✨Living with BPD✨
Living with BPD feels like an emotional rollercoaster I didn’t sign up for. Some days, I feel everything so intensely, and other days, I feel empty and disconnected. I struggle with identity—who am I really without the people around me? Relationships can feel like a battle between craving closeness and fearing abandonment, even when I know someone isn’t leaving. Healing is hard, but I’m trying to take it one step at a time.
If you have BPD, what’s something you struggle with the most? How do you cope?
@Priscella
Hi there. 💜 I don't have BPD, but will share based on some BPD-adjacent experiences I've had--as well as some vicarious experiences other people with BPD have shared with me.
Something really challenging is how feelings/thoughts can flare up and seem incredibly vivid and real in the moment, and it feels like there's something desperately important there. But then within hours or even minutes, once that impulse has been expressed and feels like it's satiated, it completely vanishes.
So it's like in one moment you might be shouting at someone and really angry at them. And then sometime later, none of that fire is there, but other people are understandably still reacting to you as if the version of you from a few hours ago was real/permanent. Meanwhile, I've moved on to a different version that's very gentle, soft, apologetic, etc. (once that fire has exhausted itself). So it's confusing, both for me who's oscillating (which one is the real "me") and also for whoever's trying to interact with that.
What's helped:
-Internally - mapping out the different sides, understanding how they get triggered, noticing as one element flows into another element, and gradually there being a sense of them forming a coherent whole/system that's complicated and counterintuitive but not entirely inconsistent. Finding a way to balance the two thoughts of "none of this is real" (not clinging onto any one specific version of me as being the one/true/real one to the exclusion of all others) and "all of this is real" (empathy/self-compassion for all of the different versions of me).
-Interpersonally - avoiding rushing... delaying any major decisions/actions toward others until things feel less "spiky". For example, if I have an impulse to contact someone based on a fear of our relationship being in peril, forcing myself to wait a little while. Anything I say/do while in a desperate state will be interpreted in a pessimistic/fearful way by a future version of me. So those actions that I perform in a stressful moment intending to quell anxiety become the cause of increased future anxiety (which I'll then want to apologize for or try to "resolve" and then the cycle repeats). Things are simpler if I "keep my cards to myself" sometimes, wait for storms to pass, and communicate "from a position of strength" when I'm in a bit more of an equilibrium.