8 Major Behavioral Traits of Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious mental illness that affects how you think and perceive things, making it difficult to function in daily life. It’s a mixture of unpredictable feelings, intense emotions, and unstable relationships. Your identity, ambition, and preferences may fluctuate regularly, leaving you confused and unsure of yourself.

A lot of people confuse this condition with bipolar disorder. While they share some common symptoms and are both mental illnesses, they’re not completely alike. Bipolar disorder is a mood disorder, and BPD is a personality disorder.

BPD tends to make people highly sensitive to the people and things around them. Some have compared it to an exposed nerve ending. Minor things can invoke strong and sometimes extreme responses. This emotional instability has a major impact on maintaining healthy relationships.

It becomes hard to shift your focus from the thing that’s triggering you. It might cause you to say things you don’t mean and make you act out in irrational ways. This behavior will later have you feeling guilty and experiencing feelings of humiliation and shame. However, you can get it under control with the help of medications and coping methods. Periodic and regular treatment can help you regain control over your emotions, feelings, and behaviors.

BPD traits and symptoms can manifest themselves in numerous ways, but doctors classify them into the following key areas for diagnostic purposes. At a minimum, five traits need to be present in an individual’s personality for them to have BPD.

Fear of Being Left Alone

People with BPD have a continuous fear that those they care about will leave them. Small events that an average person may consider meaningless can greatly affect them. It could be as simple as someone coming home later than usual at night or somebody leaving them alone at a party for a few minutes.

This could prompt them to be by their loved ones’ side and refuse to let them go.

They could become overly attached, demand attention, start conflicts, follow and monitor the whereabouts of the people in their life, and try to stop people from going away. Unfortunately, such behavior often makes the loved ones in their lives get detached and leave, turning their fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Issues With Self-Harm

Individuals with this mental illness are more likely to have suicidal ideation and may harm themselves. Suicidal behavior can range from contemplating suicide to making desperate actions or threats to attempting suicide. Any action that causes you harm and creates physical or emotional pain is classified as self-harm. People often burn and cut themselves as a way to self-harm.

Emotional Instability

BPD is associated with erratic emotional states and mood swings. Typically, being happy one minute can be easily followed by being depressed the next. Small issues that other individuals easily forget and dismiss can throw a person with BPD into a whirlwind of emotions.

These emotional outbursts are severe, but they tend to dissipate quickly. They last only for a few hours or sometimes, if you’re lucky, a few minutes. This is particular to BPD as opposed to mood swings in depression or bipolar disorder.

Changing Self-Perception

Individuals with BPD often have a very skewed self-perception and may think of their identity as unstable. Some days, they could feel on top of the world and may despise everything about themselves on other days.

Such thought processes are quite common with many mental illnesses, but BPD has an increased intensity. It can feel like you have no true knowledge about yourself or anything you desire. This could result in frequent changes in employment, friends, goals, ideas, and even sexuality.

Unhealthy Views About Relationships

Individuals with BPD tend to have strong but brief relationships. They can be quickly attracted to somebody and fall in love with them. They may believe that every new person they fall for would complete them, only to be heartbroken soon after. Their relationships can appear to be either wonderful or terrible, with no in-between.

This doesn’t just affect them but can also play with the mental health of their loved ones. Their family members, romantic partners, and loved ones may experience emotional upheaval due to these rapid shifts between romanticization and rejection.

Self-Sabotaging Behavior

This trait leads people to indulge in dangerous and unhealthy behaviors. Someone with BPD may seek lifestyle choices that invoke pleasure and thrill, especially when they feel down and sad. They might impulsively act on their emotions and waste money meant for important tasks like paying bills or buying groceries.

They could go on an unhealthy eating spree, drive dangerously, steal things, or take illegal drugs and alcohol that may turn into a lifelong fight with alcoholism and substance abuse. These dangerous practices could make them happy momentarily, but are dangerous to their physical and mental health.

Sense of Loneliness

BPD can leave people feeling as if they’re hollow on the inside. At times, they feel like they don’t amount to anything or that they’re nobodies. Since this sensation makes them uncomfortable, they attempt to overcome this loneliness with drugs, alcohol, unhealthy amounts of sex, and food. This indulgence in bad habits doesn’t achieve anything, and they still feel unsatisfied.

Outbursts of Anger

Many individuals with BPD struggle to keep their anger under wraps and are often short-tempered. When something triggers them, they may find it difficult to restrain themselves. This results in them throwing objects, yelling, and becoming completely overtaken by wrath. This rage may not always be directed towards another person. They could also direct this anger inwards, resulting in self-harm, as discussed earlier.

If you or someone you love is looking for help, you should buy A Notebook of Love by Luis Trivino. This book serves as a guide for others who want to dive deeper into the world of mental illnesses. Luis is a war veteran who overcame various mental health issues with tenacity and bravery. This book helps people struggling with mental trauma, bipolar disorder, or alcoholism.

You can buy A Notebook of Love online from Amazon. Get in touch with us if you need any help!