Keep a mood diary
Or notice early signs when they're beginning to happen. Try noting down difficult thoughts or feelings. This might help get them out of your head and make them feel less overwhelming. You can then reflect on them when you feel calmer or talk about them with someone you trust.
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.
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.
Remind Them of Their Positive Traits
Someone with BPD may struggle to form and maintain a positive self-image, especially if they struggle with the difficult aspects and stigma of BPD. You can support them by reminding them of their strengths and expressing your positive feelings for them.
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.
Learning how to support someone diagnosed with BPD will require the acknowledgment that boundaries need to remain firm. Setting boundaries create a set of rules that can help confrontations or arguments dissolve more quickly.
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. They can evaluate your symptoms and refer you to a mental health professional.
Anger in people with BPD may represent one side of their feelings which can rapidly reverse so keeping this point in mind can help avoid taking the anger personally. Sit with them through it and remind them their feelings are valid and you are there to support them.
Fears like “Will my husband abandon me?” or “Do my friends actually like me, or do they just tolerate me?” can plague people with BPD to the point that it disrupts daily functioning. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone.
Because of their overall pessimistic demeanor, they can easily feel slighted and may express this aggressively or hold it in and build resentment. Those with this type of BPD tend to view people in “black and white” terms (known as BPD splitting), so they are likely to hold onto a grudge after feeling insulted.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.