Borderline Personality Disorder and the Danger of Self-Destruction

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The uniqueness of these individuals is undebatable. I’ve met incredible artists, creators, business thinkers and doers, writers, professors, and those with immense talents hampered by the features of borderline personality disorder (BPD).

An inherent aspect of BPD is the drive to self-destruct, which acts as a chain to block them from success. There is an ongoing debate over whether this is learned from an external source or created internally as a maladaptive protective mechanism.

Unpacking this latter point may be addressed at another time. In this post, I’d like to examine the chains of BPD that hold these people back, keeping them wedded to a false ideology that after enough suffering, you’ll experience peace and pleasure.

It’s hard to succeed when you’re against yourself.

A central component of my work with my clients is not only identifying the basis and drive to self-destruct, which I call this core content, but trying to increase awareness to prevent it. This can become a tug-of-war. It sometimes entails me trying to teach them adaptive strategies while they remain linked to the internalized ideal that pain and suffering will result in love, compassion, caring, and safety. This is one of the main reasons it takes years to treat BPD successfully. It has to become me and them against BPD, not me trying to convince them that their BPD-ingrained beliefs, behaviors, and patterns will get them what they want or feel they need.

Please don’t confuse this with blame; that is not my intent. I find blame to be a wasteful exercise, particularly in therapy. The resistance to grow beyond their BPD, whether cognitive, emotional, or behavioral, is there to protect them. It is not willful destruction of their life. They are acting on the false belief that self-destruction will give them what they want and that the person trying to help them will only hurt and abandon them and confirm their brokenness. These are not whispers in their mind but loud, AC/DC-concert-volume messages that are almost impossible to ignore.

Alignment with me against BPD is not a linear process. At least it’s never been in my two decades of doing this. I don’t expect it to be either. I understand that to reach a point of symptom remission—and the majority of those with BPD do reach symptom remission—this will be a tango of alignment and misalignment. It’s just a matter of degrees of the thickness of the chains and the self-destruction that is adhered to as part of their BPD.

It’s hard to win a marathon with an extra 100 pounds on your back.

Living with BPD and trying to start and maintain relationships is like running a marathon with a backpack on and putting rocks in it as you go. While running this race, you expect to keep up with everyone else and have the same results and experiences, but with BPD, you have to run harder, making it feel like you’re running longer and destined to lose. This would take the wind out of anyone. This is what it’s like for people with BPD trying to start and maintain relationships with significant others, friends, coworkers, and therapists.

The rocks are those self-destructive components that you put in your backpack yourself. This makes relationships harder with yourself and others. Remember that concept of core content I mentioned before: the internalized belief that no one loves you, and that you don’t deserve to win, so why not blow it up, self-destruct on what you perceive as “your terms,” or just not run at all. Both options reinforce the drive and false belief that you deserve a life destined to self-destruct. This negative feedback loop builds over time, and the more it is reinforced by all those heavy rocks in your backpack, the more intractable it becomes.

As mental health providers, we have to assist clients in taking out those rocks, but it takes time, energy, dedication, and a willingness to trust that someone else will help them get to the finish line without those rocks weighing them down.

Imagine a life without a self-destruct button.

Those past experiences, lack of support, and internalized self-recrimination created that self-destruct button inside many individuals with BPD. The therapeutic process must first build insight into helping them realize that they’re pushing their own self-destruct button, and as long as they keep pressing it, it’ll continue going off. This does not mean that they’re the cause of their past pains and trauma. But as adults, we are empowered with choice. Many individuals with BPD feel they have no choice, especially when those BPD issues and symptoms hit like a tsunami crashing into a small crab on the shore.

Insight is the first step, followed by imagining a life without your self-destruct button. You have to see it in your mind’s eye to do it and achieve it. In the alternative scenario, without the button, the individual sees someone they like, who they want to love, and they can speak confidently, embracing their true self and their compassion, love, intelligence, and insight while fostering connection. These are the components I see in my clients who grow beyond the shroud of their maladaptive BPD beliefs, behaviors, and patterns.

By tempering those issues, they can find a better life, and a better them, and build the future they know they deserve. Most of my clients have an inkling of that future swimming inside them because if they didn’t, they wouldn't be working with me. Some become too frightened by it and choose to stay wedded to their self-destruct button. Still, some work hard, very hard, each day, all day, to build adaptive strategies to weaken their urge to self-destruct because they know their true self is the doorway to a different life without the urge to self-destruct.

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