Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline Personality Disorder: Is It Just An Excuse?

Is borderline personality disorder a real diagnosis or is it just a way to let someone who’s selfish, impulsive and mean off the hook for their bad behavior?

Borderline Personality Disorder: Is It Just An Excuse?
By RICHARD ZWOLINSKI, LMHC, CASAC & C.R. ZWOLINSKI

Is borderline personality disorder a real diagnosis or is it just a way to let someone who’s selfish, impulsive and mean off the hook for their bad behavior?

If you’re shocked by the above question, don’t be.

Some therapists will tell you that without education, spouses, children, and especially colleagues of those with BPD might feel the diagnosis is a “sham” or an “excuse for bad behavior.”

This is a shame because BPD is a real disorder and as hard as it is for spouses and children, it is much harder for the person who’s been diagnosed with BPD. The ups and downs of emotion, the fear and panic, the shame, the self-harm are all exceedingly painful to the person with BPD. Life or death neediness, knee-jerk responses to perceived abandonment, sudden rages—these are just a few of the inner stresses people with BPD endure.

Clearly, there is a marked difference between someone who might have a hard time with relationships, or act out in anger, or is occasionally spiteful, and someone who has BPD.

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3 Comments

  • Rick Anderson

    We need to remember, just because the behavior is the result of a diagnoseable personality disorder, it doesn’t make the behavior any less real or any less damaging to the loved ones that have suffered from it and they have suffered real damage.

    Mental Health professionals would be wise to remember non-BPD partners are NOT impervious super men or women, they are human beings just like the BPD’s and the mental health professionals themselves. They have very real damage and dealing with years, (my case decades) of suppressed and burred anger and wounds that have never healed. Why do Mental Health professionals lack any sympathy for behavior that is the direct result of the damage the non-BPD has suffered? Of course for non-BPD’s need to let go of their anger and resentment to heal, they need to exam and get help for their own emotional issues that kept them in these relationships. Of course they will come to have understanding and sympathy for their BPD partner’s condition, but after years or decades of abuse, is there a single mental health professional suggest that its reasonable for it to happen over night?

    And its worth noting that non-BPD’s that stayed in relationships, although having emotional issues, for most, those issues are often benign. By benign, I mean their issues do NOT harm others, and if they paired with emotional healthy or at least those with similarly benign emotional issues, they would have healed and grown instead of suffered more damage and back stepping in emotional growth paired with their BPD. At least that is true in my case, I don’t know how prevalent that is in other non-BPD’s. And NO, I do NOT think it is arrogant to state that, and I am more than willing to defend that statement.

    Professionals that treat alcoholism seem to be able to treat people effected by the disorder/disease without throwing the innocent victims under the bus.

    Once I would like to see a Mental Health professional, instead of saying, “Stop being angry at BPD’s, don’t you know they are mentally ill”, they say, “I understand you’re angry and you have a right to be angry, for you’re own good you will have to process that anger and release it, and understand your BPD was being driven by mental illness, NOT malice toward you.”

  • Michelle Kujat

    Why then is there no medication the same way other mental issues have treatment? If it a mental issue then why does nothing exist?

  • Lane Dillman

    Amen Rick you nailed it !!! I don’t see professionals making excuses for Ted Bundy or Charles Manson there assholes !
    Call like it is and quit being a codependent/enabler for these people.

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