People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) tend to have major difficulties with relationships, especially with those closest to them. Their wild mood swings, angry outbursts, chronic abandonment fears, and impulsive and irrational behaviors can leave loved ones feeling helpless, abused, and off balance.
How can it affect relationships? People with borderline personality disorder often find it difficult to trust other people . This, along with their fear of abandonment and tendency to idealize or devalue relationships, may make it difficult to ensure that this condition does not negatively impact relationships.
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.
What is the effect of BPD on family members? Family members often feel mystified and exhausted by their relative's illness. The intense mood swings and anger outbursts can be frightening and disruptive. Impulsive acting out in areas such as spending, substance abuse, or sex can be a major source of marital conflict.
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.
Studies of BPD in families show that as a child of someone with BPD, you are also much more likely to be diagnosed with it at some point in your life. However, having a parent with BPD certainly does not mean you will have the same dysfunctional traits.
Their wild mood swings, angry outbursts, chronic abandonment fears, and impulsive and irrational behaviors can leave loved ones feeling helpless, abused, and off balance. Partners and family members of people with BPD often describe the relationship as an emotional roller coaster with no end in sight.
Family members may be quick to deny or argue the feelings experienced the person with BPD. If these feelings are ignored, the individual may resort to self-destructive ways to express their emotions.
BPD in particular is one of the lesser-known mental illnesses, but all the same it is one of the hardest to reckon with. (Some people dislike the term so much they prefer to refer to emotionally unstable personality disorder.)
For a person with BPD there are significant fears of abandonment and they will attach to a favourite person and rely on this person for emotional validation and security. Their favourite person becomes the source of their comfort and devotion.
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.
Intense episodic irritability or anxiety lasting a few hours or more than a few days). Recurring feelings of emptiness. Frequent intense, inappropriate anger or issues controlling temper. Severe dissociative symptoms or stress-related paranoia.
However, they also have a "bias" towards negative emotional expressions, meaning that they are more sensitive and alert to negative feelings in others. Perhaps due to these propensities, they are also more likely to experience "empathic distress" (Chikovani, Babuadze, Tamar Gvalia, Surguladze, 2015).
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.
An “FP” (or Favorite Person) is a person who someone with mental illness relies on for support, and often looks up to or idolizes. Common with borderline personality disorder (BPD), it's often that someone has a minimum of one FP, but a person can have many.
Push/Pull behaviors
A common theory about why you might use this behavior if you have BPD is because you desperately crave closeness in your relationships but, fearing abandonment, you choose to reject this person before they can reject you.
Some potential causes of quiet BPD may be the result of: Family history of various personality disorders. History of other mental health conditions (anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, substance abuse, depression, etc.) History of neglect, abuse, trauma, or abandonment in childhood.
One relatively neglected explanation for the overblown rage so common in borderline personality disorders (BPD) relates to their unresolved trust issues. More often than not they were taught, however unintentionally, by their parents' unreliability, neglect, and criticism, not to trust them.
In addition to engaging in reckless or impulsive sex, there is evidence that people with BPD are more prone to promiscuity. 2 This differs from impulsive sex in that promiscuity is the act of intentionally having multiple sexual partners (rather than having casual sex on a whim).
The Hermit: Hermits feel constantly betrayed by others and take criticism as a condemnation of who they are. They are constantly criticizing others to mask their own inner shame. They may socially isolate to quell their own fears and paranoia.
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.