CLUSTER B PERSONALITY DISORDERS

10 Signs You Might Have Borderline Personality Disorder

For those who ever wondered whether they have BPD

1. You are preoccupied with the thoughts of finding the perfect relationship/love

People with BPD have an intense need for love, which is the key characteristic of the disorder — they have a deep desire to love and be loved. They crave intimacy. They try to please people in desperate attempts to make them love them. From an early age, they tend to be obsessed with the idea of finding “the one”. As a result, romantic fantasization is a common feature of the disorder.

This distinguishes them from patients with disorders such as NPD, who seek attention and ASPD, who seek power.

2. You have a fearful-avoidant attachment style

People with this attachment style fear abandonment and have a deep-seated fear of rejection, which means they worry that they will be hurt if they allow themselves to become too close to others. As a result, they can go to extreme measures to avoid real or imagined separation or rejection, such as by people-pleasing even at a cost to themselves or making suicide threats to guilt people into staying in relationships.

They are uncomfortable getting close to others, even though they want emotionally intimate relationships. They find it difficult to trust and depend on people. They push people away despite their fear of abandonment because they feel ill at ease with emotional closeness. When someone tries to become intimate with them, they become aggressive and rejecting, because they have unconscious negative views about themselves and other people. They view themselves as unworthy of responsiveness.

“I’m unworthy, can’t you see? Why do you give me love? If you give me love, either you are blind and stupid or you are cunning and manipulative. These are the only two reasons to give me love. You can see that I’m damaged goods. You can see that I’m broken, defective and dysfunctional and yet you give me love… Something is wrong with you, or you are doing this for a purpose. There is some hidden agenda. There is some ulterior motive.” — Sam Vaknin

3. You have attempted suicide

Not everyone with Borderline Personality Disorder attempts suicide, but this is one of the key features that separate this disorder from other personality disorders. For example, narcissists can experience suicidal ideation when going through narcissistic mortification but they rarely act on this. In general, it is much less common for people with other disorders to make suicide attempts.

He may attempt suicide, often not with the intent to die but to feel something, to confirm he is alive.¹

4. You have identity disturbance

This involves rapid self-identity and self-image changes that include shifting goals and values. For example, it’s not uncommon for patients with BPD to regularly change the way they look by changing hair colours drastically (pink to green to blue to purple, etc.), their fashion sense (new piercings, tattoos, etc.) or even life plans (career plans, jobs, universities, etc.)²

Identity diffusion can manifest in 6 ways:

• Contradictory Character Traits: e.g. naivety and suspiciousness, greed and self-denial, arrogance and timidity
• Temporal Discontinuity in the Self: e.g. experiencing oneself as very young and at the same time old beyond rejuvenation
• Lack of Authenticity: e.g. caricature-like display of feelings, emotions, beliefs and actions, as-if personality (behaving as if well adjusted but is only doing what is expected and unable to behave in a genuine or spontaneous manner), in any given situation acting as someone else they know would act, not in a way that is genuinely their own.
• Feelings of Emptiness: Feeling like one is hollow, empty or just a shell or numbing of inner emotional experiences when alone. To ward off feelings of emptiness, engaging in compulsive socializing, drinking, drug use, impulsive sexual encounters, self-mutilation, and provocative behaviours.
• Gender Dysphoria: Weakness of gender identity that manifests through the display of overt behaviours more appropriate for the opposite sex, gender confusion and seeking sex-reassignment surgery
• Inordinate Ethnic and Moral Relativism: Contradictions in value systems and even absence of any genuine inner value altogether. Ideas and convictions are often simply another person’s view of good or bad. e.g. overenthusiastic adherence to a specific moral principle replaced by a contradictory when friend group changes, heightened vulnerability to join cults, etc.

5. You are impulsive and reckless

Impulsivity can take many forms such as substance abuse, reckless spending, gambling, making foolish investments without thinking, binge eating, promiscuity and reckless driving.

To stave off the panic associated with the absence of a primary object, borderline patients frequently will impulsively engage in behaviors that numb the panic and establish contact with and control over some new object.³

6. You self-harm or you used to self-harm

Self-harm is considered a pervasive problem in Borderline Personality Disorder. However, in most cases, self-mutilation does not carry suicidal intent. Instead, it may be enacted to regulate emotions, reduce dissociation, communicate distress, and express feelings.

7. You are quick to idealize people and form attachments to them

People with this disorder are quick to idealize people as potential intimate partners. This can create instant and often fake intimacy with others, triggered by things like having a one-night stand. Those with BPD are prone to projecting their own desires to find “the one” onto the other person early on and start daydreaming about how perfect the relationship will be in the future. They tend to have high expectations of others.

8. You have difficulty controlling your anger

Like patients with all personality disorders, people with BPD have black-and-white thinking (splitting). This manifests in idealization and devaluation of people — shifting between (“I’m so in love!”) and devaluation (“I hate you”) — which results in unstable personal relationships. It also causes inappropriate and intense anger episodes, such as frequently losing your temper, being sarcastic or bitter, or having physical fights.

9. You have had mood lability from a young age

While it’s normal to have experiences with anxiety and depression throughout life, it is not normal if these are chronic and experienced most of the time.

People with BPD are emotionally dysregulated. Their emotions are all over the place, and these are often unexpected, eruptive, explosive, dysregulated, chaotic and disorganised. It can also be difficult for them to label these emotions.

They tend to suffer from emotional swings (day-to-day changes), social anxiety, pervasive shame (sense that you are flawed and defective as a human being), depression and extremely poor self-esteem. They often have a “thin skin” and take things personally, feel like they are a burden to others, externalise blame or blame themselves whenever there’s a conflict.

What I have found is that I am profoundly impacted by emotional dysregulation, in which I feel emotions at their full intensities and that these emotions can change extremely rapidly…Given that I am hyperaware of the negative impact that outwardly expressing symptoms can have on my loved ones, it further can trigger that fear of abandonment in the sense of ‘people will leave me because my mental health is too difficult to manage.’ I then must juggle implementing boundaries in order to ensure myself and others are OK, which makes living with my disorder exhausting.⁴

10. You experience dissociative symptoms

People with BPD often report dissociative episodes. These present as periods of loss of contact with reality, feeling detached from the world (the world around feels unreal), feeling detached from their body, feeling disconnected from themselves and feeling like they are in a dream (derealization). Dissociative episodes can last for a short time (from a few minutes to a few hours) but can also be longer (weeks or months).

References:

[1]: Kreisman, J. J., & Straus, H. (2010). I Hate You — Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality. TarcherPerigee.

[2]: Akhtar S. (1984). The syndrome of identity diffusion. The American journal of psychiatry, 141(11), 1381–1385. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.141.11.1381

[3]: Lawson, C. A. (2002). Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship. Rowman & Littlefield.

[4]: Monaghan, C. (2022, February 16). Why Self-Harm and Outbursts in Borderline Personality Disorder Aren’t About Manipulation. Nami Queens/Nassau. https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/home-care/info-2021/caregiving-questions.html

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