Living with Borderline Personality Disorder can often feel like a roller coaster in which the ups and downs seem endless. Borderline Personality Disorder creates instability in relationships, emotional regulation, and self-image, which can sometimes be terrifying and painful.

People with Borderline Personality Disorder live in constant fear of abandonment or rejection, which sometimes becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re living with Borderline Personality Disorder, it’s not your fault. Borderline Personality Disorder is usually the result of severe trauma.

At My LA Therapy, we have special training to help you heal the underlying trauma that has led to these feelings of instability so that you can begin to develop a more resilient sense of self and create lasting, stable relationships. Our therapists are trained in trauma-specific, evidence-based interventions such as EMDR and DBT.

We will help you learn practical skills for emotional regulation and address distortions in your thinking that are contributing to anxiety, depression, relationship, and self-esteem issues. Most importantly, we will gently help you face and overcome your trauma so that you can heal and get your life back.

The DSM-5 emphasizes these points in diagnosing Borderline Personality Disorder:

• A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
• Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
• A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
• Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
• Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending excessive money, reckless driving, sex, substance abuse, binge eating).
• Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
• Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., irritability or anxiety lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).
• Chronic feelings of emptiness.
• Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
• Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

1. Psych Central