According to the DSM, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a person must show an enduring pattern of behavior that includes at least five of the following symptoms:
- Extreme reactions—including panic, depression, rage, or frantic actions—to abandonment, whether real or perceived
- A pattern of intense and stormy relationships with family, friends, and loved ones, often veering from extreme closeness and love (idealization) to extreme dislike or anger (devaluation)
- Distorted and unstable self-image or sense of self, which can result in sudden changes in feelings, opinions, values, or plans and goals for the future (such as school or career choices)
- Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating
- Recurring suicidal behaviors or threats or self-harming behavior, such as cutting
- Intense and highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few hours to a few days
- Chronic feelings of emptiness and/or boredom
- Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger
- Having stress-related paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms, such as feeling cut off from oneself, observing oneself from outside the body, or losing touch with reality.
Seemingly mundane events may trigger symptoms. For example, people with borderline personality disorder may feel angry and distressed over minor separations—such as vacations, business trips, or —sudden changes of plans from people to whom they feel close. Studies show that people with this disorder may see anger in an emotionally neutral face5 and have a stronger reaction to words with negative meanings than people who do not have the disorder.6
My doctor is changing my medications but I think this started weeks ago when a dear friend announced she was hired for a new job that is far away. I immediately pulled back as way to protect myself from missing her or losing her friendship. I'm not in the top ten of her important relationships but I don't know this for sure. I know she loves me tenderly. She has others like God, her children and grandchildren, her mother and siblings (one brother who passed away recently), her three closest friends, her job, taking good care of herself, many seeking her time, her garden, and then there's me. I don't think I'm at the bottom but that's where I often put myself in people's lives. That's where I often put myself in my own life when BPD flares up.
My emotions of insecurity and deep hurt often cause me to mentally and emotionally leave relationships of the friends I love. Like it says above, something mundane will trigger a reaction. I'll feel angry, emotionally leave the friendship, refuse to feel close, have strong reactions to their words and negate anything positive they say to me. They are liars, they don't love me, they have other friends they go to and if they really cared about me, they'd understand that any mistakes I make are not intentionally against them but sometimes part of the BPD I have or simply a mistake I've made. Either way, I regret it and I'll apologize for it.
I don't like having BPD. It messes with my head, my decisions, my sexual risks and behaviors, my close relationships and managing my emotions when they are triggered and strongly distressed. It's like I hate the person who, in my mind, caused the distress and I've decided to evict them from my life forever. It's not until I wait 24 hours before I respond do I see the lie and the truth.
People who do not have BPD are very fortunate. BPD comes on quickly, severely and intensely. If one's mental health is weak, BPD becomes a force of evil, leaving the victim unable to resist the power of the destructive behavior that seeks to destroy the soul that carries the BPD behaviors and fears. Only by identifying our own illness, through ourselves or through someone else, can the power of BPD be arrested, eradicated and completely destroyed.
ONLY THEN, will the subject who carries this beast know peace.
ONLY THEN, will the subject who carries this beast know peace.
