10/24/2020
Personality Disorders are different from Mood Disorders. Personality Disorders affect how people see themselves, how they interpret what they are feeling, how they relate to others and how they behave. Mood Disorders can affect energy, activity levels and thoughts.
The cycles for Mood Disorders usually come on more gradually and can last for days to months. Cycles for Personality Disorders can come in more rapid and intense cycles lasting hours to days. A person with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) can cycle through extreme emotions from devastated, desperate or completely hopeless to feeling ok in a matter of moments and they can experience several of these cycles within the course of a day.
BPD distorts every aspect of a persons life. They can have a hard time making and keeping relationships (mistaking emotional intimacy with relationship intensity), experience severe self destructive behaviors (self-harm, overspending, promiscuity, addiction, eating disorders and self-sabotage), intense fear of new situations and people which leads to isolation, loneliness and depression, intense reckless and impulsive behaviors trying to find excitement and newness and intense amounts of shame when they do these things.
Most of these symptoms are experienced in secrecy and not in front of friends, colleagues and even family. It is challenging and sometimes feels impossible to parent a child with BPD or be in a long term relationship with someone with BPD and often the parents and partners give up far too early, which solidifies a Borderline Personality sufferer’s worst fear- being abandoned.
Treatment with psychotherapy using DBT, CBT, and some medications can help a person with BPD learn better coping mechanisms such as emotion regulation, distress tolerance skills and impulse control skills. Treatment is usually long term and sometimes life long, but with continued support and consistency, the narrative can be changed to that of recovery and hope.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324375
https://www.verywellmind.com/mood-swings-in-borderline-personality-disorder-425478
https://www.mhanational.org/conditions/borderline-personality-disorder
