Living with Borderline Personality Disorder

isabellaperrin97
Dec 4, 2017
3 min read

This article may be triggering

What is Borderline Personality Disorder?

Katy Matilda Neo is a 31 year old from East London and has been living with Borderline Personality Disorder for over six years. She says that out of all nine symptoms of BPD- she has all of them and qualifies for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which she attends on a weekly basis and communicates with almost every day.

Mind explains that Borderline Personality Disorder is a type of personality disorder. Personality disorders are a type of mental health problem where your attitudes, beliefs and behaviours cause you longstanding problems in your life.

"Most people with BPD have had some kind of traumatic upbringing, some kind of parental neglect, loss separation and so they missed out on being taught the important skills for emotional regulation."

Borderline personality disorder is known to be one of the most serious mental illnesses, so controlling it can be extremely overwhelming, either when you first diagnose BPD or throughout your life.

"When I get into a meltdown I just freeze up, and nothing can like make any sense and it all just gets too high."

These are the common symptoms of BPD:

You feel very worried about people abandoning you, and would do anything to stop that happening.
You have very intense emotions that last from a few hours to a few days and can change quickly (for example, from feeling very happy and confident in the morning to feeling low and sad in the afternoon).
You don't have a strong sense of who you are, and it can change depending on who you're with.
You find it very hard to make and keep stable relationships.
You act impulsively and do things that could harm you (such as binge eating, using drugs or driving dangerously).
You have suicidal thoughts or self-harming behaviour.
You feel empty and lonely a lot of the time.
You get very angry, and struggle to control your anger.
When very stressed, sometimes you might:
feel paranoid
have psychotic experiences, such as seeing or hearing things other people don't
feel numb or 'checked out' and not remember things properly after they've happened

Living with these symptoms can severely impact your life- day in, day out. You only need to experience five of those things to be given a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.

As explained earlier, Katy was diagnosed with all nine symptoms after experiencing such intense feelings, that were out of control. For the purposes of Virtually Better, when she used Virtual Reality she explained that BPD is like feeling a storm cloud was hovering over her, she felt she was only getting smaller and smaller. She felt that she was in a black hole which matches feeling of emptiness and loneliness and the feeling of finding it hard to make and keep stable relationships.

You can listen to Katy's experiences of BPD and what symptoms she's felt here:

Katy has been keeping a blog, which at first she found extremely overwhelming to publish to the world. She's since gained a community of support from people like herself who reads her blog to seek advise and admire her artwork.

If you want any advise and support, check out mind which includes information on diagnosing symptoms and where to go if you feel like you need to take further action. You can also check out Katy's blog to see her recovery.