"Back From the Edge" - Borderline Personality Disorder - Call us: 888-694-2273

my name is andrew chance I'm a husband and father my background as far as my career was in publishing that career would have been plotted when I got sick my name is Kyra Van Gelder I am 36 years old I started cutting and burning myself pretty regularly when I was 14 [Music] Christina Knight and I'm 27 I sensed that something was going on in my teenage years especially like my senior year of high school I knew that something was up but I didn't know what it was and I kind of tried to avoid it as much as possible [Music] borderline personality disorder is really a serious illness that we do current currently now understand as a medical disorder that probably affects about 1% of the population the criteria for this disorder can be grouped into three subsets those that have to do with emotional instability those that have to do with behavioral instability and those that have to do with interpersonal instability people with borderline personality experience emotions more intensely someone can say something to me and I can have a severe reaction and then two minutes later I can have another completely different severe reaction and so it's just constantly it's mean in the course of the day it's it's incredibly exhausting you also find a real pattern of a lot of interpersonal problems they tend to be on the one hand very dependent and clinging and on the other rapidly enraged and rejecting the hardest part for me was when she was acting out in a behavioral way that was really angry you can't have interpersonal relationships if you're not emotionally stable is extremely difficult to deal with someone who hates you one day likes you the next day and could love you the third day [Music] I grew up in a bunch of places I started out growing up in Europe until I was about six my father was in the Air Force and so it was myself my mother and my brother in Holland in Italy I had a very active imagination I loved art and was athletic and played a lot when I graduated from college publishing seemed a natural way for me to go since I was a bookworm and loved books and so it got into publishing and began to sort of climb the ladder I had a good job nice wife and two beautiful children about a beautiful Victorian in a nice town I had it all and I remember one day I was raking leaves in the front yard and you know here I was in my early 30s and people walking by everything no look at this guy he's got everything you know and I felt I was conscious of that um I felt fortunate a lot of people in my life or just people that I would meet I'm sure and I know this they thought that I had everything together they thought that everything was perfect because that's how I appeared to the world I appeared as someone who had everything going for them and that I was under control of everything and then I had all these goals really until she was in her mid teens everything seemed to be very normal she was a very involved child with a lot of sports very good at gymnastics and soccer and she was very motivated in school outwardly I think people thought I was very affable and outgoing and and personable and I wasn't a good manager I'd worked well with people what was happening inside of me was a different story I'm that began to get worse and worse one of the things that happened when I was six was my parents had divorced and we had moved from Holland to Massachusetts we were in this small community and there's just so basically a street with a lot of people on it and one of the guys who was babysitting for my brother and I regularly was molesting me at that time and I remember starting to develop a sort of aspect that I was always being watched and it gave me a real sense of discomfort and anxiety when I was around groups especially if I knew that that he was going to be there and I didn't I did really didn't know how to handle the situation I just didn't say anything to anyone so there's a that I think that was really the beginning of my sort of shift into being more socially awkward and more fearful [Music] there was a sense of not really knowing who you are I mean I think there had always been sort of a chameleon like character in me I was always sort of being who other people wanted me to be or who they expected me to be and I felt that in the morning it was almost like I had to sort of zip on my suit and tie you know put on this persona of a confident manager and go into work and I'd sort of just get through the day and then afterwards welcome to my car in the garage it was just like a total deflation I felt totally depleted like I had given everything I had just to get through the day and by the time I got home I had nothing left for my wife and kids I feel like I don't really have a group that I can identify with don't really feel like I fit in with my family I don't feel like I fit in as a college student I don't feel like I fit in whenever I work someplace and that's probably because I don't have an idea of who I am my way of coping was to start journals of how I should have a personality writing down like this is the type of person I should be so that people will like me and I can therefore be a part of something you know and I would study people and my writing was about observing other people and how those observations could be in one way or another applied to how I should be because I didn't know how to be you could actually define borderline personality disorder has the I don't fit and disorder they are in my opinion the ultimate Outsiders they oftentimes try to conform to what they think other people want from them when we got married he he pushed himself down a path now he's gonna be a husband a father a homeowner he was gonna get on a track maybe that was what he was supposed to do and that would make him happy we went down that track and it didn't make him happy and I think that engendered a lot of anger inside of me that began to sort of fester and it began to feel like it was eating me up from the inside like I was rusting through inside [Music] I remember one time when I was in ninth grade actually and I had finally made a friend and this was like a friendship where we were spending