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 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.
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.
My mother died when I was thirty-four. She was never diagnosed with anything, because she never sought help, because in her generation and her culture you did not do that. But in the years after her death, as I began my own therapy and started to understand the patterns of my childhood, I came to believe — with the quiet certainty that comes from recognition rather than proof — that she had BPD.
My daughter was labelled difficult from a very young age. Sensitive, explosive, impossible to reason with when she was upset. Teachers used words like "attention-seeking" and "manipulative" in ways that made me feel like I had failed at something fundamental. I spent years trying to find the right approach — firmer boundaries, more warmth, different schools, different therapists. Nothing seemed to hold.
Everyone talks about the crises. The self-harm, the hospital admissions, the relationships that imploded. Those are the parts of BPD that get written about, dramatised, warned against. What nobody mentions is the quiet periods — the weeks or months when you are, by most measures, fine — and how disorienting those are.
People hear "fear of abandonment" and they picture someone clingy, demanding, unable to let their partner out of their sight. That is not what it is like for me, and I suspect it is not what it is like for most people with BPD.
I have been a consultant psychiatrist for twenty years, and for the last twelve of those I have specialised in personality disorder services. I want to write about BPD not from a clinical distance but from the position of someone who has sat across from hundreds of people living with this condition and been changed by those encounters.
My brother has BPD. I am two years older, and for most of our childhood, I was the easy one. The one who didn't cause scenes, didn't need extra attention, didn't send my parents into crisis management mode at eleven o'clock on a school night. I was proud of this, in a way that I now find complicated to think about.