Living with borderline personality disorder can feel like a constant battle. Emotions often feel overwhelming and unpredictable. The people you love can feel like strangers at the drop of a hat, while your sense of self may shift so dramatically that you sometimes barely recognize yourself.
Adults living with the realities of BPD are often grappling with ongoing emotional pain and turbulent relationships. This is frequently because they’re trying so hard to feel stable in a world that always feels like it’s falling apart.
BPD can fundamentally alter how you perceive and experience other people and life in general. Therefore, the intensity of its symptoms can be exhausting for everyone involved. However, despite its challenges, BPD responds quite well to treatment.
If you’re concerned about the impact of BPD on your life, a mental health professional can provide valuable support and guidance on the right treatment programs for your needs. This page can also help you better understand the impacts of borderline personality disorder adults often face, by exploring:
Frantic efforts to avoid abandonment: Often desperate attempts to prevent either real or perceived abandonment by others, including impulsive actions such as threatening self-harm when someone tries to leave.
Emotional Dysregulation in BPD
Emotional dysregulation for adults with BPD means that your emotions can arise fast and be incredibly intense – and often out of proportion to the situation at hand.3 In other words, your nervous system responds to minor triggers as if they’re catastrophes.
Dysregulation usually has three main components. These are:3
Emotions spike faster than typical responses.
However, it can be hard to picture what this process looks like if you don’t experience such dysregulation. For this reason, we’ve provided some examples.
Examples of Emotional Dysregulation
Example #1: A friend cancels lunch plans with you. Instead of feeling disappointed, you spiral into a panic that they hate you, which quickly turns into rage at being abandoned. Before long, you feel depressed, until hours later when you become exhausted by the experience.
Example #2: You’re experiencing the minor stress of being stuck in a long line of traffic. Soon, you start to feel a disproportionate frustration that soon escalates into rage, causing you to yell, honk your horn, or storm out. Soon thereafter, you feel mortified, as the mood shift happened so fast you can barely even identify what actually triggered it.
But how does emotional regulation relate to BPD? We cover how BPD develops next, as well as how these causes can lead to emotional dysregulation.
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If we are not an appropriate provider for care, we will assist in finding a care provider that can help.
Most people with BPD experience major childhood adversity, though not everyone with childhood trauma goes on to develop the disorder. In the following sections, we consider how genetic, biological, and environmental factors can contribute to the condition.
However, your genetics aren’t responsible for everything. Rather, they can create vulnerability that environmental factors might help to activate.
People with BPD aren’t choosing to overreact. Brain imaging studies have shown that people with BPD have heightened amygdala responses to emotional stimuli and reduced prefrontal cortex regulation.6 In other words, your brain genuinely processes emotions differently, making feelings much harder to control.
Furthermore, serotonin dysregulation can affect mood stability and impulsivity.7 Dopamine system differences can influence reward processing and risk-taking, both of which can make someone’s temperament more prone to intense emotional experiences.
Growing up in a family where your emotions were dismissed or treated as inappropriate can also contribute. If your caregivers frequently told you your feelings were wrong or overblown, then it’s difficult to learn healthy emotional regulation.
Separation and loss might also play a role. Early parental death or inconsistent caregiving can create attachment disruptions. These experiences teach you that relationships can be unstable and that people will ultimately leave, fueling fears of abandonment.
A Mission For Michael (AMFM) provides confidential and free mental health assessments for borderline personality disorder and other mental health conditions. Our assessments look at your current symptoms and the challenges they’re causing you. This allows us to provide you with personalized treatment recommendations.
You may be able to find free quizzes for mental health conditions like BPD. These are often generic and not reviewed by mental health professionals. Err with caution and contact AMFM Mental Health Treatment Center by calling us now.
DBT recognizes the core problem of BPD: experiencing emotions powerfully but often lacking the core skills to manage them effectively. As a result, DBT teaches you tools to develop new skills, rather than only focusing on insights.
DBT usually combines individual therapy sessions with skills training group sessions, focusing on your specific struggles and helping you apply new skills to real-life situations.
DBT Skills Training
DBT skills groups usually cover four modules that address different aspects of emotional dysregulation:
Mindfulness: Helps you to observe your thoughts and feelings without judgment, remaining grounded in the present rather than worrying about the past or the future.
Additionally, groups provide an opportunity for you to practice new interpersonal skills, see how your behavior affects others, and receive immediate feedback. Groups can also help to challenge black-and-white or all-or-nothing thinking about relationships.
Conflicts that arise in a group setting may also mirror patterns you struggle with in daily life. Working through these dynamics can help you handle similar situations more effectively.
Residential Care For BPD
Inpatient treatment for borderline personality disorder might be necessary when outpatient therapy isn’t enough to ease your symptoms, or when they have become severe enough that daily functioning feels impossible.
Chronic suicidal ideation, frequent self-harm, or recent attempts to end your life can also indicate that you would benefit from a safe environment removed from triggers.
Personality disorder residential care offers DBT and other evidence-based care throughout the day, rather than once or several times per week. You’ll participate in multiple skills groups and individual sessions, and will have access to immediate support if your emotions become overwhelming.
Clear expectations, consistent routines, accessible support, and positive social interactions can help to create the conditions for healing. You’ll also get the chance to practice distress tolerance and emotional dysregulation skills daily, rather than only during therapy hours.
Further, mental health stabilization in residential care can also safely address any potential co-occurring issues, such as depression or anxiety.
A Mission For Michael (AMFM) provides treatment for adults experiencing various conditions. Personality Disorder support is a phone call away – call 866-478-4383 to learn about our current treatment options.
See our residences in Southern California’s Orange County & San Diego County.
Take a look at our homes on the east side of the Metro area in Washington County.
View our facilities in Fairfax County, VA within the DC metro area.
A Mission For Michael can help you start the recovery process for BPD. Our programs include daily DBT skills training and individual therapy, along with psychiatric care and holistic activities for your ongoing well-being.
You’ll learn new skills with ample opportunities to practice, along with the caring support of our clinical team of experts. Treatment also addresses any other dual diagnosis needs, giving you the wraparound care you need to start living your best life again.
AMFM accepts most major insurance plans and can help you better understand your benefits. Contact us today and find out how our residential treatment can help you build a better tomorrow.
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The goal of this page was to help you better understand borderline personality disorder, including how it can develop and be treated. Yet you may still have some pressing concerns. For this reason, we provided some responses to FAQs on BPD to give as much clarity as possible.
BPD symptoms can definitely improve with treatment, though being “cured” is likely not the best word to describe this.
Many people with BPD histories go on to have stable relationships and successful careers, because the disorder doesn’t have to define your future. But recovery isn’t always about being cured – it’s about finding new ways of being to maximize your talents and better manage any limitations you might have.
There are currently no medications prescribed directly for BPD, as the disorder mostly affects your emotional and behavioral responses. However, psychiatric medications might help to manage specific symptoms or address any co-occurring disorders affecting BPD symptoms.
BPD and bipolar disorder both involve unstable moods, but they are different mental health conditions.
Mania or hypomania in bipolar disorder can last days to months before turning into depression. In contrast, BPD mood shifts can happen within minutes and are usually triggered by events like a perceived rejection or an interpersonal conflict.
However, these conditions can occur at the same time, which can complicate things. It’s recommended to see a professional to obtain an accurate diagnosis and get the targeted professional help you need, no matter the nature of your symptoms.
