Written by: Mario Spiler

Borderline Personality Disorder is one of the 9 different personality disorders categorized in the latest Diagnostic Statistical Manual (V) published in 2013 (and one in 12 according to dimensional criteria).

What is Personality Disorder and why it needs therapy?

A personality disorder is a mental illness that can be described as a disruption of the psyche that distorts a person’s perception of him/herself, others, and relationships. These distortions prevent the person from achieving genuine satisfaction in love, work, or play. These distortions make these individuals particularly difficult to treat; however, because individuals with personality disorders are treatable, their future have become more hopeful over the past two decades.

Borderline Personality Disorder is one of the 9 different personality disorders categorized in the latest Diagnostic Statistical Manual (V) published in 2013 (and one in 12 according to dimensional criteria). It is critical that we gain a better understanding of the internal experiences of the suffering BPD individual, considering their often time confusing and dramatic manifestations. We have to keep in mind that their internal experience can be vastly different from the external behaviour they display. The more dramatic their behaviour the more we find ourselves paying more attention to our own internal experience to cope with their dramatic and intrusive displays and provocations.

The value of psychotherapy lies in assisting the BPD individual to engage in the process of learning and integrating the realization that their distorted views of themselves and others are of their own creation, and that they could question the accuracy of their own perceptions, and have the capacity to modify them so that they can come to a more realistic image of what it is to be an okay as a person. The therapeutic goal is to assist the individual to master this integration of their urges and how to fit them into a system that is socially and morally acceptable and develop a fuller sense of who they are.