How to live with a family member with borderline personality disorder?

How does BPD affect family members?

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.

What it's like living with someone who has borderline personality disorder?

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.

How do you make someone with BPD feel loved?

What is the best way to deal with someone who has borderline personality disorder?

Support Your Partner's Treatment

“Trying to get them into a DBT program is very helpful,” Lobel says, because it teaches people with BPD healthier ways to respond and interact. You'll want to find a therapist who's has experience working with DBT and with people who have borderline personality disorder.

3 Ways the Family Affects Borderline Personality Disorder (& Vice Versa)

Are borderlines aware of their behavior?

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.

How do you calm down a borderline personality disorder?

How should you act around someone with BPD?

How do you build trust with someone who has BPD?

What is BPD splitting?

Splitting is a psychological mechanism which allows the person to tolerate difficult and overwhelming emotions by seeing someone as either good or bad, idealised or devalued. This makes it easier to manage the emotions that they are feeling, which on the surface seem to be contradictory.

Do borderlines feel remorse?

Only remorse leads to a real apology and change. One of the hallmarks of people with Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder (BP/NP) is that they often do not feel truly sorry. Even though a BP/NP may say he or she is sorry, there is often something lacking.

Can borderlines ever be happy?

Also, many people achieve remission — their symptoms become much less intense, so much so that they no longer meet the criteria for diagnosis. The stigma around BPD is pervasive, but many people get better. With treatment, it's possible to go on to lead a happy and healthy life.

Why do borderlines hurt the ones they love?

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.

How do borderlines treat their family?

Key points. People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) may engage in divisive behaviors toward family members, which affects patterns of relating. Patterns that cause conflict among families with BPD include competition and triangulation, in which a third person is brought into an argument.

What is the root cause of borderline personality disorder?

Environmental factors

being a victim of emotional, physical or sexual abuse. being exposed to long-term fear or distress as a child. being neglected by 1 or both parents. growing up with another family member who had a serious mental health condition, such as bipolar disorder or a drink or drug misuse problem.

What kind of parents do borderlines have?

Unpredictable love - BPD parents may have difficulty providing children with a consistent feeling of being loved. Feeling threatened by a child's normal behavior - BPD parents may have difficulty allowing children to be angry with them without retaliating.

What happens when you set boundaries with a borderline?

Setting boundaries for your relationship is important for you and the person with BPD. However, you should not expect your limits to fix the relationship quickly. The person with BPD may feel like these boundaries are a form of rejection, which may cause them to lash out.

Are borderlines capable of love?

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.

What are the 9 criteria for BPD?

How does BPD affect those around you?

Unstable relationships

If you have BPD, you may feel that other people abandon you when you most need them, or that they get too close and smother you. When people fear abandonment, it can lead to feelings of intense anxiety and anger.

How do people with BPD react to others emotions?

It has long been recognized that individuals with BPD seem to possess an uncanny sensitivity to other people's subconscious mental content — thoughts, feelings, and even physical sensations. They also seem to have a talent for involving and influencing others (Park, Imboden, Park, Hulse, and Unger, 1992).

What does borderline rage look like?

Anger that is intense, uncontrolled or inappropriate can be a devastating symptom for someone who has BPD. They may be driven by a desire to be connected to others, yet loss of emotional control frequently drives others away. In some cases, the level of rage experienced can lead to violence.

How do you respond to BPD rage?

When faced with BPD rage – which stems from the BPD person's interpretation of an event – it is important that you react in a calm and validating manner. Take care of your own emotional and mental health and seek therapy for yourself. Encourage and support treatment (when the BPD person is ready)

Do borderlines sabotage?

Borderline personality disorder causes a broad range of reactions that can be considered self-destructive or self-sabotaging. It influences thoughts, emotions, behavior, and communication, adding a degree of volatility and unpredictability to daily living that can be unsettling for BPD sufferers and their loved ones.

Are borderlines always angry?

With over 70% of patients acting out aggressively against others within a year, aggression is frequent in BPD (5). Being predominantly reactive in BPD, aggression is triggered by frustration, provocation, or threat, closely related to feelings of anger, and causes severe interpersonal problems (3).