Is borderline personality disorder curable?
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) can be lifelong, but it doesn’t have to be in most cases.
All posts filed under: Borderline Personality Disorder
Why are personality disorders difficult to distinguish from healthy personalities?
Everyone has a personality, comprised of strengths and weaknesses Get to know anyone well enough and you will begin to see that s/he struggles dealing with certain aspects of life, work, and relationships. These weaknesses in someone’s personality can even be so vulnerable that people can have acute episodes of anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric disorders. In other words, no one is perfect, nor does a healthy level of functioning depend on someone moving closer and closer to perfection over time. This basic truth makes it tricky to differentiate someone with a disordered personality from a flawed, but mostly normal personality organization. In order to determine if weaknesses in a person’s character meet criteria for a personality disorder, one of two things need to be present: 1. You have a great deal of reliable data about a person’s life across time and context, or 2. You need a great deal of experience and expertise recognizing signs and symptoms of personality pathology. Distress and impairment are often context-dependent Narcissists can be extremely high achievers. Obsessive-compulsive Personality …
Are the parents of individuals suffering from BPD aware of the role they had to play in the development of this disorder?
The most widely held theory of etiology for BPD is that sufferers of borderline personality disorder have both a temperamental predisposition (genetic emotional sensitivity and receptivity to one’s emotional environment) AND an emotionally invalidating environment during sensitive developmental periods. I would add that the larger context for both of these etiological factors is an intergenerational history of trauma. Explaining this is beyond the scope of this question, but an important point to hold in mind. This context is necessary to answer the question, since we have to consider how likely parents are to really empathize with the pain of their children. And, the short answer is that parents are not likely to fully comprehend how they have contributed to their child’s BPD. The reasons for this are as follows: Parents don’t tend to be aware of their contributions to the disorder without significant soul-searching because they are the source of the emotionally-invalidating environment. “Awareness” as used in the original question, in my reading, implies more than just intellectual understanding. Parents can cognitively “understand” that they …
Are psychopaths aware of their condition? Do they care?
Why are we so interested in psychpaths? Cold-blooded psychopaths and criminals are fascinating (and terrifying!) creatures. They fascinate us so much because they seem to express normal animalistic feelings, like rage, without much fear of social consequences, shame, or rejection.So what is the subjective world of the psychopath really like? Admittedly, it seems quite foreign to me, but let me take a stab (figuratively speaking–no one was harmed in the writing of this post) at an explanation. Psychopathy and antisocial Personality disorders are personality pathology Psychopathy and antisocial traits are fundamentally deficiencies in personality (i.e., they are personality disorders). A defining feature of personality disorders are that the “symptoms” are baked into someone’s day-to-day experience, and are therefore invisible–like water to a fish. The psychology jargon for this is that the traits are “egosyntonic”. In treating personality disorders, the first step is to build a discrepancy between the patient’s sense of social reality and a more widely-held feeling of social experience. Personality disorders bloom in families that are both extreme, harsh, and/or abnormal in their …
“My truth”: Why Sufferers of Borderline Personality Disorder Treat Feelings as Facts
People with a Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis can often seem to overvalue their own thoughts and feelings. In the cognitive behavioral therapy tradition, this phenomenon gets labeled as “emotional reasoning.” The logic of emotional reasoning goes like this: what I feel or think with conviction MUST be true because I feel so strongly that it’s true. The problem, of course, is many things feel true that aren’t. For example, the earth feels flat, but isn’t. A watched pot may feel like it takes forever to boil, but it always does given the burner works and is turned on. Here’s where it gets complicated. People with BPD treat their thoughts and feelings as facts because: Caregivers historically have not taken their thoughts and feelings seriously at all (i.e., invalidating emotional environment) The invalidating emotional environment makes sufferers of BPD self-invalidate; this means, they don’t take themselves seriously! Why would someone who doesn’t really believe that their internal world matters treat their thoughts and feelings as factual? The answer is quite simple: it’s too painful to relive …
It’s not easy being green: Is envy in BPD the same shade as envy in NPD?
Many have observed that borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder both share a common denominator of envy. Envy, since it’s a feeling of being or having less than someone else, is what points clinicians to the core feelings of emptiness at the heart of both disorders. But since the DSM-5 classifies these cluster B disorders as separate entities, does it naturally follow that envy presents differently in BPD vs NPD? Before addressing this question, I’ll start with several caveats: Envy is a natural emotion that everyone not only experiences, but also expresses in more than one way (Narcissism is also a trait that all possess and can express in numerous ways) BPD and NPD have many different expressions. If you look at the criteria for BPD and NPD, then calculate all of the different ways someone can meet criteria for the disorder, you’ll find that there can be tremendous diversity in symptom clusters within the same diagnostic category Personality disorders are notorious for bleeding into one another. Most people who meet criteria for one …
6 Existential Anxieties That Could Be the Cause of Your Panic Attacks
Panic attacks are among the most common and most distressing symptoms I see as a therapist. Not only do people encounter some of their most primitive existential fears, such as feeling like they are dying or going crazy, panic sufferers also have to deal with the repetitive (and often unpredictable) nature of panic, and the fact that others cannot fully appreciate the intensity of the experience. Search the web and you’ll find a ton of strategies to deal with panic attacks. In my opinion, very few (none in fact that I have found) adequately address different types of panic attacks. While I do not explicitly address tips for dealing with panic here, I believe we can optimize our coping strategies for anxiety attacks by first identifying what the panic is and what it is signifying. I identify six types of panic that I have observed in clinical practice below. I do not accept that panic attacks “come out of nowhere.” While cues may not be easily identifiable, experience has taught me that there is ALWAYS …