Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a complex and frequently misunderstood human experience that deeply impacts not only the individual with the diagnosis, but many of their loved ones as well. Learning how to effectively interact with someone with BPD can often feel like trying to communicate in the middle of a burning building–you’re both lost and confused, communication sometimes seems disconnected, and neither of you knows where a safe place to step may be. 

If you know someone who struggles with BPD or BPD tendencies, you may have felt the deep desire to connect with and support them, while also experiencing personal burnout and a need to take care of yourself as well. You may have had moments of intense frustration or anger when their actions don’t make sense to you or when you simply wish you knew better how to respond. As a therapist who works closely with BPD, my goal is to destigmatize BPD in the community, to build understanding, and to help people learn how to have sustainable and healthy connections, so far as their personal limits allow. 

There are three critical things that I believe help people to support their loved one with BPD: (1) developing empathy and understanding for what it is like to struggle with BPD; (2) learn helpful ways to support and validate your loved one with BPD, and (3) learn how to take care of yourself and express your boundaries/limits within this relationship (you matter too, and relational burnout can be very real!). This post will be all about understanding where BPD comes from and developing empathy for the experience. Keep posted for topics 2 and 3 in later updates!

Biosocial Model

One of the most difficult things about living with BPD is that things feel very different for the person from the inside than how they look from the outside. This can lead to a lot of misunderstandings, confusion, and pain in relationships. Marsha Linehan (largely recognized as the lead researcher on BPD in the field to date) developed the biosocial model to help us understand what is going on inside the world of someone with BPD, without blame or judgment. 

There are two things that are focused on in the biosocial model: an individual’s biological experience of emotions, and their social environment’s responses to those emotions. Neither the individual nor the environment alone causes the intense emotional dysregulation and impulsivity in BPD, but transactions between the two over time can create difficulty in certain situations.

“Bio”: Individuals with BPD are frequently born highly sensitive to their emotions. A metal detector would be termed “sensitive” because it picks up on smaller amounts of metal more easily and quickly than others. Similarly, individuals with BPD often feel emotions faster and more intensely than others. This can be a powerful strength when we think about how emotions drive so much art, productivity, and connection in our lives! It can be difficult to feel emotions so frequently and for longer periods of time, but with proper support, people can learn to move through those emotions with great success.

“Social”: When someone born with inherent sensitivity lives in an invalidating social environment, however, transactions over time create an unhelpful pattern. “Invalidating” here refers to an environment where the individual feels out of place, misunderstood, and undervalued. “Invalidating” can definitely refer to an abusive environment, but it does not always. It can also refer to simply feeling out of place–like a tulip in a rose garden, or a puzzle piece that just doesn’t quite fit. It is a place where one’s unique strengths and needs are not understood or accepted. Think about if someone with a gluten intolerance was born into a family of bakers. The child did nothing wrong, and the bakers did nothing wrong, but through no fault of either, the child grew up inhaling flower and eating gluten day-to-day. Their family had no idea how to help them because all they had known prior was to offer bread and baking as comforts and sustenance.

Biological Sensitivity to Emotions + Invalidating Social Environment = Difficulty managing emotions

Imagine for a moment that you are trying to build a bookshelf, but someone gave you the wrong tools. Instead of hammers and nails, you have a sewing needle and thread. Everywhere around you, people are building their bookshelves without a problem, but for some reason, you simply can’t. At first, you may feel discouraged that what comes so easily to others seems more difficult for you, but you decide to ask for help to see if you can be like them. Imagine that the person you ask help from happily starts to explain the instructions to you, but neither of you realize that your tools are simply built differently than theirs. They explain everything like the instructions should be so simple, but it’s not working! You can’t just “hammer in the nail here”, because you don’t realize that your nail is actually a needle and your hammer is actually a spool of thread. You may feel self-hatred for not just being better. You may feel anger at the other person for making it sound so easy when it feels like an impossible task! This is what it feels like for someone who feels like their emotions or sense of being are out of place. They may be told to just “get over” their emotions, or simply act differently, but they don’t know how! And that feels impossible.

Think back to the analogy with the bookshelf. We started with the initial sensitivity to emotions (having a needle and thread) and showed how that interacted with an invalidating environment (not fitting in with others who had the hammer and nails). This environment would then impact you as an individual. You would likely get exasperated and frustrated as you try to make the other person understand that what they are describing as being so simple doesn’t work for you. Now, imagine that the person you are asking for help from responds with “well don’t get mad at me! You just need to try harder and listen to the instructions I’m giving you”. You can tell they are getting frustrated and angry back at you, but you don’t know how else to explain to them the intense frustration and difficulty you are experiencing.

With this painful invalidation, many people tend to go back and forth between two types of reactions: (1) shut down and withdraw, or (2) get louder with their emotion to try to get their point across. If you shut down and withdraw, you’re still stuck with an unbuilt bookshelf. Others may still be telling you that you need to catch up, so maybe you pretend like you know what you’re doing just to get people off your back. Either way, you learn to numb your responses and invalidate your own perception–after all, if everyone else seems to think it’s easy, maybe the problem is with you. If you get louder with your emotion by yelling at them or by pulling them in to show them how hard it is for you to build the bookshelf, then others may accuse you of attention seeking or being “manipulative”. They may still help you with the bookshelf just to get you to shut up, but this would only reinforce to you that the only way people believe you is if you scream at them to make them understand. You probably don’t even realize why you’re screaming at them, but your system has learned that’s what it needs to get it’s needs met. Without other tools, that’s probably what you would do. The problem is that over time, this would simply continue to perpetuate the cycle of invalidation. People may get exhausted at being yelled at and so they may be less willing to help you. Then you may either shut down and withdraw or get even louder until they listen. 

This pattern of shutting down or getting louder is very real to what people with BPD learn to do in order to survive. It is a painful and helpless feeling, and without someone to understand and say to them “I see that you have a different set of tools–I believe you when you say that this is hard,” that feeling of self-invalidation, self-hatred, and anger may continue. 

There are ways to break this pattern and cycle! And it does take both sides of the equation (the individual and the environment have to be willing to change). Over the next couple of weeks, I want to show you what you can do to support your loved one with BPD and yourself in this painful cycle. Before anything though, I hope you can have a moment to tell your loved one simply “I see you.”

If you think you or your loved one could benefit from therapy with someone specialized in working with BPD, give us a call for a free 15 minute consultation: 1-801-687-9509. Or check out our support/skills group for loved ones of individuals with BPD (link below).