Borderline Personality Disorder

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BPD: Def

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Borderline personality disorder is characterized by repetitive self-defeating or self-destructive behavioral patterns, particularly associated with interpersonalrelationships, self-image beginning in early childhood

Part of Cluster B PD's

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BPD: Etiology

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familial trauma, loss or separation during the firstthree years of life, adoption, incest, violence, hostile environments, and ADHD

These individuals often have a history of an early-life abandonment or victimization andabuse by a parent

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BPD: Treatment

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Individual Psychotherapy

DBT

Hospitalization or Partial Hospitalization if necessary

The therapist’s work is to help ‘borderline individuals’ learn to integrate (‘good-self ’ and ‘bad-self ’).

essential components of treatment:

Providing a stable treatment framework

Having highly active and involved therapists

Establishing a connection between the client’s actions and feelings Identifying adverse effects of self-destructive behaviors

Paying careful attention to counter-transference feelings

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BPD: Personality Traits

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The ‘borderline’ individual, who failed to experience normal separation-individuation, perpetually seeks out an ‘idealized’ relationship to replace the ‘rejecting’ mother whofailed to provide adequate emotional nourishment.

Typically, individuals with BLPD are argumentative one moment, depressedanother, sometimes panic-stricken, and emotionally numb at other times.

Their emotional rollercoasters are related to the fact they cannot tolerate being alone but also cannot tolerate closerelationships.

They try to fill chronic feelings of boredom in destructive ways, frantically searching forsomeone to fill the emptiness, yet provoking others in ways that precipitate loss or victimization.

Thus,borderline individuals suffer repeatedly the pain of destructive and tumultuous interpersonalrelationships.