Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms

The symptoms of BPD vary. People with BPD tend to be extremely sensitive to rejection. They may react with anger and upset at even mild separations from friends or family members. Symptoms often become more acute when people with BPD feel isolated and lonely or during times of particular stress.

Traits that are common to people with BPD include:

• Fears of being left alone, resulting in frantic behaviors aimed at avoiding it
• Extreme mood swings and difficulty managing emotions
• Difficulty in relationships, characterized by dramatic swings between idealizing and devaluing the relationship (viewing people as all good or all bad)
• Unstable self-image
• Impulsive behavior
  • Excessive spending
  • Promiscuity, risky sexual behavior
  • Gambling
  • Drug and alcohol abuse
  • Self-injury, suicide threats
  • Binge eating
• Repetitively injuring themselves through cutting, scratching, or burning
• Feeling misunderstood, bored, and empty
• Having deep-seated feelings of being flawed or bad in some way
• Using defense mechanisms to avoid taking responsibility for behavior, or to blame others
• Unpredictable mood and difficulty regulating mood
• Problems with anger management, manifested as periods of intense, uncontrollable and often unreasonable anger
• Episodes (usually precipitated by stress) of intense paranoia, dissociation, or thought patterns bordering on psychosis (hence the term “borderline”)