time together and I I was so happy I mean it really into in my relationships with people tend to be so intense I didn't really know how to kind of just have casual friendships I was like you know you're my best friend forever and ever you know and probably the six months eight months of our friendship this young woman lost a lot of weight and went through this transformation you know her sort of moving up the social ladder and hanging out with the kids who were cooler and prettier and whatever and when she did that I found that I was unable to accept what she had done [Music] I ended up sending her a letter written in my blood [Music] writing a letter in your own blood is a beautiful example of communication of a desperate need which would be very difficult for the other person to ignore this is a group of people often need other people to regulate them the relationships that they form are often breathe life into them and therefore if the people who are regulating them in some way are getting ready to leave them it can feel like a life and death proposition absences or separations from those relationships once they're established are catastrophic and their significance like I don't exist myself [Music] I'm not sure that people with borderline personality disorder know that they're being manipulative but it comes across that way often to the people who are living with them or who are around them sometimes for the family members it's almost like walking on eggshells sometimes living your life and what you think is a normal way is upsetting to them so you stop doing that and then you feel like that was their purpose all along people see the emotional sort of I think there's a phrase you know I hate you don't ever leave me people tend to see it not as a medical condition but as just somebody being difficult dramatic self-absorbed and these are all things that people should be able to control because it's not an illness manipulation assumes that a person has the skills to institute to to think about and then execute a plan and manipulation in that sense I don't think can be applied to people with BPD because it's all about knee-jerk reactions and desperately trying to get something to feel secure and safe and okay again and so for me you know when I was sending letters of blood to people written in blood one could say that was a tad manipulative on the other hand you could just as easily say I had no clue about what I was doing I had no idea how to get people to pay attention to me in ways that would work manipulation is when you consciously try to get someone to do something for you without them knowing that you actually got them to do it these individuals very rarely have the end of personal skills to figure out how to get you to do things in an unobtrusive way [Music] I began to lose a sense of connection with my wife and kids with becoming less and less engaged with them was drawing from them very irritable anger percolating that surfacing at inappropriate times I could remember him having a conversation with my sister on the phone then for some reason something she said just put him over the edge he slammed down the phone and broke the glass coffee table because he slammed down the phone that hard and I was like oh my god another time I remember practically I mean I was trying to get dressed for work and I was something minor was getting me angry and something like trying to take my suit off a hanger and it got caught and I just began to sort of start ripping you know and just slamming the closet door things like that physical aggression that was coming out not against anybody but just things this is a group of people who emotionally respond much more sensitive to vlei to things in other words they respond to some small thing when for you it might take something bad so that's just a motion vulnerability factor the second thing you have to know about them is not only do they respond to a very small event they respond very rapidly you know they say that borderlines can feel like burn victims that if that their skin is just raw like someone who's been burned and that if something is said to them are done to them that they feel it with the intensity that you would if you poked somebody in the arm that didn't have skin on their arm it's really easy for me to get out of control and it takes a while for me to be able to calm myself down there was a specific instance I went up to this street vendor and he had these markers and they had the marker spread out all over the table and there was paper there I should be able to use the markers and draw on the paper to see what the markers did but he didn't want me to touch the markers I lost my mind like I to the point where my boyfriend at the time was like we need we need to leave like he had to drag me away from there because I was so upset and could not understand why you would have the markers and the paper out on the table if he didn't want people to touch them and he just didn't want me to touch them I think that it was embarrassing to the person that she was with and she doesn't seem to understand at the time that it's over-the-top and and an incident that didn't need to escalate to that degree I got so heated about it so quickly that I felt like I didn't have any control over it and I obsessed about that for days afterwards and I told the story to like so many different people just to to justify that I was right in the fact that I should have been able to use the markers individuals who meet criteria for borderline personality disorder ordinarily no matter how hard they try despite all their very best intentions simply cannot regulate themselves you I would make relationships with people based on these really sort of you know these behaviors that were self-destructive there was always sort of like the getting high or that are they doing something dangerous and then getting you know crazy drunk and dancing with people and going out to parties and and and having sex with people who were very attractive and and you know ephemeral and I would never see them again Christina tends to have risky behavior whether it's drug use or whether it's driving her car very fast I know that like when I there are