Do not cross boundaries and try to document everything. It can be a challenge interacting with individuals with BPD so it is essential to set limits clearly and stress proper workplace conduct, remind about completing assigned tasks and take consideration of coworker's feelings.
A person's BPD symptoms may affect their concentration and focus at work, making it hard to keep up with deadlines. Stressful situations at work or not having enough time to attend therapy may make a person's symptoms worse.
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.
Common triggers of BPD rage can include: Emotionally challenging situations that seem threatening. Situations where the person fears abandonment. BPD splitting, which is a type of black-and-white thinking where people see things as either all-good or all-bad.
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.
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.
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.
Provide distractions. Sometimes helping to distract someone from difficult feelings can be really useful. Try suggesting activities or tasks, such as watching a film or tidying up. Or you could start something and let them know they're welcome to join in when they feel ready.
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.
Some employees with BPD may spread gossip in order to play coworkers against each other. Some may unload their stress and drama onto coworkers. Coworkers may feel that they are walking on eggshells and productivity may suffer. Individuals with BPD may have a history of job changes.
Fear of Patients Lashing Out. Individuals with symptoms of BPD are particularly sensitive to perceived criticism. This increases the likelihood that they will feel attacked when a therapist attempts to offer suggestions or insights. This often leads to lashing out.
People with BPD need validation and acknowledgement of the pain they're struggling with. Listen to the emotion your loved one is trying to communicate without getting bogged down in attempting to reconcile the words being used. Try to make the person with BPD feel heard.
People with BPD are often affected by several types of distorted thinking. 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.
Those with BPD may form a strong, irrational opinion that characterizes people, places, things, or situations as all good or all bad. Splitting can lead to intense emotional swings, amplifying conflicts, and straining relationships. Find a supportive therapist that can help with BPD.
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.”
They have anger outbursts and become particularly volatile. More often than not, they're not intentionally manipulating others — hence the quotation marks. Although their actions appear malicious, they're just trying to get their needs met.
Negative thought spirals
Once someone with BPD becomes angry, letting go of their rage can be challenging. After exposure to BPD rage triggers, they tend to fixate on the situation or event that upset them, replaying these thoughts repeatedly. Ruminating on negative emotions can increase aggression.
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.
If you are feeling perpetually anxious or depressed as a result of caring for your loved one with BPD, you might find it impossible to continue living in those circumstances. Caring for your loved one while maintaining the responsibilities of work, home, and family can erode your own mental well-being.
People with BPD fear abandonment and have trouble maintaining relationships. Nevertheless, they tend to lie, which ruins trust and intimacy, fosters resentment, and harms the very relationships they fear losing.
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.
The ability to feel and express intense passion for a person, art, literature, music, sports, food, dance and other areas of interest comes naturally to a person with BPD. In fact, they know no other way of living other than to engage fully in their craft.