...you aren't doomed because of your diagnosis, because it's apparently the most treatable of all personality disorders.
To this day, BPD is still pretty much the
only personality disorder that actually has an evidence-based, reliable treatment modality that addresses at least some of its core symptoms. It's really easy to understate exactly how revolutionary that was in the 1980s, when studies first started to show that DBT was successful enough to reliably improve symptoms in most cases where it's implemented correctly by the therapist and taken seriously by the patient. PDs were, prior to that point, usually regarded as completely untreatable rather than just treatment resistent. If there were a Nobel Prize in psychology, Marsha Linnehan would have probably won it for pulling that off.
The failure of basically every effort to come up with something similar for other personality disorders has been a point of frustration and confusion ever since, because some other PDs seem like they
should be more treatable than BPD. The Cluster C condition Dependent PD has enough in common with BPD for the two to be differential diagnoses, but patients with DPD tend to be a lot less tiring for a therapist to deal with at first. DPD, however, still has no known treatment with a consistent record of efficacy. Radically Open DBT, a relatively new form of therapy tailored more toward DPD, AvPD, and mixed BPD-Cluster C presentations, does show some promise, but it's still not shown the sort of results that DBT did for "classical" BPD.
BPD, NPD, and similar disorders are ego-syntonic, which means people who suffer from them are convinced there is nothing wrong with them -- it's everyone else who is evil and crazy!
Sort of.
Self-awareness is usually pretty hazy with PDs, but that can vary depending on the condition and the severity of its symptoms. Being ego-syntonic means that core symptoms of the condition don't seem intuitively wrong to the person involved, but someone who's still mostly grounded in reality (relatively speaking, of course; in this context, that really just means "not constantly and hopelessly delusional") is going to realize eventually that there's something off in the way they experience the world. Usually, people with PDs who voluntarily seek professional help will present initially with symptoms of depression or anxiety, but occasionally someone with a little more insight will recognize that their whole-ass worldview is different enough from that of normal people to directly seek assessment for a PD. In my experience, their suspicions are usually wrong on specifics (someone with AvPD might believe they're a Covert Narcissist, Dependent might believe they're Borderline, etc.), but that sense of profound alienation from the common human experience is still a useful form of intellectual self-awareness that a professional can build upon.
Cases where the person is totally convinced that they're normal usually involve extreme deficits in cognitive empathy, which are often present in BPD even if they aren't a core symptom, probably have much worse outcomes on average. A more moderate deficit there can be accounted for in treatment, but once it rises to the level of having no real theory of mind, there isn't really a way to work around that.
Many also accuse their therapists of life-ruining things like rape, cannibalism, Satanic ritual practices, and child abuse, which is why any therapist who works with BPDs will privately video-record every session just in case.
Where did you hear the last part of this? I'm honestly, genuinely, sincerely curious, not asking a rhetorical question. I can't find any instances where a court case involved a therapist accused of a crime by a client with BPD using surreptitious video evidence in their defense. That isn't to say it's never happened, but considering the potential for public scandal and the fact that it's highly illegal in states with two-party consent rules for recording conversations, I feel like there would be multiple high-profile stories about it if this were a very widespread practice.
I can easily imagine it being more common a few decades ago, and I'm not sure it would be a bad idea, especially for patients with mixed Antisocial traits who lie pathologically with no discernable motive. It would be a good way to catch a class-action lawsuit, though, if it came to light that a therapist were doing it regularly in the past two or three decades. Therapists have a right to turn down clients they don't feel they can work with safely, or to refuse to work with them one-on-one, so why risk the expense and negative publicity even if you think you could beat a civil claim?
Seek a licensed clinician (not a counselor, not a life coach) who specializes in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.
Yeah...I don't think I could ever stress enough just how important it is to take it seriously if you have any meaningful number of BPD symptoms. It's a severe mental illness where almost all of the diagnostic criteria would, taken individually in an otherwise healthy person, still be considered serious enough to merit a psych eval. The mortality rate by suicide alone averages 10% (with that rising to 20% in men with the condition), and all-cause mortality is high enough for pwBPD to have a life expectancy roughly 20 years lower than the general population.
Life coaches are grifters who target the mentally ill because they're desperate and easily manipulated. Unless you're just curious what it feels like to drop $29.99 on a hundred page .pdf written by the sort of person who believes that
The Dilemma on the Other Side of Borderline Personality, Can Borderlines Love? - Do Borderlines Feel Love? The Toxic Love of the Borderline False Self is a perfectly acceptable title for a book (just in case you're wondering, I'll spoil the ending: "Nope, they can't; also, Snape decides not to kill Dumbledore, and they make gentle yet passionate love in a rose bath instead"). Online support forums are roughly 50% self-diagnosed teenagers who yelled at their partner once, and 50% people who are still seriously ill using their condition as the linchpin for their entire existence. Imagine if you just found out that your coke dealer was also selling select agents to the Taliban, and that you might have just railed a fat line of live, powdered Hantavirus in a Denny's restroom. Would you go on /r/hantavirusmemes, then have a one hour, $200 virtual visit with an uncertified Hemorrhagic Fever Coach? If you're an adult with at least mediocre critical thinking skills, then the answer is usually going to be, "What the fuck are you even saying? I'm on the phone with an emergency dispatcher right now." Severe mental illness shouldn't be any different.
Although BPD especially is considered "treatment resistent", that just means anyone who *can* reduce their symptoms is a total gigachad.
Good luck.
Honestly, recovery from BPD is a little like recovery from a severe, chronic addiction. Even after you attain remission (defined as no longer meeting the necessary 5 out of 9 criteria for a formal diagnosis), you still have to put in effort every day in order to avoid spiraling right into a relapse that could very well kill you. It gets easier with time, but there's always that temptation to just slide back into old habits, especially if you're one of the many people with BPD who also have comorbid traits of other personality disorders where treatment is still in the "Sadly, We've got to Drain Some Blood in order to Un-Haunt your Pancreas" stage of medical development.
Anyway, thanks for the whole "Giga Chad" comment, but the truth is that there comes a point where you realize that you literally can't just keep going ahead the same way. You've either got to try to improve the situation, or stop thinking about it and literally jump off of a literal cliff. It's a lot better to do something before hitting that point, but yeah, nobody who needs that message is going to take it seriously unless the point of no return is already too close for comfort.
