Borderline Personality Disorder · First-hand accounts · Community
I was thirty-one years old when a psychiatrist first said the words Borderline Personality Disorder to me. I had been in and out of services since I was seventeen — depression, anxiety, "emotionally unstable personality traits", a brief and terrifying inpatient admission at twenty-three — but nobody had ever put a name to the whole shape of it. The diagnosis landed like a key turning in a lock I had been pressing my ear against for years.
First-hand accounts from people diagnosed with BPD
Loving someone with BPD — the joys and the challenges
Raising or supporting a child or adult child with BPD
Clinicians and therapists on what BPD really looks like
One month without being blamed for everything. One month without being yelled at, shut down, devalued, belittled, or discarded. One month of going out with friends without calculating whether I'd have to explain myself later.
What nobody told me about was the memory. He would recount arguments we'd had and I would not recognise them. Not because he was lying — I genuinely believe he wasn't.
The reason you can't get over your ex isn't weakness. It's because of a very specific cocktail of psychological tactics that have left your nervous system in a state it was never designed to be in for this long.
It is not an exaggeration to say that finding this community helped save my life. No one around me understood what it meant to have your faith in people dismantled that completely.
I have been with my partner for four years. He has BPD. I want to write something that is not a warning or a survival guide, because I am tired of those being the only narratives available to partners of people with BPD.
I spent the first three years of caring for my son — who has BPD — trying to fix it. I researched treatments, pushed for referrals, attended every family session I was invited to, read every book I could find. I was convinced that if I found the right combination of interventions, the right therapist, the right approach, I could solve this.