-image. Intense, often unreasonable fear of being abandoned.
BPD is a very different diagnosis than schizophrenia, though the two can co-exist. While BPD is characterized by a pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships; schizophrenia is characterized by a range of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional dysfunctions.
People with borderline personality disorder have a deep fear of abandonment. They compete for social acceptance, are terrified of rejection and often feel lonely even in the context of an intimate relationship. Therefore, it is more difficult for them to manage the normal ups and downs of a romantic partnership.
Separations, disagreements, and rejections—real or perceived—are the most common triggers for symptoms. 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.
With borderline personality disorder, you have an intense fear of abandonment or instability, and you may have difficulty tolerating being alone. Yet inappropriate anger, impulsiveness and frequent mood swings may push others away, even though you want to have loving and lasting relationships.
BPD Triggers Loneliness and Isolation
Loneliness is a typical issue. It may spring from your fear of being rejected or abandoned. This fear can make you feel lonely, even when you have a partner or loving family. Also typical with borderline personality is co-occurring mental illness.
People with BPD may not have a consistent self-image or sense of self. This may worsen obsessive tendencies, since they may find it difficult to see themselves as real or worthy individually, separate from their relationships.
What are the conditions that may drive a person in their manipulative behavior? In BPD, these conditions are a lack of affective self-understanding, difficulties with regulating one's own emotions, and an impeded interaffectivity that makes it incredibly difficult for the person to feel connected with other people.
BPDs have very complex needs, as well as very complex maladaptive coping strategies — and manipulation is one of them. It can be effective in the short term to get their needs met, but in the long term it destroys the very relationships they so desperately need.
The symptoms of BPD are very broad, and some can be similar to or overlap with other mental health problems, such as: Bipolar disorder. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) Depression.
Often, the borderline person is unaware of how they feel when their feelings surface, so they displace their feelings onto others as causing them. They may not realise that their feelings belong within them, so they think that their partner is responsible for hurting them and causing them to feel this way.
Unstable sense of self, which may involve frequent shifts in goals, values, and career plans. Frequently changing your feelings toward other people. Feeling like you don't exist. Frequent feelings of emptiness or boredom.
There's also a lot of anecdotal evidence from other people's experiences that suggest 2-4 years is more common. So, if you want to know how long your relationships might last if you have BPD, it really does depend on the intensity of your condition.
Hallucinations, Childhood Trauma and Dissociation
Hallucinations in BPD are also associated with posttraumatic stress disorder and a history of childhood trauma, especially emotional abuse,17 but sexual and physical.
Between 50% and 90% of patients with BPD report hearing voices that other people do not hear (Yee et al., 2005; Kingdon et al., 2010). Importantly, such auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a risk factor for suicide plans, attempts, and hospitalization (Miller et al., 1993; Zonnenberg et al., 2016).
Borderline victims can be dangerous. They linger, confined, inside their impetuous and neurotic minds of self-mutilation, perpetual accusations, and malicious manipulations in attempts to pursue unknown cravings.