Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder Quotes

“People with BPD tend to judge themselves and others in extreme ways. They will often use excessively positive terms, idealizing or glorifying, or excessively negative terms, demonizing or devaluing themselves or others. They look at themselves with harsh and critical negative self-judgments that increase their sense of shame.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“Not knowing how to regulate their own painful, aversive feelings, such as shame and anger, makes people with BPD walking powder kegs. Because of their deficits, they tend to regulate emotional pain with actions that bring quick, short-term relief, such as cutting themselves (parasuicidal acts) using drugs or alcohol, shopping or overspending, binge eating, anorexia, gambling, or engaging in unsafe sex. The consequence of these behaviors is usually more emotional pain. Alternatively, they may cope by avoiding or dissociating from the trigger or the actual emotion they are feeling. Some people with BPD may have developed too much control of their emotional responses. They may be described as emotionally over-controlled or emotionally constipated.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“Gwen, a woman with BPD, talks about her inability to decipher the world around her. “On the day I was born, all the newborn babies got on a line to meet God and to get their How to Act in All Situations Throughout Life book. When it was my turn, God had run out of the book. Ever since that day, I have been looking over other people’s shoulders so that I could read their book and know how to act.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“This painful mental illness is not fair, but saying it is not fair does not change anything. Thinking that you should not have to work so hard to get through everyday life with someone with BPD does not change the fact that this is what you need to do.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“the ability to cope effectively with daily problems and responses does not depend on willpower. Solving problems and tolerating distress requires skill power,”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“It is very difficult to go through life when your core belief about yourself is that you are incompetent and do not count. When you have no sense of your own value, you are like a leaf in the wind, dependent on what others think of you to know who you are. In order to attain a better quality of life, it is imperative that your loved one develop a sense of mastery, competency, and respect for himself.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“People with BPD spend a great deal of their emotional energy worrying about past pain or potential future problems. “If I do that, this will happen.” Dwelling on the past or the future prevents you from focusing on the present.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“People with BPD judge themselves harshly all the time and find judgments lurking around the corner of every raised eyebrow, sneeze, yawn, or shoulder shrug. You must be acutely aware of how your responses can be misconstrued as judgments.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“People with BPD are usually burdened with strong feelings of worthlessness and shame that are not necessarily supported by the facts of actual situations.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“It is not necessary to get into a fight with someone because you feel angry; aggressive behavior does not have to be a knee-jerk response to anger. By practicing mindfulness, people with BPD can learn to slow themselves down and have more control over how they will respond.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“Radical acceptance requires being open to fully experiencing your own life, as it is, without wishing it were not so and without pretending it is different. Acceptance is entering into the reality of this moment, without judgment. Radical acceptance is the fulcrum that balances validation and change.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“The tiny bud the parents nurtured does not seem to have bloomed into the magnificent flower they expected. Parents feel as if they have been cheated or robbed; their family seems irretrievably lost to them.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“Tips for Being Mindful • Focus on what works • Keep an eye on your goals and values • Give up opinions and judgments in favor of facts • Give up expectations of reciprocity in the moment • Stop wanting • Instead of being right, lose the battle but win the war1”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“Think of your loved one as living in a different culture. Get to know his culture, learn to speak his language. Because you are probably terrified that your loved one may harm himself or engage in dangerous behaviors, you try to control him. Unfortunately all you will usually accomplish is alienating your loved one. In the long run, you will have to learn to tolerate your own painful feelings such as fear, loss, anger, failure, insecurity, and powerlessness. Being effective means you have to let what is be what it is and allow the person to experience the natural consequences of his own behavior.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“You will become effective only when your loved one can trust you. For years, your loved one with BPD has felt emotionally isolated and misunderstood. How can he trust someone he feels has never heard him? He will begin trusting you when he senses you are truly listening to him, actually hearing what he says, and really trying to communicate with him. Having the humility to acknowledge your own mistakes will help you begin to repair the damage brought about by years of miscommunication. This will be a very slow process but, over time, you can do it.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“If you want to pull someone out of a deep hole, do you jump in after her? Now that you are in the hole with her, you will not be able to help her out. When you observe that your loved one has a problem, and you jump into it, flounder in the problem pool, and swim laps with her, you are engaging in an exercise in futility that will not help either of you. You need to balance becoming a participant in your loved one’s world with being an observer of her world, staying outside while going inside.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“they may pontificate that the suicide attempt was merely a ploy to gain attention or to manipulate others. No matter what may have motivated a suicide attempt, the family has just experienced the terrifying possibility that their loved one might have died. Trivializing a suicide attempt invalidates a family’s grief and despair. They may bury their feelings of grief and loss inside themselves or may convert their feelings into secondary emotions such as anger or fear.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“Willingness is giving up trying to control behaviors or outcomes. By giving up control you can do what is needed in any situation. Willingness is wholehearted, spontaneous participation, responding to situations as needed, without resentment or preconceived ideas of what has to be done, how to do it, or when to do it.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change

“Western culture does not encourage validating someone’s emotional responses, as emotional awareness of daily interactions is counterintuitive to how we normally react. In today’s fast-paced society we often do not take the time to notice or acknowledge people’s feelings or the efforts they are making to do their jobs. We tend to notice these things even less with the people who are closest to us.”
― Valerie Porr M.A., Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change