certain people that have meant that haven't been great for me like they have been doing drugs or whatever and I will go to the extent to where I will actually do the drugs just so I fit in with them and that's not necessarily the greatest thing she also has eating difficulties and and so she's been bulimic and I think that that's a risky behavior that could you know ultimately be life-threatening that constant level of intense distraction and chaos is a way to distract from all of the painful things that are going on a lot of the dysfunctional problematic behavior that an individual who meets criteria for borderline engages in if you look at the behavior you will see that that behavior in fact is highly effective at regulating their emotions the only big problem with that behavior is it regulates it short term instead of long term that is the problem [Music] I started cutting when I was 14 I had become infatuated with another student and was rejected and the rejection this was like a romantic infatuation was very public I was very upset and I went into the bathroom in between classes and I had attack and I just started dragging the tackle on my arm I remember once being feeling very hurt by a conversation I had with my father and it was a lot of anger and emotion and I slammed down the phone and I went and got a razor blade and I started cutting my wrists anytime that I've cut it's been because my emotions were so intense that I needed a different outlet for them and to inflict physical pain on myself was a relief because then I could focus on the physical pain and I didn't have to focus on the emotional pain that I was feeling to me it was like a cigarette break in a sense and in a way of being able to manage the feelings that I hadn't found a way to do yet there's no doubt about it at all cutting and physically damaging the self regulate emotions in this group of people no one is clear on exactly why it happens and there's a lot of research on it the self-destructive behaviors of borderline patients can definitely serve to help them alleviate feeling states that they can't stand oftentimes feeling states that they can't even articulate there's a kind of gratification to it as you're cutting and usually seeing the blood come out there's a satisfaction and after you do it I know I'd make four or five six cuts on my wrist and see the blood coming out there was a sense of relief afterwards I'd be sort of shaking with excitement but feeling calm and the emotional storm I was feeling it sort of subsided he would come down to me and go look and they got blood down his arm and I but he'd have this look like like he almost felt better now on the perfectly pragmatic side the reason it's a bad idea is it means that you never solve the problem that generated an emotion in the first place so it becomes like taking drugs it's a way to avoid distract or get out of something but it isn't a way that makes you look at it and figure out how to solve it long term you cannot be a parent you can't be a successful person you can't be at work and say okay oh yeah right I don't solve problems like on okay Olcott you'll have to leave them heating's you have to leave your children somewhere I mean how in the world are you gonna live your life as this is how you solve your problems [Music] as I began to feel more and more worthless as a person I began to feel that people would be better off without me because I was just falling apart it was sort of a burning wreck of a person so the only way out as I saw it was suicide the thing that started happening is I wasn't able to live with what was inside of me and what I was dealing with around me I felt very powerless so I started going into my parents liquor cabinet and drinking from all the bottles I began to think about it more and more and it became almost like a little seed that started growing and suicide became more and more of an infatuation and all of a sudden I found myself listening to Nine Inch Nails Smashing Pumpkins Pink Floyd a lot of real kind of dark you know the downward spiral by Nine Inch Nails was basically an album about somebody's self-destruction and I just listened to that and I was you know really spoke to me I was pretty much walking around every day with with a bottle of whiskey in my backpack and razor blades and just drinking as much as I could and then going into the woods and cutting myself and hoping I could actually make the cuts that would do it I began to think about doing it and more realistically and I basically trotted with everything every I would walk up on bridges highway overpasses and just look down and think about jumping I put a loaded shotgun on my mouth I would stand up on a stool with a noose around my neck overdose massively a few times there's a math test and you know seventh grade and I remember panicking because I couldn't find the math notes and that night before the test I went into my mother's drawers in her bedroom and I knew that she had pills there so I ended up taking the bottle of pills thinking okay this is this is it I you know I failed but they obviously weren't enough to do anything and and I woke up in the morning and felt disappointed I used to go to work and I subway trains pulling into the station and think about jumping in front of them I actually did go for a walk on a subway station downtown Boston once just wrote a suicide note I was dressed up in my suit walked out of my office and walked into a tunnel at Park Street Station I I can still recall seeing you know the darkness ahead of me as I was walking in the tunnel and seeing my shadow in front of me growing longer and longer as the subway train came up behind me and I was just totally detached you feel afraid I didn't feel depressed really I was just tentatively shut down completely and the train stopped and I turned around and started walking you know next to the train to get back out of the tunnel and when I got out went to a payphone called 9-1-1 and said you know I I just went for a walk in a subway tunnel I think I need to be put into the hospital thinking about suicide or wanting to be dead is extraordinarily common suicide attempts are very common and suicide itself is very common between