BrodieSenior Contributor
Borderline Personality Disorder tips for family and friends
- Read as much as you can about BPD — knowing about the disorder helps you deal with it.
- Understand that BPD behaviors aren’t about you. Try to depersonalize what’s happening.
- Collaboration for change. Accept that families can help, can learn effective skills and become therapeutic partners. They can reinforce treatment.
- Be realistic. You will not eliminate another person’s borderline behavior, no matter how well you communicate. Only that person can do that. Your goal is simply to communicate in a way that respects you and the personal with borderline personality disorder. Click for more tips on communicating with someone with BPD.
- maintaining other sustaining life roles such as friendships, leisure activities and work.
- Maintaining good health, emotional and spiritual well-being.
- Don’t invalidate their emotions. Everyone experiences emotions, and people with BPD experience them in spades – that is the very nature of emotional dysregulation. When a loved one of a person with BPD invalidates the emotions of someone with BPD, the result is shame and mistrust in expressing their emotions.
- If you live with someone who has BPD, join a support group or consider therapy for yourself to help you deal with the issues you face.
- Even if you understand BPD behaviors, you need to know your own limits and stick by them — don’t ever allow yourself to be abused.
- Realize that sometimes the only thing you can do is leave the relationship when your loved one repeatedly runs over your limits or when your loved one refuses treatment.
Sources:
Sources:
Tips for Friends and Family of Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder
Helping Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder
