Breaking Free from BPD

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a mental health condition that affects how someone regulates their emotions, relates to others, and sees themselves. People with BPD often feel emotions very intensely and may struggle with fears of abandonment, shifting self-image, or impulsive behaviors. None of this is their fault—it’s a pattern that usually develops from a mix of genetics, temperament, and difficult life experiences.

Who Gets BPD?

Traditionally, BPD has been seen as a mostly female disorder because about 75% of people who get diagnosed with it are women. However, population studies tell a different story and find that there isn't much of a gender difference at all. There is a couple of potential reasons for this. The first is that women are more likely to seek help for this, and therefore more likely to be diagnosed. The second is that it may be expressed as different behaviours in men because of how men and women are socialised.

For instance, displays of emotion, especially vulnerable feelings, are socially more accepted in women than men, so males with BPD are more likely to express their emotional distress as aggression, withdrawal or addiction. Their feelings are just as intense, but they are less likely to display them overtly. The presence of aggression may also to lead to a misdiagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is more commonly diagnosed in men.

What is BPD?

BPD is a 'Cluster B' personality disorder, as defined by the American Psychiatric Association'S diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V). What does that mean? Cluster B disorders share some defining characteristics including emotional dysregulation, impulsivity and behavioural dysregulation, Interpersonal problems, identity disturbances and erratic, dramatic and unpredictbale behaviours. In short, they are seriously disruptive for the person who suffers them and for the people around them.

They include borderline, narcissistic, histrionic and antisocial personality disorders. Though they share many features there are also important differences. Antisocial (APD) and narcissistic personality (NPD) are both 'narcissistic' defences, in that they attempt to create a sense of safety by being too 'big'. NPD is characterised by grandiosity, an excssive need for admiration. APD is driven by a need for dominance and control as a way to avoid vulnerability. So the rule for narcissisitic defences is "it's not safe to be vulnerable".

Histrionic (HPD) and Borderline (BPD) are 'neurotic' defences, meaning that they both seek safety through attachment to others. Histrionic PD needs to be the centre of attention and presents as dramatic, seductive and charming to 'attract' attachment, but they tend to avoid commitment and depth in relationships. Their relationships tend to be performative and superficial.

People with BPD, which is what this article is about, are the opposite. They seek to form intense, deep and dependent attachments on others. They are seeking a pseudo-parent figure who will unconditionally love, validate and protect them. All cluster-B PD's have their origin in attachment trauma, but BPD is very much centred on the fear of being abandoned, which brings with it very intense childlike states of extreme grief and terror, because being abandoned as a child is an extreme threat to life.

People with BPD therefore try to create unbreakable bonds with their partners. They often start with displays of hyper-sexuality and/or hyper-vulnerability to evoke not only attraction but the type of commitment that a parent feels towards a child. This is especially true of female BPD, as males are less likely to display hyper-vulnerability as this is less likely to attract a partner. In order to maintain this hyper-vulnerable state, a person with BPD must give up all power, boundaries and self-interest. This means they idealise their partner and make them the source of all things good and right, while rejecting their own rights and needs - for a while. This self-abandonment is unsustainable, and it requires the person to repress their assertive self-interest emotions of anger and disgust. These emotions don't like to be repressed, and eventually fight back.

This leads to the flip side of idealisation, which is devaluation. Having placed their partner on a pedestal of Godlike perfection, they will then make them the demonic villain of the story the moment their partner fails to live up to their idealised demands. Any whiff of rejection or abandonment can trigger an extreme and even violent reaction of intense rage and hate. Those repressed emotions didn't go away, they just got stronger.

So What is Going On Here?

Let's start with understanding attachment trauma. The thing that children absolutely need to survive and thrive is an emotionally attuned caregiver. Kids can't do anything to take care of themselves, so they rely on their parents to understand and respond to their needs. Infants can literally only display their emotions to tell us that they are hungry, cold, hurting or lonely.

If those emotional signals are met with an appropriate response, the child develops secure attachment, which is both confidence that they will be loved and protected and the belief that they deserve to be loved and protected. Over time they will also develop self-attunement, which is to say that they will learn to understand and respond to their own emotions and needs.

As they grow in power and abilty, their need for protection and love from others reduces as they can now do that for themselves. However, we still have attachment needs, but the person with secure self-attachment expects to receive loving support, can give loving support, and is sad but not devastated when relationships fail.

If a child does not receive this secure attachment experience, they can develop insecure attachment beliefs such as I am unloveable, undeserving, inadequate, etc. This is terrifying to a child, as attachment is survival. This can lead to fragmentation of the self where different 'parts' of us get repressed and other parts are encouraged and displayed as a strategy to get loved and cared for.

With BPD, the strategy involves repressing power and self-interest to maintain their attachment. That means that feelings like anger and disgust, which protect us through the fight/flight response, are rejected and repressed as a way for the child to get love by being agreeable, compliant and loving to the parent. When we repress these 'power' emotions, we find it hard to have boundaries, be discerning, have a sense of purpose and to feel strong or confident. We literally remain in a childlike state of helpless dependence.

