Falling In Love With Someone With Borderline Personality Disorder: What Challenges Can Be Faced?
Borderline personality disorder affects approximately 2% of the general adult population It is characterized by four types of symptoms: extreme impulsivity, mood instability, interpersonal problems and identity alterations. The symptoms are generally very varied (some present self-harm and suicide attempts) and usually cause a lot of suffering to the person who suffers from it and their loved ones.
In therapy, people come who have romantic relationships with people who have been diagnosed with this disorder, and they do not know how to treat them. That’s why I would like to give some guidelines or advice on how to use them, although it is always advisable to put yourself in the hands of a mental health professional to guide us. I am going to focus on the couple, but relatives or friends close to the patient may relate to this description.
The symptoms with which partners of patients with BPD usually come to therapy are: guilt, denial and emotional repression, fear and irritability, emotional exhaustion, grief, anger and emotional ambivalence. On some occasions these couples also tend to have another mental disorder.
One of the main symptoms in BPD are the relationship problems they have with the environment and that appear since early adolescence Bonding as a couple can be in the form of emotional dependence or in an ambivalent way. Generally, people with BPD show two types of relationship problems:
1. Anxious bond
They express an inability to tolerate separation (feeling of loneliness) from the person they love. In this case they usually feel a feeling of emotional emptiness and a high fear of abandonment. When the partner is close, the world of the person who has BPD only revolves around them
This ends up triggering an emotional dependence on the partner, which in some cases becomes instrumental dependence, as the partner covers all their needs, not just the emotional ones (for example, carrying out administrative procedures, or going to buy things, talking to someone, banking procedures, etc.). Relationships are fusional, establishing very clear limits with the rest of the people. For example: not wanting your partner to hang out with coworkers.
There are two types of profiles that have BPD that present the anxious bond: those who have a regressive tendency (more infantile), who look for the figure of “the savior” and need to be taken out of their suffering and everything they have to work on. for themselves. This profile usually adopts a more victimist and defenseless attitude
The other type of profile that has an anxious attachment is more egocentric. He assumes that his partner is there to respond to his wishes or orders, since he “does not know how” to do things for himself. Here, threats, tyrannical attitude or extreme jealousy usually occur on the part of the patient. The dependency in this case is not regressive (childish), but egocentric. But in both cases it denotes the patient’s insecurity. The thing is that on the outside he is perceived as a self-sufficient person. Recommendations for the partner of the person who has BPD:
2. Ambivalent bond
The other type of link they establish is ambivalent: it occurs especially in people with BPD who present pathological pride And it usually occurs in cases where these patients have suffered in the past in a relationship where they felt emotionally dependent on their partners. The bond is ambivalent because there is an internal conflict between the incessant search for a loved one and an intense fear of feeling vulnerable or being hurt (having the need to be self-sufficient).
For example: you may urgently need advice from your partner, but then become angry at the advice they give you (“you don’t understand me”, “let me do what I want”). They are the relationships that we know as: “neither with you nor without you.” The behavior of the person with BPD oscillates between victimhood and tyranny when the partner does not satisfy their expectations, which are usually changing.
What usually happens to couples is that they tend to get fed up and feel learned helplessness (The subjective feeling of not being able to do anything, resulting from the perception of lack of control). At the same time he also feels sorry for the couple’s suffering. In this case, they can leave the person with BPD, or stay, but will feel emotionally unstable, depending on how the person behaves towards them
If the patient feels that his partner is far away, he will tend to look for him and get closer again. On the contrary, if he feels too close, he will tend to avoid. This causes fatigue in the BPD patient themselves, and they prefer to be alone instead of bonding as a couple, since they have not allowed themselves to feel loved. Recommendations for family members of this profile:
If you feel identified, it is good that you ask for help to cope with this whole situation.
