Lexi Geller
Staff Reporter
Borderline Personality Disorder, also known as BPD, has many symptoms specific to it. One of which includes a tendency to get trapped in a cycle of unstable relationships. This can mean romantic relationships, friendships, or family dynamics. There are many ways in which these relationships can become very unstable for the person living with BPD. The way in which this symptom comes to be is actually dependent on other symptoms of the disorder.
Very Well Mind explains that “Many people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) experience intense and unstable relationships with others as a part of the disorder.1
Their relationships tend to fluctuate between being all good or all bad, and they can be unable to experience contradictory feelings when relating to the world or others. This black and white thinking, or splitting, can spill over into all relationships including those at school or work with peers, professors, and instructors, managers, and supervisors.”
So this specific symptom actually is an effect of the symptoms fear of abandonment, and the tendency to ‘split.’ Splitting is the way in which a person processes situations with black and white thinking, where someone sees someone, something, a situation, or even themselves as to all good or all bad. When splitting occurs and the person with BPD is seeing something, or more specifically someone, as all bad, this is where the instability in relationships is developed.
When someone with BPD splits on someone they have an interpersonal relationship with, this can cause the person with BPD to believe the other person is nothing but bad and a threat, and they may take these emotions out on the person they have split on. This may cause the other person to become increasingly confused, as the person with BPD seems to hate them terribly out of nowhere, over a seemingly small mistake or misunderstanding.
When the split happens the other way and reverses back to believing that this person is all good and not bad, this leads the person with BPD to regret the decisions they made when they split for the first time, which may be expressed in tears, apologies, self-harm, and isolation. This leads to even more instability in relationships due to the lack of communication and understanding from one person to another, and because of the sometimes inevitable symptom of splitting.
Image Credit: BPD Humans
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