You’ve heard of Borderline-Personality Disorder, but you need a little more information. This blog is designed to help you understand BPD girlfriend signs so you can get a better sense if BPD is the reason for the difficult times in your relationship.
BPD can make it hard to maintain a healthy relationship with healthy boundaries. It can be easy to touch on the common triggers that activate someone with BPD.
The disorder often originates because of past trauma or sexual abuse, which makes it important to recognize and work through possible triggers. This last can’t diagnose your girlfriend, but you may learn a little more about what’s going on with her if she has BPD.
Always remember that mental health professionals can help you and your girlfriend work through the hard time you’re experiencing right now, whether it’s through couples therapy or other effective treatments.
This post is all about BPD girlfriend signs.
BPD GIRLFRIEND SIGNS:
1. She talks about experiencing feelings of emptiness
If you’ve never experienced feelings of emptiness, you can think of it like never feeling “full.” While it may sound simplistic to use a synonym for talking about emptiness, most of us know what it feels like to be fulfilled.
Maybe you have a hobby that makes you feel good when you do it. Or you have a project you finished that makes you happy. Whatever gives you the feeling of being fulfilled and content with your life, imagine that you struggle to get that feeling.
You try to hang out with friends or you hang out with your partner, but you can’t ignore the feeling of something missing or that something out there could make you feel better than you do right now.
2. She engages in self-destructive behaviors
When someone has BPD and their fear of abandonment is triggered, they start engaging in black-and-white thinking among other things. They will start finding every reason to confirm that you, as their partner, will leave them.
This can lead them to engage in self-destructive behaviors that can range from verbally abusing you (and, therefore, pushing you away) to reckless driving.
They do these things because they struggle to deal with the negative emotions they experience when their fear of abandonment is triggered. Self-destructive behaviors act as a coping mechanism.
3. She has outbursts of inappropriate, intense anger
It’s normal to get angry when you get triggered. This is what happens to people with BPD, too. However, in their case, you may not always realize when you’ve triggered their mental illness.
Instead, their anger will likely catch you off-guard since you don’t realize how easy their triggers are to activate. Once someone with BPD is triggered, they may look like they are shutting down because their brain is starting to devalue you.
What that means is their brain is in survival mode. It’s trying to protect them from being abandoned by any means necessary, which is where the anger will come from.
BPD is characterized by intense emotions, and anger can definitely be one of the more frightening ones to witness.
4. She exhibits suicidal behavior
Suicidal behavior is pretty clear when you see it. However, it’s very easy to miss the more subtle signs of suicidal behavior. Maybe your partner drives more radically than they usually do. Or maybe they want to experience dangerous things.
They may also engage in self-harming behaviors, which can be connected to suicidal thoughts. Clearly, any type of suicidal behavior means that a mental health professional needs to be involved. It can be hard to understand why someone would consider suicide.
But, in this case, try to understand it in the context of their fear of abandonment. If they are afraid to be abandoned, and they believe that you will abandon them for whatever reason, suicide would be an option for them.
Abandonment is not an option for someone who has BPD because of the trauma they have likely experienced in the past.
5. She talks about or demonstrates an unstable self-image
Self-image refers to the way that we think about ourselves. You can equate self-image to identity. However, when we talk about self-image concerning the BPD experience, we are talking about a sense of self that we feel confident in.
The sense of self represents what we think we are capable of and how we treat other people. It is the way that we know we act. In other words, if we have an unstable sense of self, we don’t know who we are.
Imagine that the way that we think we react to the people around us and the events that happen in our lives is not the way that we truly act.
This would be intensely scary for anyone experiencing it. This can look like your partner questioning who they are as well as acting in ways that do not align with the person that you think they are.
6. She engages in substance abuse
Substance abuse is a coping mechanism. It is an unhealthy coping mechanism, but it’s still can help someone with BPD symptoms feel a little better. Sometimes, it’s just the act of trying to improve the way you feel that is enough.
So, look for signs of abusing substances. Look for the ways that their substance use affects their daily life. Ask yourself if they are able to attend work, hang out with the people they care about, and engage in their relationships.
7. She has an intense fear of abandonment
Symptoms of BPD typically all stem from the fear of abandonment. We didn’t put it higher up on this list because it can be really hard to identify. While some people would BPD may make comments that indicate this fear, it’s not always that easy to tell.
So, it’s important to look at all of the other signs on this page for guidance. People with BPD may have experienced trauma and their own lives that has led to this intense fear of abandonment. This mental health disorder can originate from a sense of survival.
In other words, someone may have developed BPD as a result of experiencing abandonment when they were younger. Therefore, they have this deep-seated trigger, now. Identify any moments where they comment on this fear.
8. She can struggle to provide you with emotional support
As you can see, a lot is going on when someone is experiencing symptoms of borderline personality disorder. They deal with a lot internally already, which can make a difficult for them to show up in romantic relationships.
They may struggle to be in a healthy relationship that involves emotional support on both sides. Think about someone with BPD as a pot of boiling water, and your emotions added heat to the pot.
Their emotional state is close to boiling over already, which means that providing you with emotional support might be the thing that makes them boil over.
So, when you need emotional support the most, your partner may yell at you or explode at you. This happens because they struggle with emotional instability and don’t have the mental ability to support you.
9. She has a history of unstable relationships
When we say that she has a history of unstable relationships, that means that she has struggled with romantic partners in the past. This is designed to validate your feelings of struggling in your current relationship. But, it is not designed for you to use it against your partner.
This blog is designed to help you better understand BPD relationships in case a diagnosis of BPD may explain a lot of the issues that are happening in your relationship.
So, think about how your partner talks about her other interpersonal relationships and past relationships. If you notice a pattern of her struggling to form a successful relationship, that may be a sign that she could benefit from BPD treatment.
10. She engages in impulsive behavior
People with BPD get triggered and immediately make whatever frantic efforts it takes to feel better. They attempt to reduce their anxiety by acting impulsively.
This can look like risk-taking behavior such as verbally abusing you, breaking up with you, and anything else they wouldn’t normally do unless they were triggered. Impulsive actions are always designed to make them feel better. To be clear, this rarely works.
They get anxiety from their trigger, which is ultimately caused by their mental health condition. It’s worth clarifying this because it can be of some comfort to you.
They may hurt you when they are triggered and anxious, which is never okay no matter what emotional pain they’re experiencing. However, their true feelings are rarely reflected when they act impulsively when triggered.
