Living with Borderline Personality Disorder: Can You Live a Normal Life if You Have Borderline Personality Disorder?
Living with borderline personality disorder, or BPD, can be quite challenging but there are ways that you can attain a more normal life, a way you can maintain relationships with friends and family and even romantic relationships without the hassle you have experienced thus far. The key to living a normal life with borderline personality disorder is accepting the fact that you have the mental illness, realizing what the inward and outward symptoms of your disorder are, and how these untreated symptoms are keeping you from living a normal life.
The Negative Aspects of Not Accepting the Diagnosis of BPD
Once you have been diagnosed with BPD, it is not uncommon for you to deny the fact that you suffer from the mental disorder. You allow the symptoms of this mental illness to take over your life and give it the control to ruin friendships, lose contact with family, and engage in dangerous behaviors including promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse, and various other self destructive behaviors.
By allowing the symptoms to take over your life you are letting your chances of living a happy and more stable life get away.
How to Start Living with Borderline Personality Disorder the Right Way
It is not your fault that you suffer from an involuntary mental illness such as BPD. However, it is up to you to find ways to control your disorder so that you can live happier and stop hurting yourself and others with your untreated symptoms.
It is common for a person with untreated BPD to lash out at the ones they love the most, for them to become easily depressed when separated from someone they know, to have unnecessary anxiety over normal events in life, and fears of abandonment that are unwarranted. With the right treatment these feelings, actions, or emotions can be reduced enough that you can start living with BPD and doing it while feeling and being normal.
The Road to Living a Normal Life with BPD Won’t Always be Easy
Getting the right mental health treatment is important to reduce the severity of symptoms. Even with treatment some of the symptoms will still remain. Keeping up with your psychotherapy sessions with your therapists, possibly getting involved in BPD support groups, and even being on a BPD drug treatment plan can help you when you feel like your symptoms are becoming out of control again, or you fear that you are giving in to the symptoms. It is important that you relay these feelings to your doctor or therapist so that he or she can better help you cope.
Living comfortably with borderline personality disorder is possible. You can have all the things that people without BPD have, you just have to work harder to maintain a more normal life and you can do this with outside help from therapists and support groups. These people understand what you are going through and are there to help you.
Sources:
Borderline Personality Fact Sheet
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/borderline-personality-disorder-fact-sheet/index.shtml
Dr. Corelli Borderline Personality Disorder
https://www.stanford.edu/~corelli/borderline.html
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