eight and ten percent of people who meet criteria for borderline personality disorder ultimately end up dead by suicide borderline patients are deeply ambivalent about whether to live and if there isn't somebody who affirms their wish to have them alive they'd just as soon be dead [Music] I had to drop out my second semester the following year I tried to go back to school and I got depressed again and I dropped out again but more severe to the point where I was you know had the suicidal ideation and I was just kind of sick of feeling the way that I had been feeling for the past couple years and I wanted more of an answer after getting a GED going back to school dropping out of college going back to college finishing college going to graduate school for creative writing and at that point I was starting to teach art and memoir writing but um what I was discovering was that um my ability to function in life was really compromised by these reactions I'd have two situations two relationships to responsibilities to stress she went to the clean hospital after she had gotten her master's degree and she climbed out but she had achieved a goal in her life and then everything fell apart everything fell apart that was when I really saw what could happen to her I came in with a very serious list of complaints which was that I couldn't keep a job I couldn't tolerate being in relationships they were too painful that my emotional life was out of control like you know was crying and reacting all over the place couldn't drive a car because I couldn't think straight and I thought people were chasing after me and that I was constantly feeling suicidal just my perceptions were very skewed I didn't I couldn't see things clearly I had no sense of who I was well the staff doctor that was treating me came in and told me you know I think that you have borderline personality disorder and I immediately thought that that meant I was on the borderline between like sanity and insanity or something and he he said no that's not what it is and he kind of explained to me the criteria do you find that uh you uh fear abandonment and you know we'll just really try to avoid it at all costs and I was like yeah I say well you know do you do you find that you're really emotionally labile and you you know up and down and change and you're sensitive to the things around you and rejection I said oh oh my god yeah you know just sort of checked over the ledge there's there's nine criteria and um you know stormy relationships and when people you do idealize people and then when they disappoint you did you value them and and by the time you got to the ninth one he was like IRA and you know do you experience paranoia when you're under extreme stress no yeah and everything he said to me was like oh I have that I have that I had that so that to me it was like oh there is something out there that explains this people with the disorder more commonly than not find it great relief to be diagnosed it's like looking in the mirror as a common phrase it's like oh my god I'm something and there's something is understandable somebody could actually understand me and if they understand me maybe I could understand me maybe other people are like me which means that I'm not so alone I am not different from everybody in the world I'm not an outsider every single place I am and also there's an enormous relief that there might be a treatment borderline personality disorder is an eminently treatable disorder and patients can be helped and with good therapeutic resources patients have a good chance to get better there are many therapies which are appropriate and helpful for borderline patients there are the individual psychotherapies there are psychosocial therapies which include family interventions and group therapies and there are medications psycho pharmacological treatment is an auxilliary treatment that is helpful in many cases we have very few evidence-based treatments for borderline personality disorder at this point DBT is probably the treatment for which there is the greatest evidence dialectical behavior therapy was designed very specifically for people who self harmed and had strong suicidal impulses it basically is helping you to deal with situations that are gonna come up every day and your emotional reaction is going to be a certain way and it helps you deal with that emotional reaction it helps you find ways to stabilize yourself it is the synthesis or merging of trying to change something while simultaneously radically accepting that it is what it is it encourages first of all the person who's suffering to step out and look at their own emotions as a third person might rather than to immediately act on them the reason it's called dialectical behavior therapy is because the treatment itself is this synthesis of both the change in behavior therapy and the accept which when the treat most developed was drawn primarily from my own practice and experience in soon it used to feel literally like people's eyes would have a physical effect on my body like my neck would prickle and my heart would constrict and I interpret that they are looking at me in a hostile way you know the fact is they are looking at me but I can't assume what they're feeling inside and what they're thinking DBT has helped me tolerate that I feel this thing and I interpret it this way but it may not necessarily be the reality I like dialectical behavioral therapy because there were things that I could work on in a daily basis that would help me get through the day and there were certain exercises that I could do and there was concrete things that I could do the last time I I desperately wanted to cut myself I did a type of technique that I learned through DBT which is I went and I held ice cubes in my hand and putting ice cubes in your hand when you really want to experience physical pain as a way of focusing on something without necessarily hurting yourself instead of saying oh I just shouldn't feel this way or oh I need to change the way I feel you've learned how to work with what you're experiencing in an effect a more effective way it is so effective that we've had some clients when they knew they were going to have to discuss