This is called ego fragmentation, or structural trauma. It means that there is not just one identity, but two, or more. There is usually a terrified, sad and vulnerable child self that is desperate for love and validation, which in BPD is displayed to the world. Also, there is an enraged child self that over reacts to the threat of abandonment, or anything that even suggests rejection. There is also an incredibly rejecting child-self that thinks it is protecting us by repressing the parts of us that it fears are going to get us abandoned, which is often called the inner critic.

As you can imagine this gives rise to some very intense emotions and an unstable and fragile identity. It also means that these parts of us can take turns driving the bus, which leads to very unhelpful reactions and behaviours that ironically lead to other people abandoning them. Trying to be in a relationship with someone who is love-bombing you one minute and screaming abuse at you the next gets pretty old.

That's not to say that people with BPD don't grow up at all. Many can become highly functioning adults with good careers, loving friendships and stable adult lives, until they enter a romantic or sexual realtionship that 'triggers' this underlying trauma.

How do we break free from BPD?

There are a great many therapeutic approaches to BPD, most of which I have studied and used over the years. Below I present the approach I use with people which draws from all of them.

1. You are not your disorder. BPD tends to get worse over time, and after years of behaving in these ways and having multiple failed relationships, as well as endless psychological pain, it is easy for a person to start believing that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. It's not true. Everything inside you is put there by nature. It has purpose and it is meant to be a part of you. However, if you reject and repress these parts of you they come out in distorted ways. We aren't rejecting ourselves because we have BPD, we have BPD because we are rejecting ourselves. A psychologically healthy person is an integrated person, meaning that all parts of them are welcome and allowed to fulfill their function. You are not broken, your story about yourself is broken. Fix the story. How?

   
   

2. Heal the Inner Critic

   
   

   All personality disorders arise from psychological fragmentation, which is created by self-rejection, which is created by the inner critic. This has been called the superego, the adpative child, the introjected self and many other names. In essence, it is the emotion of disgust turned against ourselves. Disgust is the emotion that discerns between what is healthy and what is toxic. It is meant to face the world and help us make choices about what is welcome in our life and what isn't.

   However, children can't change their world much, so they learn to change themselves by hiding what might get them rejected. We experience this as a voice in our head that is both demanding and critical. It demands that we should be whatever it thinks will get us loved, and criticises any part of us that might not. It's quite clever too. It uses our emotions against us by scaring us, shaming us or guilt tripping us into not doing the things that might not be approved of. The really clever critics pretend to be our friend, protector or 'coach' who is trying to fix us, improve us or make us better so we can finally be worthy of love. If you think about this though, you don't need to be fixed if there is nothing wrong with you, so this is just a sneaky way of maintaining the idea that you are faulty.

   Now, before you go trying to defeat or kill your inner critic for this, have a think about why it is doing this. The answer is that it is trying to protect you against being abandoned and dying. The critic sounds very powerful, like an authority or a parent, because if you saw what it really was you wouldn't listen to it anymore. It is really just a terrified child, usually about 5 years old. So your critic is really a type of trauma that needs healing - a child self that needs to be loved and to know that it doesn't have to do this anymore because you can take care of yourself now. You can protect it, so it no longer needs to protect you by repressing parts of you. We dont kill the inner critic, we love it and heal it. Believe me, you will both be happier.

3. Re-integration Because this type of fragmentation happens early in life, these fragmented selves are usually the same age they were when it happened, so they are children. The vulnerable ones need love, reassurance, affirmation and protection. The angry ones need boundaries, guidance, love, affirmation and protection, but also permission to be themselves and to act in self-interest. This is often called inner child work, or self-reparenting.

   Who can do all of this amazing magical healing? You can. In fact, only you can do this. A therapist might guide you on how, but it is you who does the healing. Even though you may not feel like a powerful and capable adult yet, you actually are. You can give your inner children the affirmation, protection and permission they need to heal and grow into the adult version of themselves.

   We do this by giving our younger selves what they need, as the adult we are today. The last thing you need to do is become the inner child and re-experience that trauma. We need to rescue them from the past, standing firmly in the present. For this you may need the support and guidance of a therapist who does inner child work, especially if you become easily overwhelmed by your child-self feelings, but not everyone needs this.

   How? We respond to our distress with love, as you would with any distressed child. Anger is met with firm but loving containment. Terror is met with reassurance. Grief is met with comfort.

   The big problem with BPD is that we project this parent role onto a partner, and then hate them for not being able to fix us. They can't. No amount of love, support, affirmation or reassurance from someone else can heal the wound of self-rejection. The only thing that can do that is to stop self-rejecting and give our child selves the love they crave.

Conclusion

BPD can be healed, not just managed. Older therapies tended to focus on managing the symptoms, which can be be helpful, but unless we heal the fragmentation the symptoms just come back again. Trauma-informed approaches get to the cause of the problem. Fortunately there are many more therapists out ther using traumagenic approaches now, so even if you have tried before without success, maybe have another look at whats available.