It is not always easy to identify Borderline Personality Disorder, also known as BPD. This Mental Health Condition involves intense shifts in emotions, thought patterns, goals, and self-image, making it difficult to see and understand the root of the issues.
When you know the common signs of Borderline Personality Disorder, you can recognize these symptoms and seek the help you need from a Licensed Clinical Psychologist. Learn more about BPD and the effect it has on emotions, thought patterns, associations, behaviors, relationships, and more with this overview.
Where BPD Symptoms Come From
Though the symptoms of BPD vary from person to person, most of them revolve around shifting moods, disturbed patterns of thinking, shifting goals, and an unstable view of yourself and others. The intense and erratic mental and emotional state of BPD creates challenges at work, within relationships, and throughout other key aspects of daily life.
There are several risk factors associated with Borderline Personality Disorder. These factors include genetic predispositions or a family history of Borderline Personality Disorder or other Personality Disorders, brain abnormalities, and insecure attachment styles stemming from unstable relationships with primary caretakers during infancy.
Fear of Rejection or Abandonment
One of the most notable signs of Borderline Personality Disorder is an intense fear of rejection, separation, or abandonment. This fear can stem from insecure attachment styles in childhood, but it is also important to note that this fear is not simply just rooted in past experiences or current circumstances. Even if there is no sign of a loved one leaving you, you can still fear abandonment, rejection, and a feeling of not being worthy.
This fear can drive impulsive, reckless, or erratic behavior. It can lead to higher impulsivity in behavior, reactivity in words and actions, creating drama, perpetuating chaos, feelings of clinginess or possessiveness. It can also result in manipulative or codependent behaviors, creating unhealthy relationship dynamics that put you and your intimate relationships at high risk.
Severe Mood Swings
Severe and intense mood swings are one of the most common symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder. Feelings of happiness, security, and confidence can change quickly into anxiety, profound sadness, volatile temper tantrums, resentment, vindictiveness, rage, anger outbursts, or irritability. These patterns of constant shift in mood and affect or vacillating between idealization and devaluation can be as short as a few hours or as long as a few days. Mood swings influence many other Borderline Personality Disorder symptoms, such as reckless behaviors, impulsivity, paranoia, and instability in all intimate relationships.
Short Temper and Bursts of Anger
In addition to other mood swings, sudden bursts of anger are also common in people with Borderline Personality Disorder. This anger appears quickly and is often disproportionate to the current situation or the stressors. You might lose your temper frequently or respond to minor annoyances with extreme levels of hostility, bitterness, or passive-aggressive language and behaviors. These bursts of anger have the potential to lead to physical aggression, resulting in throwing things, breaking things, or involvement in physical fights and encounters with law enforcement or various legal problems.
Ever-Changing Self-Image
Borderline Personality Disorder affects your self-image and makes it difficult to see yourself clearly and objectively. Your self-image can shift quickly within minutes, hours, or days, leading to ever-changing goals and values. This changing self-perception often leads to negative and maladaptive thought patterns, such as perceiving yourself to be inherently inadequate or even thinking of yourself as if you do not exist.
A maladaptive and shifting self-image can lead you to chronically seek reinforcement, validation, and endorsement from your friends, family members, coworkers, loved ones, or anyone in an intimate relationship with you, which in turn leaves you feeling insecure and unstable in yourself and all your intimate relationships across the board.
Paranoia and Breaks From Reality
The stress and shifting emotional states of Borderline Personality Disorder can lead to distorted patterns of thinking that influence your view of reality. Those with Borderline Personality Disorder may experience detachment from oneself, dissociation from reality, paranoia, and/or hallucinations. These experiences might be only a few minutes long, but they can also last for hours or days and even weeks. While it may be difficult to ascertain whether these thoughts, feelings, and experiences are real, leading to uncertainty, anxiety, sadness, paranoia, maladaptive behaviors, anger outbursts or passive aggression, and distrust, it will ultimately destroy your intimate relationships, positive prospects, and opportunities.
Impulsive or Risky Behaviors
Impulsivity and recklessness are also common symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder. These can manifest as a wide variety of behaviors that put you in physical danger or create a slew of legal problems. They can also create strain in your relationships or at work. These patterns of behaviors can be a maladaptive attempt to handle stress, or they can be the result of numbness, extreme mood swings, other Borderline Personality Disorder symptoms, or other comorbid Personality Disorders.
Substance Abuse Disorder or Addictive Behaviors
Substance Abuse Disorder and other Addictive Behaviors commonly develop alongside Borderline Personality Disorder. Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder might see alcohol, prescription drugs, illicit substances, shopping, porn, sex, or traveling to escape reality as ways to handle the stress and mood swings they experience. However, these addiction patterns only worsen the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder over time, creating more long-lasting problems while offering zero long-term relief.
Gambling
Gambling is another impulsive behavior that stems from Borderline Personality Disorder. Reckless gambling is often the result of an intense mood swing; if you suddenly feel happy, confident, and energized, it is easy to believe that you are invincible. This confidence makes it tempting to bet large amounts of money.
Dangerous Behaviors
Many reckless behaviors associated with Borderline Personality Disorder put you directly in danger. These behaviors can include reckless driving, starting or joining fights, or participating in unprotected or otherwise unsafe sex. As with gambling, these dangerous behaviors often occur during mood swings that leave you feeling angry, energetic, or overconfident.
Sabotaging Success
Impulsive behaviors are not always as obvious as putting yourself in harm’s way. Sometimes, these reckless choices and impulsive decisions can take the form of maladaptive and impulsive patterns that invariability sabotage your success in the hope to assert independence, perceived dominance, and false sense of control over your life and relationships.
You might leave a prosperous opportunity or quit education, career, or end a meaningful association with no forethought. Similarly, you might end an intimate relationship for not getting validation or feeling rejected and abandoned.
Threats of Self-Harm
Self-harm and suicide—as well as threats of self-harm and suicide—can also occur in individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder. The urge to self-harm as a mean to numb difficult feelings can stem from a number of other symptoms, such as feelings of emptiness, inner void, bouts of anger, or negative self-image. Implicit or explicit threats of self-harm or suicide attempts to seek attention or act out are also unhealthy responses to the fear of abandonment or rejection by those suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder.
Unstable Relationships
Many of the symptoms of forethought contribute to relationship challenges. Your self-image, thought patterns, and inability to regulate emotions or modulate affect, all influence how you relate to and interact with others in life and relationships. Borderline Personality Disorder adversely affects these traits, which means it negatively affects your relationships at home, work, and in social settings.
It is not easy to identify your forethought —or any Mental Health Disorder—as the source of your relationship problems. Working with a Licensed Clinical Psychologist allows you to receive the care and treatment you need to understand the issue, build emotional regulation skills, and strengthen your relationships.
If you are looking for Borderline Personality Disorder treatment from a therapist in Los Angeles, Irvine, Beverly Hills, Newport Beach, Bel Air, Century City, Brentwood, Westwood, Huntington Beach, Mission Viejo, Aliso Viejo, and the surrounding areas, contact Blair Wellness Group to see how our evidence-based treatment plans can help you.