something extremely intense like sexual abuse or rape or something like that actually go to the store and buy those little cubes that you put in your freezer the ones that are wrapped up and you can put them in your freezer and when they have to have a session like that take them with them to therapists office hold them in their hands during this session [Music] the other forms of treatment which have been empirically validated include a transference focused psychotherapy which is a derivative of the early psychoanalytic treatments and focused much more on the importance of interpretation and understanding the ways in which oneself the Borland patient distorts their views of other people and of themselves it tries to bring about an integration of the patient's concept of self and of the patient's concept of significant others when I got into therapy I began to open up and talk about all kinds of things that were bothering me and and and one of the things the therapist would try to do is to dissect a particular incident to see if there were triggers that would set that off and I also participated in group therapy in the hospitals because all the sort of walls came down and the pretenses and all these things that you sort of erect around yourself in the outside world and people are very open and honest and are willing to talk about very intimate and upsetting things it's very important for patients or their families who are troubled by borderline personality disorder to find clinicians who are knowledgeable about this and have experience with it and want to treat them to seek treatment from people who don't have those qualifications is likely to make the patient worse the right practitioner in the right treatment or west required you can find a really fabulous person who doesn't know treatment or how to treat this particular population you can find a person who knows an effective treatment who the patient can't relate to and that's not going to work either you've really got to have both [Music] when I was first diagnosed I thought that it was basically all my fault and then it was an environmental thing and that I should be able to you know fix it myself and then later when I started going to these conferences and learning more about the disease they came out with studies saying that there are chemical and biological reasons for this disease and so that to me was a huge relief because again I felt like oh there really is a reason for this it's not just because I am not dealing well with situations it's not just because I'm not working hard enough to feel better it's because I have chemical things wrong in my brain borderline personality disorder for sure has a predisposing biological base and whether somebody gets the illness depends upon the environment in that respect it's not unlike diabetes or high blood pressure within traditional medicine take it interaction with another person for example we're sitting here talking I see your face well in the brain there's two pathways one node directly to the visual cortex that shows me the actual image of your face so I have a mental picture of it but also a second pathway that goes to what's called the limbic system particularly the amygdala so that I can assess the emotional impact of your face and these two are integrated in terms of my appraisal view and then of course my behavioral response to you one of the most interesting findings is the finding that the amygdala the area of the brain that signals danger and fear in borderline personality disorder seems to be overactive so that a face that an on borderline person would react to in a neutral way a borderline person may actually see as fearful and when you talk to patients I think what you hear is they experience other people as angry critical and hostile towards them when indeed in many instances that may not be the other person's intent while the amygdala the part of the brain that signals danger is overactive and borderline personality disorder the prefrontal cortex the part of the brain that's responsible for higher-order thinking which can inhibit the behavioral response to this alarming signal seems to be under active it doesn't surprise me that people's brains are actually wired differently that Auntie might have kind of an ultra sensitivity to two things that create is two emotional things - I think over the past ten years that as we've come to understand the physical component of mental illness people have begun more and more to think of it as a real illness as opposed to just somebody you know having emotional problems in the unable to deal with things and you know come on snap out of it that sort of thing although we're just beginning in a sense like Columbus leaving the port we're beginning to understand some of the new neural circuits involved in various aspects of this dysregulation it would be fair to say that BPD can be hell for families having a borderline a person with borderline personality disorder as in your family is devastating there's something in the nature of this condition and in its symptoms that can draw not only from families but from trained clinicians unhelpful responses from my experience the most common response of other people who are around people meeting criteria for borderline personality disorder is that their response is shape-up if i had known about BPD at the time of her adolescence i think i would have been much more attuned to the fact that she reacted very quickly to things that that were things that she disagreed with it was a huge what appeared to us overreaction and then an inability to regroup so I think that was a big sign that I that I missed because I didn't understand what that would have have to do with mental illness they know the prison is emotional but they don't know why and they really don't have the fundamental understanding as a person is actually doing the best they can it's important for me to get all the emotions out that I'm feeling because if I don't then I obsess about them and I'm I pick myself apart and I think about every you know interaction that I had with every person that I interacted with and I can make myself crazy thinking about you know did I do this wrong or you know did