Breaking Down BPD
Personalities are the relatively consistent ways in which people feel, behave, think, and relate to others. Your personality reflects the ways in which other people generally describe you – such as calm, anxious, easily angered, mellow, thoughtful, impulsive, or standoffish. All people differ from their usual personalities from time to time, but, for the most part, personalities remain fairly stable over time.
For example, consider someone who has a generally jolly personality; this person enjoys life and people. However, when this person experiences a tragedy, you expect to see normal grief and sadness in this generally jolly person. On the other hand, someone with a personality disorder, such as BPD, experiences pervasive, ongoing trouble with emotions, behaviors, thoughts, and/or relationships. The following sections describe the core problems that people with BPD frequently experience.
The American Psychiatric Association has a manual that describes specific symptoms of BPD. The manual groups these symptoms into nine categories. Here, we condense these nine categories into four larger arenas of life functioning that are impacted by the symptoms of BPD in one way or another.
Although BPD has an identifiable set of symptoms, the specific symptoms and the intensity of those symptoms varies greatly from person to person. You will be able to see the nine symptom categories separately and how
BPD manifests itself in a wide variety of presentations in some future posts.
If you follow the link below, you will be able to take a fast quiz to discover what type of personality defines you.
Read the following articles to know more about the consequences of suffering wiht BPD.
Post made possible thanks to Montse M.