If you have a loved one or family member who suffers from BPD, the odds are you’ve found yourself asking the question “What does a BPD episode look like?”
BPD episodes are different for everyone, but they have some common symptoms that recur like intense mood swings, intense emotions, self-harming behaviors, and loss of emotional control overall.
If you love someone who deals with BPD, this post can help you understand where their severe symptoms may originate. This blog is meant to educate and inform you, but it is not meant to replace the help of a licensed mental health professional.
Please take care of yourself as you learn how to work with someone who has BPD and remember that the pain they cause you is still valid whether or not you understand why they might do it.
This post is all about the question, “What does a BPD episode look like?”
What is Borderline Personality Disorder?
Borderline Personality Disorder, first and foremost, affects the way people relate to others and themselves. While there is no proven, reliable cause behind BPD, many people with BPD struggle to maintain healthy relationships and regulate their emotions.
These symptoms and experiences can culminate in a BPD episode, which is often caused by the inability to self-regulate.
WHAT DOES A BPD EPISODE LOOK LIKE:
1. They may have intense outbursts of anger
People with BPD may experience intense outbursts of anger because BPD results from a shakey self-concept. They struggle to believe in the view they develop of themselves, which means they struggle with any hint that someone may abandon them.
In some ways, it can make sense that, if you struggle to develop a sense of who you are, it would be terrifying for someone to threaten to leave you. It may feel like they are confirming that you do not know who you are.
It may even feel like you can’t trust yourself, or you can’t trust the person you’re in a relationship with. When someone has BPD and experiences this, their reality is skewed by their mental illness and mental health issues.
Instead of seeing daily events and nondescript actions as they are, they see reasons to believe the people around them will leave. From the outside, it’s understandably frustrating to be in a relationship with someone who gets mad at you for seemingly no reason.
With BPD, they may never tell you they’re afraid of you leaving and, instead, their brain will start coping with this fear in other ways. They may start thinking of themselves as superior or start feeling empty and lose a sense of who they are.
2. They may experience an unstable self-image
Self-image is the view we develop of ourselves. In most people, it remains relatively constant and grows in response to personal growth. However, for people with BPD, they struggle with self-image.
Mental illness, in general, whether someone struggles with anxiety disorders, Bipolar Disorder, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, often skews their experiences.
In other words, people with BPD may experience an unstable self-image because their experiences don’t align with their actions. For example, you identify as someone who only gets angry when you notice an injustice happening around you.
However, one day, you get angry with your partner when there is no clear injustice present. Maybe you try to justify it to yourself and explain to yourself why you got angry.
Unfortunately, this messes with your sense of self because you no longer understand how your actions contribute to your identity or who you are.
So, when someone has BPD and they’re in the middle of an episode, they may experience a misalignment between what they believe about themselves and the actions they’re taking. Another example of this is when you accidentally trigger someone’s fear of abandonment.
In people with BPD, this is one of the biggest BPD triggers they can experience. So, on one hand, they may truly believe you love them and feel your love daily.
However, when you trigger that fear, and subsequently hit on one of BPD’s most common triggers, their actions no longer align with their beliefs and they start a BPD episode.
3. They will struggle with emotional dysregulation
To understand emotional dysregulation, we need to understand emotional regulation. If you aren’t sure what emotional regulation means right off the bat, you aren’t alone.
While most people who grow up with mental illnesses have the innate ability to self-regulate their emotions, it’s still a skill that most people don’t know how to do. We don’t grow up in school learning to identify our emotions, let alone how to handle them.
And that’s what emotional regulation is. Emotional regulation means that we can identify what we’re feeling, understand why we’re feeling that way, and recognize the path forward.
Not all emotions are painful or uncomfortable and we also shouldn’t shy away from the ones that are painful and uncomfortable. However, self-awareness is a crucial skill to develop to respond to situations around you appropriately.
When you struggle with emotional dysregulation like people with BPD do, you struggle to understand why you’re reacting the way that you’re reacting, what triggered you, and possibly even how you’re feeling in the first place.
People with BPD will often experience an intense mood swing without understanding why they’re experiencing it, which will make it hard for them to manage further the BPD symptoms that come along with that mood swing (which can often mean it turns into an episode).
4. They will experience an intense fear of abandonment
An intense fear of abandonment is central to the BPD experience. It often either contributes to BPD episodes or quickly becomes a symptom of BPD episodes. While it’s not clear where this fear originates within BPD, it’s clear that the fear of abandonment can drive a lot of decisions.
It can often be the cause of symptoms of BPD. The person with BPD in your life may act in ways that either align with their fear or self-sabotage without realizing it’s a form of defense mechanism.