that person like me or did they not like me or the real tragedy for the individual as they say I can't regulate it and the other person says yes you can so of course then they start feeling worse about themselves thinking that they can but they just don't want to what really helped me was when I realized that it wasn't about me that I wasn't necessarily what she was angry at and the target of it but that I was just there to be somebody that she could vent all of this feeling that was about something so I don't know if you remember the comedian Gallagher and Gallagher used to smash watermelons and things and the people in the front row would have to put on raincoats or some things to cover them up because they get splattered with all the watermelon juices and so I kind of liken to myself to being in the front row with Gallagher when he was about to smash the watermelons she just understands that I need to get it out and that there's nothing wrong with that and then she doesn't have to help me qualify anything it's just that's how I feeling need to get it out and once I get it out I feel a lot better we have guidelines for families which suggests that when they're borderline offspring or family member has one of these excessively angry reactions that they listen carefully look for whatever is true about it and by validating that part of it which makes sense it'll calm the person down to address the part of it which is excessive and inappropriate can and should only be done in a context when the borderline person is themselves calm you know when you have a child with this disorder it's not something you talk about it weddings that you go out socializing you often don't talk about these kinds of things so when family members go to a support group it's the an incredible process that happens for them because they feel that someone else understands them and understands what they've gone through you know BPD is so much a disorder of relations and the recovery really involves being able to get back into communities and have relationships and tolerate the distress and you know build up a life for yourself again you [Music] you [Music] I found that insurance doesn't want to cover borderline as the initial diagnosis that often times you need to be given a different diagnosis and access one diagnosis such as bipolar and that will be accepted for insurance regrettably families may have to strengthen themselves to fight insurance companies when they do wrongfully denied coverage for what is indisputably a medical disorder there's an effort to find brief treatments that will get these patients going that's an illusion these patients need long-term treatment I think it's important for families to recognize that the first no from the insurance company shouldn't be the last word on the subject the key thing to recognize that borrowing personality disorder is you can't decide not to treat it the insurance companies have to come to grips with this particular reality the thing we won't pay for the treatment doesn't mean they don't pay for the treatment they do pay for the treatment somebody pays for it because when you don't give them treatment they show up in the emergency room and no one can kick them out of there when they give you emergency room the office and get on an inpatient unit that's extraordinarily expensive for care [Music] when family members call me for the first time the first thing I want to give them is hope I want them to know that people with this disorder get better for somebody who is family member just recently been diagnosed I would say that they want to participate in the therapy get to understand what's going on and what to expect that they probably got a long haul but where they understand it the better off they are borderline personality disorder is often called the good prognosis diagnosis and that's because people get better people recover from this disorder they manage their lives in effective ways they have children they have careers people with this disorder I have a remission meaning that their psychopathology is greatly reduced within a couple of years and when that happens is sustained relapses are not common the emotionality that they have the tendency to react quickly will probably always be there but you can build a corresponding Tennessee to be able to regulate the payoff is that rather than having short series of intense volatile interactions with people you probably going to go through a dry period where it feels like there's no one around and then things start building I developed the vocabulary to say to people I get triggered because of this or I'm having a borderline moment right now I think you're rejecting me when you get the diagnosis and a set of language to bring awareness to the interpersonal dynamics things that use of destroy relationships become opportunities to build a new level of communication I think the thing that was really helpful to me was to just know that that I love my daughter more than I need to be right all the time that the relationship is the most important thing to me that if I can hang in there and learn to understand the perspective of the other person that it's worth it to hang in there that we really have a great relationship in spite of a lot of ups and downs it's also learning that life with a borderline can be a rollercoaster ride and I don't always have to hop on the ride I think that families should remember that most people with this illness will recover in some instances it will take time and that this really is not a sprint but a long-distance race there's this like this crucial element that I think is so important which is the will and the desire to confront what's going on with yourself and believe that if you confront it and you get help for it things are going to be so much better and I can look back now and see that that I'm much better off today that I was when I was trying to do things on my own but it takes an awful lot of trust and faith and the people around you to to admit to having something that's so stigmatized and then to put yourself in their hands and say please help me [Music] [Music] you [Music] you [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital

