Borderline Personality Disorder: The Jukebox of Self Doubt Playing With Marbles

Having borderline personality disorder (BPD) means struggling to regulate your emotions. If depression sucks the colour out of the world, then BPD turns it right up until it’s painfully bright.

If you have BPD then you’ll react in intense ways to emotional triggers: You might get the wrong coffee order, and your inner monologue starts telling you that you were given a mocha instead of a latte because you are a bad person. It means your relationships are often intense and unstable – this is such a key part of the disorder that it’s part of the diagnosis. You might spend money impulsively, and your friends might find you overly generous with your gifts.

It can also be frequently misdiagnosed but, when it is identified, people with BPD are often labeled as “difficult”. This labeling and stigmatization of the disorder can feed into the looming fear of abandonment that is a cornerstone symptom of BPD.

BPD can lead to a very unstable existence. In the UK, where our BPD star Sophie is from, it’s actually called emotionally unstable personality disorder, or EUPD. Sophie is telling us her story, and how her BPD makes her hyper-attuned to the emotions of others. We’ll find out how BPD can be a defence mechanism by a brain that’s been through trauma, and we’ll learn about how it’s treated. We’ll hear from a doctor who knows what’s going on in the brain and can tell us about how people can get better. Treatment is a lot of work, with a lot of talking. Our doctor knows how and why the different treatments out there are effective, and Sophie’s been through the process.

This is a condition that remits and recovers. One of the features that defines recovering is being in a stable relationship, of any kind.