Introduction
There are some typical symptoms or features that can occur in a borderline syndrome. These include a disregard for one’s own experience, an increased vulnerability in the emotional experience and the masking of emotional reactions. Also the so-called blinding, an insufficient possibility for problem solving, impulsiveness as well as black-and-white thinking and dissociatines are part of it. Further symptoms are the so-called active passivity and self-harming behaviour (e.g. by scratching). In the following text the symptoms characteristics are explained.
Self-harming behaviour
Almost 80% of patients with borderline develop self-injuring behaviour in the course of their lives. These often very different types of self-harm (cutting, burning, draining blood, etc.) do not usually serve the purpose of killing, but rather to end a state of arousal.
Patients often state after a self-harm that they had to “feel” themselves again. Scratching is a symptom that can occur in patients with a borderline syndrome and is probably the first thing many lay people associate with a borderline syndrome. Scratching is a type of self-harming or self-damaging behaviour.
Typically, sharp objects such as a razor blade are used to inflict injury on themselves. Numerous cuts are often made to the forearms. Depending on how deep the injuries are, scars are left behind.
Apart from scarring, there are other types of self-injury, such as burns or hair pulling. The patients concerned name as a reason for the self-injuring behaviour that they can feel better again, that they can release inner tension or that they can drive away the inner emptiness that torments many patients very much. Self-injuring behaviour can also serve to manipulate the outside world.
Often the patients know about the effect that these injuries have on their social environment and they use this to get someone to turn to them. Rather rarely a suicide attempt is the aim of the scratching. In general, by the way, self-harming behaviour does not only occur with borderline disease. Other mental illnesses can also be accompanied by self-harming behaviour, for example depressive episodes or obsessive-compulsive disorders. Especially during adolescence, self-harming behaviour also occurs without being an expression of an illness.
Disregard of one’s own experience
With the borderline disorder, patients have “learned” already in childhood, through a mostly abusive or otherwise negative environment, that they should not listen to their feelings, because they are “wrong anyway”. Furthermore, this leads to the fact that important feelings are often not taken seriously and not considered by patients with borderline syndrome.
Increased vulnerability in emotional experience
It often does not take much to make a borderline patient explode. Even small things are enough to provoke a violent and long-lasting reaction.
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