When everything feels like too much or nothing at all
Someone you've been dating for three weeks doesn't text back for two hours and your brain goes: "They hate me and I'm going to die alone." That's Tuesday morning with BPD.
You know you're overreacting. You can see yourself doing it. But the panic is already flooding your system, and now you're texting too much, or you've already decided to end it before they can hurt you, or you're numb and dissociating because feeling this much is unbearable.
You've probably been told you're "too intense." That you need to regulate your emotions. That you're making it harder than it needs to be. As if you haven't been trying to do exactly that your entire life.
BPD isn't a personality flaw. It's what happens when your early environment was so chaotic, invalidating, or dangerous that your nervous system learned to be constantly on alert. When closeness meant abandonment was coming. When feelings got so big and no one taught you they were survivable.
Most people with BPD grew up in environments where their emotional reality was either ignored, dismissed, or punished. Maybe your parents couldn't handle your distress. Maybe expressing needs led to rejection. Maybe you learned that love is unstable - here one moment, gone the next - and you have to do everything to keep it.
So you developed hypervigilance. Split-second assessments of whether someone is about to leave. A hair-trigger response to any hint of rejection. Emotions that go from zero to catastrophic because your system learned that's how you survive - by reacting immediately and completely to any threat.
The fear of abandonment isn't irrational. It's historical. You were abandoned - emotionally if not physically. And your system remembers. It's still trying to protect you from that happening again, even when the threat isn't real.
DBT teaches you to regulate the symptoms. Distress tolerance, emotion regulation skills. And those can help. But they don't change why you need them. Why your emotions are so intense in the first place. Why relationships feel so dangerous.
We meet weekly or twice-weekly. Consistency matters more with BPD than with anything else. Your attachment system needs to experience that someone can show up reliably, survive your intensity, and not disappear when things get difficult.
You'll probably test this. Push me away to see if I leave. Get angry to see if I can handle it. Go numb to see if I notice. This isn't sabotage - it's your system checking whether I'm actually safe. We'll work with this, not around it.
We'll explore the fear underneath the intensity. What abandonment actually meant in your history. Why certain triggers send you into crisis. What you're protecting yourself from by splitting people into all-good or all-bad.
This work is long. BPD doesn't develop overnight and it won't shift in a few months. But gradually, you learn that feelings - even enormous ones - don't have to be catastrophic. That people can be flawed and stay. That you don't have to perform stability or independence to be worth keeping.
The goal isn't to become less intense. It's to feel intensely without it meaning you're broken. To love deeply without needing to possess completely. To keep the passion whilst losing the desperation.