- The essential feature of Borderline Personality Disorder is a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, affects and marked impulsivity that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.
- A person with this disorder will make frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. The perception of impending separation or rejection, or the loss of external structure, can lead to profound changes in self-image, affect, cognition and behavior. These individuals are very sensitive to environmental circumstances. They experience intense abandonment fears and inappropriate anger even when faced with a realistic time-limited separation or when there are unavoidable changes in plans. They may experience panic or fury when someone important to them is just a few minutes late or must cancel an appointment. These abandonment fears are related to an intolerance of being alone and a need to have other people with them. Their frantic efforts to avoid abandonment may include impulsive actions such as self-mutilating or suicidal behaviors.
- Individuals with this disorder have a pattern of unstable and intense relationships. They may idealize potential caregivers or lovers at the first or second meeting, demand to spend a lot of time together, and share the most intimate details early in a relationship. However, they may switch quickly from idealizing other people to devaluing them, feeling that the other person does not care enough, does not give enough, and is not "there" enough.
- These individuals have sudden and dramatic shifts in self-image, characterized by shifting goals, values, and vocational aspirations. There may be sudden changes in opinions and plans about career, sexual identity, values, and types of friends. These individuals may suddenly change from the role of a needy supplicant for help to a righteous avenger of past mistreatment. Although they usually have a self-image that is based on being bad or evil, individuals with this disorder may at times have feelings that they do not exist at all.
- These individuals may have a pattern of undermining themselves at the moment a goal is about to be realized. For example, they may destroy a good relationship just when it is clear that the relationship could last.
Criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder:
BACK
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 (spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating) recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood chronic feelings of emptiness inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms - A person with this disorder will make frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. The perception of impending separation or rejection, or the loss of external structure, can lead to profound changes in self-image, affect, cognition and behavior. These individuals are very sensitive to environmental circumstances. They experience intense abandonment fears and inappropriate anger even when faced with a realistic time-limited separation or when there are unavoidable changes in plans. They may experience panic or fury when someone important to them is just a few minutes late or must cancel an appointment. These abandonment fears are related to an intolerance of being alone and a need to have other people with them. Their frantic efforts to avoid abandonment may include impulsive actions such as self-mutilating or suicidal behaviors.