Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a Mental Health Disorder that distorts thought patterns and affects your ability to regulate your emotions. As a result, individuals with BPD experience severe symptoms such as intense mood swings, shifting goals, volatile behavior, impulsivity, lack of sense of self, poor self-esteem, self-injurious behaviors, Addiction Issues, Mood Disorders, lack of secure attachment, and an unstable self-image.
Without treatment, BPD can harm your relationships and professional life. It can also lead to reckless behaviors that put you and the people around you at risk. That is why it is necessary to seek professional intervention and treatment from a Licensed Clinical Psychologist.
Learn more about how BPD affects your life and what the right treatment can do to help with this overview.
Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline Personality Disorder distorts patterns of thinking and causes intense, shifting emotional states. These problems make it difficult to maintain control over your emotions and develop a clear, objective view of yourself, your relationships, and your place in life. From overwhelming mood swings to an intensely negative view of yourself, the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder makes life feel negative, unstable, and out of control.
Borderline Personality Disorder’s symptoms look different for everyone, but they all stem from the distorted thought patterns and poor emotional regulation caused by this Mental Health Disorder.
Anger and Mood Swings
Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder commonly experience intense and unpredictable mood swings. Feelings of anger, irritability, depression, hopelessness, rage, angst, and anxiety can come from seemingly nowhere. Mood swings can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. This unpredictability—paired with difficulty regulating emotions, inability to modulate affect, lack of mindfulness, and inability to manage stress or anger adaptively—often leads to volatile behaviors, impulsivity, instability in thoughts, actions, shifting values, and changes in relationships.
Similarly, individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder often struggle with anger management issues. Short tempers or disproportionate responses to mild problems or annoyances exacerbate emotional dysregulation. These issues can lead to overly hostile attitudes, passive-aggressive behavior, and even physical violence.
Unstable Self-Image
Borderline Personality Disorder affects your ability to see yourself and others clearly. Distorted thought patterns cause your self-image to shift, which means your mindset, goals, and values shift with it. Your view of yourself becomes false and unfair. You might see yourself as bad and unredeemable. You might even think of yourself as if you do not truly exist. This unstable self-image leads to a reliance on external sources of stability. Without other people in your life providing validation and assurance, you can feel insecure and out of control.
Intense Fear of Rejection
The negative, ever-shifting self-image many individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder struggle with often leads to an intense fear of rejection, separation, or abandonment caused by self-fulfilling prophecy and mental schemas from adverse childhood experiences. Because you rely so heavily on others for validation and attention, you end up clinging to the wrong associations and people that reinforce the same mental schemas. This unhealthy reliance and distorted views can lead to possessive or manipulative behaviors in your relationships. It can also create codependent relationships and other unhealthy power dynamics that reinforce the same maladaptive patterns stemming from your childhood insecure attachment styles and traumatic experiences from your past.
Fear of rejection might also lead to impulsive or reckless behaviors. When you are desperate for assurance and care from others, you may resort to drastic measures to keep people close to you. The reckless behaviors associated with Borderline Personality Disorder put both you and the people around you in danger. It is crucial to seek professional intervention so that you can build a more positive self-image, establish healthier relationship dynamics, and eliminate impulsive, dangerous, chaos oriented, dramatic, attention-seeking, and reckless behaviors.
Breaks From Reality
Distorted thought patterns and shifting emotional states can also harm your view of reality, leading to hallucinations or bouts of paranoia. These experiences cause intense anxiety, instability in mood or goals or behaviors, paranoia, and distrust for others, further exacerbating the issue. Furthermore, these breaks from reality can deepen your desire to seek validation and assurance from others, which, in turn, worsens unhealthy patterns and maladaptive relationship dynamics.
Self-Sabotaging and Threats of Self-Harm or Self-Injurious Behaviors
Reckless behavior stemming from intense mood swings, unhealthy and unstable relationships, and a negative self-image can culminate in harmful, self-sabotaging behaviors. You might get in the way of your own success and happiness by quitting your job for seemingly no reason or ruining your intimate relationships.
In severe cases, reckless behaviors can turn into urges to self-harm. These urges or threats of these impulsive urges can also be a response to your fear of rejection or abandonment. Over time, reckless self-harm and self-sabotaging behaviors can lead to suicidal thoughts and threats of suicide.
Treating Borderline Personality Disorder With Psychotherapy Using Evidence-Based Treatment Models
The most effective treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder is Psychotherapy using evidence-based treatment models under the care of a Licensed Clinical Psychologist aims to understand and resolve the root causes of Mental Health Disorders. Symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder stem from distorted thought patterns, inability to modulate affect, high-level of impulsivity, shifting goals or values, intense mood swings, Addiction Issues, inability to form healthy attachments, and emotional dysregulation.
Through Psychotherapy using scientific models, patients can build more positive patterns of thinking, develop greater mental and emotional resilience, and learn how to regulate emotions to improve mental and emotional well-being. With help, you can build a stable self-image, treat Mood Disorders and Addiction Issues, overcome stress and anger management, and maintain stronger, healthier relationships with intimate partners, friends, and colleagues.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the most common forms of Psychotherapy. Through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Licensed Clinical Psychologists help patients develop greater awareness of their own thoughts and feelings. This allows you to distinguish between what you feel in the moment and what you do in response to those feelings.
As a result, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a powerful treatment for replacing negative thought patterns with more productive and positive ones. In the context of Borderline Personality Disorder, this treatment helps you recognize and correct the distorted thought patterns causing you distress.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Dialectical Behavior Therapy also seeks to improve awareness of thoughts and emotions. However, it also focuses on the development of cognitive skills such as mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness.
These skills lessen the control that negative thoughts and emotions have over you. Regaining control makes the severe mood swings of Borderline Personality Disorder less overwhelming. As a result, you can correct reckless behaviors, improve self-image, and better handle feelings of fear, anger, and uncertainty.
Psychodynamic Therapy
Psychodynamic Therapy increases self-awareness and builds a deeper understanding of thought patterns and emotional responses. With the help of a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, patients who undergo Psychodynamic Therapy learn to view their present emotions and behaviors through the context of their own life experiences.
This viewpoint develops a clear understanding of how past trauma and relationships influence current thought patterns, emotions, and behaviors. With this knowledge, patients can free themselves from past experiences and build thought patterns and emotional regulation skills to build a healthier future.
Blair Wellness Group Offers Tailored and Customized Treatment Modalities Using Evidence-Based Models Specifically Designed for the Clinical Needs of Professional Men
Combining different forms of Psychotherapy to create a personalized treatment plan is the most effective way to create positive, lasting change for patients with Borderline Personality Disorder. If you are seeking treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder 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.
