Hiding emotional reactions

For fear of possible negative consequences, many patients try not to allow certain feelings (e.g. shame or anger) to occur during borderline surgery. This leads to feeling control and finally to fading out.

Aperture

Due to a strong will for recognition, but also due to overestimation of their own abilities, borderline patients strive for extraordinary performance in certain areas of life. However, this can have the consequence that they blind their immediate, but also their therapeutic environment. Borderline patients thus appear more competent even in areas of life in which they are very insecure.

Numerous symptoms can occur in patients, but the central feature – as the clinical picture already indicates – is an unstable, changeable, ambivalent way of thinking and acting, which often changes from one extreme to the other. Another central point in the symptomatology of the borderline disorder is the fear of those affected of being abandoned. It usually has its origins in unstable or traumatic family structures in childhood.

Borderline patients suffer from this fear of loss and often try to contain the danger by so-called manipulative behaviour. In this context, manipulation through lying can also occur. However, this is only one of many possible symptoms that characterize the interpersonal relationship with a patient suffering from a borderline disorder.

Insufficient possibilities for problem solving

It is not always possible to simply block unwanted feelings. Often enough, however, they do work in patients with borderline vision and lead to severe emotional states due to the increased vulnerability mentioned above. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for borderline patients to try to endure these states with the help of drugs and alcohol.

Impulsiveness

In states of great excitement, borderline patients typically find it very difficult to keep their impulses under control. Actions are taken without caring about any consequences. This can be risky driving, eating attacks or even unprotected intercourse with strangers.

It is not uncommon in this context for spontaneous outbursts of violence or destruction to occur, such as throwing or smashing objects. Mood swings or a lability of the mood are a typical symptom for patients with a borderline disease. The feelings can quickly change from one extreme to the other, emotional outbursts and impulsiveness occur.

Frequently, disputes and conflicts with others occur. In a relationship, the affected persons often switch quickly between strong affection up to clinging and strong devaluation and pushing away of the partner with, however, mostly pronounced fear of being abandoned. Relationships of borderline patients are often described as very intense but extremely unstable and frequently changing.

Borderline personality disorder is a subgroup of the emotionally unstable personality disorder. This term already gives an idea of what the relationship behaviour of patients with this disorder can look like. Traumatic experiences often occur in the childhood of affected people, whereby the offender is often also an important reference person at the same time.

Thus, the child is looking for protection and security on the one hand, and on the other hand, it connects fear with this person. This can lead to the development of contradictory ways of thinking, which can later show up in behaviour. Patients with a borderline disorder often suffer from a strong fear of being abandoned by their partner and intensively seek his closeness and assure himself of his affection.

On the other hand, within a very short period of time there can be a change of feeling in which the affected person pushes away and devalues his partner. Thus, such relationships are either characterized by a rapid and erratic alternation of quarrelling and reconciliation or the affected person leads frequently changing relationships, which start very intensively but can also end very abruptly. This ambivalent and strongly fluctuating behaviour in interpersonal relationships is a very common symptom in borderline personality disorder, but there are also patients who can lead lasting and relatively stable relationships.