Coworkers with Borderline Personality Disorder are often easy to spot. They are the coworkers who are constantly battling with someone in the workplace or they are constantly unloading their anxiety on you or others about office drama or their stressful personal lives.
Due to the emotional reactivity of BPD, individuals with the disorder can create divisions in the workplace through their tendency to see people as all-good or all-bad as a coping strategy to avoid being abandoned or rejected.
People with borderline personality disorder may experience intense mood swings and feel uncertainty about how they see themselves. Their feelings for others can change quickly, and swing from extreme closeness to extreme dislike. These changing feelings can lead to unstable relationships and emotional pain.
Because of a poorly-developed self-image and an inability to recognize the emotions that others feel, people with BPD often struggle to maintain friendships. Whereas they may make friends easily, the duration of the friendship proves challenging. This has a lot to do with how BPD sufferers perceive relationships.
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.
Empathy and compassion – People with BPD experience greater internal and external turmoil. However, this in turn allows for the ability to recognise and have greater insight for others in similar situations.
“People with BPD lie often, but it is not because they are pathological liars,” says Nikki Instone, Ph. D. “Lying is not a symptom of the disorder so much as a consequence of their internal battle.” Lying is really rooted in emotional dysregulation, which is one of the main symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder.
For some people, their BPD symptoms can lead to challenges in the workplace. Some examples of challenges a person living with BPD might experience at work include: A person who thinks in an all-or-nothing way may find themselves loving their job in the beginning and feeling like quitting later on.
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.
High-Functioning BPD Symptoms
Those experiencing high-functioning BPD often alternate between pushing people away and pulling them in closer, and may similarly fall into patterns of idealizing and then devaluing others. They tend to exhibit quick switches in emotions, such as going from very happy to very irritated.
Relationships. Relationships are one of the most common triggers for people with BPD. People with the disorder tend to experience a higher than usual sensitivity to being abandoned by their loved ones. This leads to feelings of intense fear and anger.
People with BPD score low on cognitive empathy but high on emotional empathy. This suggests that they do not easily understand other peoples' perspectives, but their own emotions are very sensitive. This is important because it could align BPD with other neurodiverse conditions.
Things like “splitting,” experiencing intense emotions or mood swings and dissociation are mainstays for many folks with BPD — but they aren't the only ways it can manifest. Sometimes BPD can make people do things that are often described (and misunderstood) as being “impolite.”
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.
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.
Show confidence and respect.
It is important that support people approach the relationship in a way that promotes trust and respect, which can be helpful and healing to a person with BPD. Although you may feel you know what is best, provide the person with BPD the opportunity to make decisions for themselves.
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.
Often, the person with BPD will react towards loved ones as if they were the abusers from their past, and take out vengeance and anger towards them. When the person with BPD feels abandoned, they can become abusive or controlling as a way to defend against feelings of abandonment or feeling unworthy.