Borderline Personality Disorder Quotes

“Behind many emotional responses are real issues.  BPD sufferers can be so overwhelmed by their emotional feelings that they feel unable to tackle the underlying cause of the emotion.”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder

“Often the thoughts that can act as emotional triggers seem to come from nowhere.  They can be positive or negative in nature.  For example a memory of a happy past experience can trigger a thought process which leads you to compare a good time in the past with your present circumstances.  Things may not seem as good now as they did then and this leads into an unpleasant cycle.  Alternatively, a negative thought can lead you to developing negative emotions, in turn leading you to avoid these, perhaps using impulsive behaviors to avoid the issue.”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder

“Self-harm or substance abuse being common ways in which BPD sufferers tend to block their unwanted emotions; this is not weakness but simply that the condition makes it so difficult to regulate your reactions.”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder

“One of the defining features of BPD is that sufferers have a difficult time in accepting emotions.  This is in large part thanks to the intensity with which they experience them.”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder

“big part of learning to cope with emotions is to ensure that those around you understand what is happening.  It can be hard to talk about BPD, thanks to the many negative depictions the condition has had in the past.  However, ensuring that your family understand how BDP can affect you is essential.  It's particularly important to make it clear that, sometimes, emotional situations can be simply too much for you.”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder

“BPD sufferers experience emotions far more intensely than the rest of the population.  In many senses, this is no bad thing but the lack of control of these emotions is where BPD patients risk self-harm, destructive behaviors and problematic relationship issues with others.”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder

“Many people will take a rational approach, thinking through the pros and cons of an issue.  This is much harder if you have BPD.  In”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder

“When it comes to BPD, emotional triggers are what we need to understand.  Most people with BPD will have a set of emotional triggers which can make their symptoms worse.  Usually it's a very specific set of triggers and these can be highly individual, varying from one person to the other.”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder

“It can be useful to develop skills which allow you to re-focus on something else initially.  This may seem like an attempt to bury the emotions but use mindfulness techniques to accept the emotion of the moment and then find a goal-orientated activity to concentrate on for a little while.  This can have a very positive effect at reducing the intensity of the negative emotion while still accepting it.  You can return to the issue when you feel calmer, more positive and able to rationalize more clearly.”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder

“There is no consensus or agreement on what “emotional regulation” means – either in general or in BPD cases specifically.  Some experts argue that the inability to increase or decrease an emotional response as appropriate to circumstances is a good basic definition, while others prefer a broader definition which looks at emotional regulation as a continuous necessity throughout our daily lives in order for us to be  able to function properly and maintain a healthy “emotional system”.”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder

“There's plenty of medical evidence from history to show that these illnesses have been around for many thousands of years even if the causes and cures were not fully understood.  Calling the now detailed classifications of the wide range of mental and emotional issues “modern” is equally inaccurate.  It's like dismissing heart disease as a modern illness that people should just “get over”.”
― Emily Laven, Borderline Personality Disorder: The Ultimate Practical Approach To Understanding, Coping, and Living With Borderline Personality Disorder