Views: 5,015,544

Rating: 4.7601957 out of 5

Keywords: NewYork-Presbyterian, New York Presbyterian, New York-Presbyterian, BPD, Otto Kernberg, Wayne Fenton, John Gunderson, Marsha Linehan, Borderline personality disorder

Id: 967Ckat7f98

Length: 48min 12sec (2892 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/jondavidbrooks]

My mother has borderline personality disorder. It is very clear what the major symptoms is. The kry symptom is having extreme feelings of love and hate for other people friends, .family, coworkers, acquaintances etc. They can make you feel like their best friend one minute, next minute the next day they can hate you for very little reason. They also have very low self esteem. They are VERY difficult to deal with. I haven't spoken to my mom in the years.

[u/errordrivenlearning]

Just for some clarity, here are the DSM criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder as well as some info on trestment, presentation, and comorbdities from NAMI.

[u/frau-fremdschamen]

I've dealt with BPD for most of my life but was only recently diagnosed. I related a lot to the descriptions of the sense of relief once receiving a diagnosis; up until then I had convinced myself that I was a chronic "crazy girlfriend", had no place in groups of people, I had no identity and just sprawled across "types", and had some kind of fleeting rage problem that causes me to break pencils in class and at one point destroy a pair of shutter doors.

I'm still figuring out medications with my psychiatrist, but I've been in therapy for four months now and it has done so much for me.

[u/jondavidbrooks]

The great thing is that you have been correctly diagnosed and not the usual boiler template diagnosis, of bipolar. The second great thing is that you know you have a problem and accepted it. You might have future incidents but I would bet you'll be able to handle the aftermath better. . Borderlines tend to handle criticism really badly so you should be proud you overcame that difficult step. By the way I heard cognitive therapy is really effective for the long term, I would look into it .

[u/madman24k]

After watching this, I think I need to go see a doctor