This might look like clinging onto you when they fear losing you to the point that you pull away due to their impulse behaviors and abrupt mood changes. On the other hand, this may look like them forming unhealthy, unstable relationships or attachments.
This way, when a relationship fails, it confirms their fear rather than challenging them to overcome their fear. So, when you observe someone you love amid a BPD episode, notice when the things they do appear to be based on their fear of abandonment.
People with BPD can hurt the people they love, and you don’t deserve that. If you are in a relationship with someone who hurts you out of fear, they’re still hurting you
You still have every right to end that relationship if they don’t take accountability and accept help from mental health professionals or a mental health provider.
5. They may exhibit impulsive behaviors
You are not responsible for the actions of anyone else, even if they have a mental illness and you don’t. However, it’s still useful to know when your loved one may be putting themselves and others at risk as a result of their mental health condition.
People with BPD often act impulsively because they struggle with dysregulation. Impulsive, reckless behavior, such as reckless driving, happens as a result of frustration.
When we feel an uncomfortable emotion that likely hurts the people around us, and we don’t know why, it’s understandable that we’d then want to do just about anything to feel better. Sometimes, when you’re right in the middle of a situation, you don’t want to quit feeling angry.
Most of the time, however, we develop the ability to self-regulate and develop enough self-awareness to realize that we’re feeling anger. Even if we don’t want to soothe our anger because we’re still in the middle of it, we understand what’s going on with us.
We know it will end. Hopefully, we know how to move forward to avoid a similar situation happening again. When someone has BPD, they struggle with that last piece.
So, when they’re angry, whatever horrible, scary thoughts they’re having about people they otherwise love feel real to them. They may think that person is beneath them and they’re better off without them.
When this happens, they will struggle to understand that emotion or reactivity is coming from their fear of abandonment and other triggers. This means that they also don’t realize this emotion can end.
They certainly don’t how to get themselves out of that mind space, so they will engage in impulsive actions and dangerous behaviors as a way of self-soothing, which will not work and likely worsen the situation as a whole.
6. They may engage in substance abuse
Many people engage in substance use, especially to numb their feelings or avoid working through some uncomfortable experiences. As many as 60% of Americans, aged 12 and up, reportedly use substances regularly, whether that’s once a month or once a day.
So, it’s safe to say, that whether someone is diagnosed with a mental health disorder or not, they are likely to engage in substance use as a coping mechanism. However, for those with mental disorders like BPD, that prevalence increases.
So, people with mental illnesses need to monitor their substance use. When someone with BPD has an episode, they’re likely to use it as a way of coping with the negative emotions they can’t self-regulate.
Just like we discussed impulsive, reckless behaviors as a way to self-soothe, substance use is a way to self-soothe. It can look impulsive when someone chugs alcohol or takes multiple shots within a few minutes.
In general, when people turn to substances to cope with the day, it becomes a problem instantly. No matter how much control they have over their substance use at the moment, they use it as a coping mechanism.
This, then, causes them to rely on it to escape a feeling that it doesn’t truly escape. Substance use is an unhealthy coping mechanism, which can become a substance use disorder.
It provides instant gratification without providing the delayed gratification that people will only get by working through their uncomfortable feelings.
7. They may experience suicidal thoughts
Now that you have gained a better understanding of what it’s like to experience a BPD episode as part of the Borderline Personality Disorder experience, you can probably understand why someone with BPD might become suicidal.
It doesn’t happen for everyone and only about 10% of people with BPD die by suicide. However, that’s still 1 in 10 people who have BPD. So, if you know 10 people with BPD, which is rare as diagnosis is rare, one person is likely to die by suicide among the people you know.
This is a scary statistic, especially since the rate of suicide among BPD is one of the highest of all mental illnesses. Use this information to inform the way you approach people with BPD, whether they’re in the midst of an episode or not.
Remember all of the related factors that combine to create a terrifying, sometimes debilitating mental illness. It’s never your job to help someone you love with their mental illness for many reasons.
Take Care of Yourself
Whether or not you’re a mental health professional or involved in mental health care, Marriage and Family Therapist, or Clinical Social Worker, you should never treat your family members or loved ones.
Having said that, you use information about their experience, like that they might be suicidal, to change the way you think about their experience and how you relate to them. Approach them with curiosity and remember that you can ask them outright about suicidal thoughts.
Generally, people who have suicidal ideation will discuss it. To gauge their safety, you can ask them questions about whether they have a plan for suicide.
You can also ask whether they experience suicidal thoughts and to rate their suicidal thoughts on a scale of 1-10 of how bad they have been recently (choose a specific time between a day and a week).
If you hear details in their plan and believe they’re at risk, refer to online resources and get in contact with someone for help.
