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.
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.
Signs Your Friend Has BPD
Mood swings with periods of intense depression, irritability, and/or anxiety lasting a few hours to a few days. Impulsiveness. Recurring suicidal threats or self-injurious behavior. Unstable, intense personal relationships with extreme, black-and-white views of people and experiences.
Wide mood swings lasting from a few hours to a few days, which can include intense happiness, irritability, shame or anxiety. Ongoing feelings of emptiness. Inappropriate, intense anger, such as frequently losing your temper, being sarcastic or bitter, or having physical fights.
Having quiet borderline personality disorder (BPD) — aka “high-functioning” BPD — means that you often direct thoughts and feelings inward rather than outward. As a result, you may experience the intense, turbulent thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize BPD, but you try to hide them from others.
According to the DSM-5, BPD can be diagnosed as early as at 12 years old if symptoms persist for at least one year. However, most diagnoses are made during late adolescence or early adulthood.
Most personality disorders begin in the teen years when your personality further develops and matures. As a result, almost all people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder are above the age of 18. Although anyone can develop BPD, it's more common if you have a family history of BPD.
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.
When a person has BPD, they often experience periods of intense feelings of anger, anxiety, or depression that can last for a few hours or a few days. The mood swings experienced by people with BPD can lead to issues with impulsive behavior and can contribute to relationship problems.
Someone with BPD may go to great lengths to feel something, as well as becoming increasingly withdrawn and avoidant during an episode. Paranoid thoughts of everyone being out to get them and hating them are also common during these times. Episodes can also be extreme highs, bursts of euphoria and positive emotions.
Fact: People with BPD are capable of giving and receiving love. People with BPD have a lot of difficulty in relationships, but that doesn't mean they're incapable of love.
Many people still believe that those living with it can be manipulative or dangerous due to their symptoms. While this can be the case in a very small minority of people, most people with BPD are just struggling with their sense of self and their relationships. It's important to note that we're not dangerous people.
People with BPD can act overly needy. If you take them out of their comfort zone, or when they feel “abandoned” they can become a burden.
Relationship difficulties
People with BPD often have patterns of intense or unstable relationships. This may involve a shift from extreme adoration to extreme dislike, known as a shift from idealization to devaluation. Relationships may be marked by attempts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
Explains borderline personality disorder (BPD), also known as emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD). Includes what it feels like, causes, treatment, support and self-care, as well as tips for friends and family.
Case studies and clinical experience suggest that features of BPD can be exacerbated in old age due to contextual changes, even causing a growing prevalence of BPD in residential care and psychiatric facilities for the elderly [55,56,57,58].
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.
People with BPD tend to experience intense emotions. In theory, “quiet BPD” describes when these significant feelings are directed toward yourself without letting others see them. Some of the emotions associated with BPD include: anger or rage. anxiety.
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.
Borderline personality disorder is characterized by loneliness, social isolation, a fear of abandonment, poor social and communication skills, and unstable, difficult interpersonal relationships. The loneliness of living with this condition can be extremely painful, but treatments can be effective.
If left untreated, the person suffering from BPD may find themselves involved with extravagant spending, substance abuse, binge eating, reckless driving, and indiscriminate sex, Hooper says. The reckless behavior is usually linked to the poor self-image many BPD patients struggle with.