Navigating a Relationship as a Recovered Borderline

Three years ago, I would never have imagined I’d be successfully completing my college degree while maintaining a happy, healthy relationship. Life, in itself, has been wonderful, despite all the challenges I faced in my past.

For some better context, I was diagnosed in 2018 with Borderline Personality Disorder, also abbreviated as “BPD”. The journey to my diagnosis was a tough one, but once I received it, things began to make a lot more sense. I was able to connect many issues I was having to an actual cause, allowing me to have a more complete perspective on my own psyche. And after spending years working on recovery, I’ve built a strong respect for the therapy techniques I utilized.

Furthermore, having such an experience gave me a renewed desire to help others that struggled with mental health issues. BPD is a personality disorder that is marked by an extreme fear of abandonment and difficulty regulating emotions. It has nine diagnostic criteria, and five need to be met in order to receive a diagnosis. These diagnostic criteria are: frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, patterns of unstable or intense interpersonal relationships, unstable self-image, impulsivity, recurrent suicidal ideation, emotional instability, chronic feelings of emptiness, difficulty controlling anger, and transient, stress related paranoia.

Since receiving treatment, there are several ways that I’ve learned to function in a healthy romantic relationship, many of which I use on a daily basis. The single most important one, however, is having and communicating with a solid support group. People with Borderline Personality Disorder can often feel alone or will doubt the security of their close relationships. For me, I’ve found it most helpful to have a list of close friends, family, or any other supporting people in my life. Currently, I have a small group of friends which I spend a lot of my time with. They have given me a way to reach out for support when I need it most. For many of the times I’ve needed them, it’s when I’ve reached a point of emotional distress that I’ve lost the ability to control my thoughts and feelings. During this, I’ll communicate these issues in a safe environment to process them with friends’ help. Not only do they offer a shoulder to cry on, but they also offer a sense of community that allows me to feel included and cared for.

The second most important device to use is Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or “DBT” for short. Dialectical Behavior Therapy sounds like a very complex thing, but in fact, it’s rather simple. It’s helped me on many occasions to regulate myself during an emotional breakdown or just when I need some extra cognitive restructuring. Originally designed for people that struggle with poor emotional regulation and coping skills, DBT was a game-changer to psychology during the 70’s and 80’s. Since then, it has grown more popular, yet still isn’t the most “mainstream” form of treatment. I believe it deserves some time in the spotlight, though, as it’s a big help to patients, their friends, family, or anyone else to implement these tactics in their everyday lives.

Typically, DBT is a lengthy treatment that involves group therapy and individual therapy, but after recovery, DBT can be used as “tricks and tips” to build healthy habits every day. DBT features something called “skills training”, which is divided into 4 different modules.

The first module is “mindfulness skills”. These skills focus on staying in the present moment and avoiding getting stuck in the past or future. It’s considered the most fundamental of all the modules. The second module is “emotion regulation skills”. These skills are all about regulating your feelings before they become “too much” and cause great distress. The third module is “distress tolerance skills”. For when all of your emotional regulation has failed, and you need some techniques to bring you back down to your emotional baseline. The fourth module is “interpersonal effectiveness skills”. Lastly, these skills combine everything we’ve learned in previous modules, and help you communicate with people in your life to get your needs met while also respecting their needs as well.

Just for a few examples, here are some specific skills I use regularly for different scenarios. When I need to be effective in communicating things to my partner, I use the G.I.V.E. skill. G.I.V.E. stands for “be Gentle”, “act Interested”, “Validate”, and “use an Easy manner”. When in too much distress to communicate things to my partner, though, I first use the T.I.P.P. skill. T.I.P.P. stands for “Temperature” (change your temperature with a cool cloth, ice water, etc.), “Intense exercise”, “Paced breathing”, and “Paired muscle relaxation”. And when nothing seems to be going my way, and there’s no way to fix it, I use the “radical acceptance” skill. In this skill, you use mindfulness.

As you can see, when all of these skills are combined together, you can create a behavioral plan to better deal with tough situations when they arise. In a relationship, this is integral to the survival of the relationship.