BPD Subtypes

When searching for information on BPD, I came across a set of subtypes that describe the various features of BPD. These subtypes are:

• Discouraged: this type of borderline is either avoidant, believing no-one will like them anyway, or overly dependent on others. They have an intense fear of abandonment. Borderlines of this type may also suffer from depressive symptoms.
• Impulsive: this is the most hated BPD type among professionals. People who are primarily impulsive tend to act before thinkign. This includes violence or other antisocial behavior. Conversely, they may also engage in constant approval-seeking.
• Petulent: borderlines of this type use passive-aggressive behavior, including emotional or physical self-abuse, to get their needs met by others. They have an intense fear of abandonment,, unstable self-image, and inability to express their needs properly.
• Self-destructive: this includes depressive and self-harming tendencies. People of this type may not have many BPD traits other than self-injury and affective instability, so they may not technically meet the criteria of BPD.

Please note that people with BPD may have some features of one type and some of another. I, for one, have features of the discouraged and petulent types.

All types except for the petulent borderline operate in an abandoned child mode. Petulent borderlines operate in an angry child mode. I do see this point, but I want to stretch that the angry child usually masks the needs of the abandoned child, as my therapist explained. I myself cannot feel sadness unless I've first expressed intense anger or rage. Yesterday, I found myself in such a situation. I had had a minor conflict with my husband which led me to fear abandonment. As I got back to the ward, the nurses were assuming I'd had a good day - after all, it was my anniversary -, and were encouraging me to think positvely. Now I could and maybe will at one point write up a whole post on the positivity paradigm, but suffice it to say I snapped. I had a rage that, after a lot of back-and-forth screaming between me and the nurses, led to me running off and wandeirng around grounds screaming. I could only start to feel the sadness and fear of abandonment after I'd blown off some steam and calmed down again.

Autistic Processing Difference vs. Cognitive Distortion

Today, I experienced a combination of emotional turmoil and sensory overload. Which came first is hard to tell, as I was having oversensitivities already for an hour or so, but the actual reaction, which is either a meltdown or an emotional breakdown, was caused by frustration. Given that both autism and borderline personality disorder come with distress tolerance issues, it is hard knowing which is to blame. It doesn't really matter, except that the two require different approaches. BPD treatment involves skills training in distress tolerance, learning to shift your idea that you can't handle frustration to the idea that you prefer not to get furstrated. Autistic distress tolerance issues involve an increased need for routine and time to adapt to a sudden change in that routine.

When sensory overreactivity comes into the equation, it gets more complicated. If this is assumed to be an emotion regulation or distress tolerance issue, people need to learn to accept that sometimes there's noise they don't like. When people still didn't acknowledge my autism, I was often told that it's other people's right to make noise, as if I was depriving them of that right with my reaction to overload. In autism, however, noise can be painful, and the right approach is to allow the autistic quiet time away from the overloading stimuli.

Now that I write this, I notice that I'm connoting that the treatment I assuem is perceived to be right tfor BPD is really not that right at all. In fact, I believe that you cannot assume that a problem with distress tolerance is ever true unwillingness to accept that things can't happen on your terms all the time, which is what is assumed in personality disorders. There are some people who are truly unwilling to take others' feelings into account, but this si much rarer than the assumption that people are unwilling to take others' feelings into account. I realize that cognitive distortions are not necessarily willful, and that the thought that you can't handle any frustration is not the same as the thought that the world revolves around your need for gratification. What I mean to say, however, is that most people, and especially autistic or otherwise neurodiverse people, do not just think they have difficulties. We genuinely do process stimuli differently, and this means that "can't" is not just a cognitive distortion most of the time. That doesn't mean that autistics doon't have cognitive distortions, too. What it means is that you need to take into account autistics' genuinely different processing style when assessing or treating cognitive distortions. As I was being told for the umpteenth time that my daily living skills deficits are largely due to fear of failure, I begun to wonder whether NTs can truly evr make such a judgment.

The Attention-Seeking Theory of BPD

There is lots of stigma surrouding mental illness. Borderline personality disorder is no exception. In fact, it is among the more stigmatized illnesses. Particularly, people believe borderlines act out to gain attention, while there's evidence they do it out of a need to regulate emotions.

I am very thankful that I didn't have the BPD diagnosis when I was first hospitalized in 2007. I had done something that can with good reason be seen as attention-seeking - made a suicidal threat in public -, but I was realy not thinking of the attention I'd get with this. Besides, the kind of attention I got, did matter quite a bit. It is not purely for attention, even though my threat had a signaling function.

In like 2006, before any mental condition had been diagnosed, I was talking to my named support worker at an idependence training facility about my recurrent meltdowns. At one point she concluded that I did it for attention. "So we won't give you attention anymore. Don't think you can do this for attention." In reality, the majority of my meltdowns and acting-out behaviors have the function of either regulating emotions or overwhelming stimuli.

Another thing with the attention-seeking theory is that nothing really is wrong with attention-seeking. Of course, having a meltdown for attention is not appropriate, but it is not like ignoring the person is going to make them better. It will just lead to them giving up and developing learned helplessness. Rather, professionals and others need to help the borderline by providing the right kind of attention before behavior escalates. I strongly disagree with the ida that borderlines need to be left to solve their own problems. We lack skills in emotion regulation, and need to actually be taught these skills. When other conditions, like autism, come into the equation, it gets more complicated, because we truly do not have the ability to process ordinaryy stimuli. I, for one, have a hard time communicating when overwhelmed, so I can't get across my needs in an appropriate manner. It is further reinforcing learned helplnessness to just ignore me in such a state.

Healing Quotes: Maya Angelou on Bitterness and Anger

"Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean." - Maya Angelou

I have always liked inspirational quotes, although I am getting a bit weary now that they're shared on Facebook all over the place without even as much as a personal commetn. I therefore want to write about thsi quote and express how it affects me.

Bitterness and anger are both emotions that come when something happens that we don't like and that we feel we don't deserve. But while bitterness is a passive emotion, one that gets people stuck in their feeling of beint treated unfairly, anger is an active emotion. It drives people to actually do something about the injustice done to them or about the consequences of this injustice. An example of this can be seen in Down with Dat's use of anger to fuel activism.

Anger really isn't the negative emotion we often think of, the emotion that paralyzes people into being consumed with self-pity. That is bitterness. Bitterness may actually also be like depression (not the clinical kind, but the everyday depression most people experience at times) rather than just anger, and, while we don't usually choose to be depressed, we can change our train of thought to convert it into anger and action.