What is Borderline Personality Disorder?

BPD involves instability and reactivity in the following realms:

Relationships

The most distinguishing features of BPD compared to other disorders (e.g. bipolar disorder).

1. Intense fear of abandonment, even going to extreme measures to avoid real or imagined separation or rejection

2. Pattern of unstable intense relationships, such as idealizing someone one moment and then suddenly believing the person doesn't care enough or is cruel

Emotions

The most common of the symptoms — if you don’t have unstable emotions, its unlikely that you have BPD.

3. Wide mood swings lasting hours to days, which can include intense happiness, irritability, shame or anxiety

4. Including inappropriate, intense anger — sometimes to the point of rage — such as frequently losing your temper, being sarcastic or bitter, or having physical fights

Behaviors

Self damaging and self defeating actions — the opposite of goal orientation.

5. Impulsive and risky behavior, such as gambling, reckless driving, unsafe sex, spending sprees, binge eating or drug abuse, or sabotaging success by suddenly quitting a good job or ending a positive relationship

6. Suicidal threats or behavior or self-injury, often in response to fear of separation or rejection

Identity & Reality

Under enough stress, your ability to be in touch with your own internal experiences and with external reality gets more disorganized and diffuse — leading you to feel empty inside or experience paranoia, depersonalization or dissociation.

7. Ongoing feelings of emptiness and loss of contact with internal self, in contrast to being filled with emotion

8. Periods of stress-related paranoia and loss of contact with reality (dissociation), lasting minutes to hours

9. Rapid changes in self-identity and self-image that include shifting goals and values, and seeing yourself as bad or as if you don't exist at all

We list “unstable sense of self” last because it helps us have compassion for the preceding difficult behaviors. Of course you have trouble with relationships, emotions and goals if you don’t know who you are.

While individuals can experience these symptoms at a wide range of functioning, for individuals with full-blown borderline personality disorder, these symptoms and experiences can make building a life as an independent adult very challenging. This struggle to build an independent life can further contribute to instability — creating a vicious cycle that can make you feel trapped in a painful life you feel little control over.