People with BPD experience intense mental-emotional pain as their baseline mood. Emotions are extremely intense, leading to episodes of depression, anxiety or anger.
People with BPD have been described as living with constant emotional pain, and the symptoms of BPD are a result of their efforts to cope with this pain. It is very common for someone with BPD to have other mental health problems. These include: major or moderate to mild depression.
A person with BPD is highly sensitive to abandonment and being alone, which brings about intense feelings of anger, fear, suicidal thoughts and self-harm, and very impulsive decisions. When something happens in a relationship that makes them feel abandoned, criticized, or rejected, their symptoms are expressed.
The symptoms of BPD can be severe and debilitating, to the point where being unable to regulate emotions can “almost certainly wreck their life,” Hooper says. “What you begin to see is a life described as instability.”
Perhaps chronic pain is simply another manifestation of the inability of individuals with borderline personality disorder to self-regulate (i.e., the inability to regulate pain). In addition, pain symptoms may function as an interpersonal means of eliciting caring responses from others.
People with Borderline Personality Disorder are 13 times more likely to report childhood trauma than people without any mental health problems, according to University of Manchester research.
Research indicates that individuals with BPD are both highly pain tolerant as well as highly pain intolerant, depending on the context of the pain. Explicitly, during acute self-injury events, pain tolerance tends to be high, whereas with non-malignant chronic endogenous pain, pain tolerance tends to be low.
Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness that severely impacts a person's ability to regulate their emotions. This loss of emotional control can increase impulsivity, affect how a person feels about themselves, and negatively impact their relationships with others.
Many people with BPD feel emotions deeply and find working in a caring role fulfilling. If you are an empathetic person, consider jobs such as teaching, childcare, nursing and animal care.
For example, in one study, 24% of BPD patients reported severe psychotic symptoms and about 75% had dissociative experiences and paranoid ideation. Thus, we start with an overview regarding the prevalence of psychotic symptoms in BPD patients.
People with borderline personality disorder may experience intense mood swings and feel uncertainty about how they see themselves. Their feelings for others can change quickly, and swing from extreme closeness to extreme dislike. These changing feelings can lead to unstable relationships and emotional pain.
Intense and sometimes inappropriate rage is a characteristic of borderline personality disorder (BPD). A person with this condition has difficulty regulating their emotions or returning to their baseline. Extremes of rage and other intense emotions may last longer than might be expected, from a few hours to a few days.
However, those positive attributes are not without the proverbial strings attached; when the BPD explodes with vindictive rage, all they said or gave to their loved one may be taken away in one fell swoop of aggression. BPDs experience the world in extremes: black-and-white or all-or-nothing.
Compared to non-patients, BPD patients showed the anticipated higher crying frequency despite a similar crying proneness and ways of dealing with tears. They also reported less awareness of the influence of crying on others.
Antipsychotics are widely used in BPD, as they are believed to be effective in improving impulsivity, aggression, anxiety and psychotic symptoms [Nose et al. 2006; American Psychiatric Association, 2001].
But with some individuals with BPD, you don't want to get into the habit of allowing certain things such as calls after hours, visits to your home without announcing it, borrowing your things and never returning them, driving your car and keeping it longer than they should, etc.
The Social Security Administration placed borderline personality disorder as one of the mental health disorders on its disabilities list. However, you'll have to meet specific criteria for an official disability finding. For example, you must prove that you have the symptoms of the condition.
Part of their surprise almost surely stemmed from an uncomfortable truth: people with BPD are often regarded as hopeless individuals, destined to a life of emotional misery. They are also frequently viewed as so disturbed that they cannot possibly achieve success in everyday life.
Research has shown that the prognosis for BPD is actually not as bad at once thought. Almost half of people who are diagnosed with BPD will not meet the criteria for a diagnosis just two years later. Ten years later, 88% of people who were once diagnosed with BPD no longer meet the criteria for a diagnosis.
BPD is a very different diagnosis than schizophrenia, though the two can co-exist. While BPD is characterized by a pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships; schizophrenia is characterized by a range of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional dysfunctions.
Muscle Aches and Pain
Another common physical symptom of stress and anxiety is muscle pain/aches. Many folks with BPD experience high emotional stress due to rapid cycling moods, so this kind of physical symptom may be common. “For me it's the physical toll the anxiety takes on your entire body.
Family issues as a source of resistance
Another important source of resistance in treating patients with BPD is their notion that change may entail betraying their family in particular ways as well as giving up habits they may feel work well for them in avoiding feelings.
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is highly associated with verbal abuse, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, physical abuse, and/or domestic violence often suffered by those who are non-borderline.
BPD has been linked to the amygdala and limbic systems of the brain, the centres that control emotion and, particularly, rage, fear and impulsive automatic reactions.