Comparing yourself to others with BPD

Hello.

I was diagnosed with BPD in February. I relate to 9/9 symptoms although internalise everything, e.g. quiet BPD.


I've constantly scoured the internet learning about other people with BPD, how they're manipulative, public displays of anger, I've seen videos on youtube where people talk about how angry they get or how outward they express things.

I've read online that 'Quiet BPD' have a hard time accepting their diagnosis because they don't feel like they relate to stories or articles/cases about the more classic type of BPD.

Okay so, I find myself doing this ALOT, and I can't ever seem to stop. It's like every single day, I'm looking up stuff on the internet, watching yt videos, reading blog posts etc about people with BPD, and although when just looking straight at the symptoms, I totally relate to them, I just don't relate to the representation of how BPD individuals generally act. I have deep insecurities, no self confidence, stress induced paranoia, instability in relationships, jobs, hobbies, values, interests, lack of sense of self, self harming behaviours, extreme efforts to avoid abandonment e.g. threats to harm myself etc. Even after bringing this up to my psychiatrist she tells me everyone with BPD is different, some people are quiet as a mouse and would never externalise anything, keeping everything to themselves and no one would ever know.

With all of the above, I still find myself extremely often questioning my diagnosis, because no one would say I'm volatile, I mean past partners would probably say I'm moody, sensitive, clingy, shy/quiet, among other similar things, but i just can't stop rethinking this all the time and it absolutely is driving me crazy. I can't stop comparing how I am, with other people who also have this disorder.

Does anyone else feel like this? Is it because of identity issues? It's so confusing and I can't seem to stop my mind going over this all the time.

Hello, I can really relate to everything you have said.
I find myself trying desperately to validate my diagnosis.
Like you mentioned in your post, I identify with all the symptoms but having been a very introverted person all my life, the fallout explodes inwardly towards myself usually in private when I'm on my own, unless the emotions are too strong to withhold.

I attended a Therapeutic Community a few years ago, and most of the people there were extremely outwards with their reactions to triggers. Whereas I was just silent until I was on my own and just exploded. Sometimes I wish I could let it out there and then as you can deal with it in the immediate, but when you're on your own things can get dangerous and difficult to manage.

I think "quiet BPD" is probably a lot more common than you'd think, but given the nature of it, people may withhold it to themselves and are left in the shadows. I wish I had a solution for you and not just a ramble (sorry ) but I just wanted to let you know that you're not alone with this situation. For me identity issues could play a significant role in this problem, when I was diagnosed I felt almost happy to be pit in this box with others people, like I was not just some random emotional strange guy, maybe I could find help almost similar people, but as time went on, seeing how different I was to other r people with BPD, the confusion set in, and you are left in a kind of purgatory, lingering between how you react/feel to triggers and how BPD is commonly perceived.
Again sorry for the rant, your post resonated with me & I had to comment:)
Take care, Danny.

Hello,

I believe I can relate a lot. I'm not that into comparing myself with (other?) borderliners, I'm reading into the matter now and the quote/link you've given me in the other thread was very helpful.

I'm cautious because I've learned that these diagnoses have to be taken with a pinch of salt. In psychiatry, you need diagnoses and guidelines because it would be awfully inefficient to start at zero with everyone and figure out their individual problems over months or years. So they agreed on certain patterns and that's basically what these "personality disorders" are, a certain set of symptoms that tend to correlate and are then put together to a certain disorder/diagnosis/whatever.

These are not infallible, it's not as easy as saying if it's got two wheels it's a bike and if it's got four wheels it's a car. To my knowledge, there's ongoing discussion among psychiatrists on this, some embrace this model and others don't. Psychiatrists aren't gods, in the end they're fallible human individuals like all of us. I got to know psychiatrists who closely follow official guidelines, I got to know others who are very sceptical about pigeonholing patients.

Apparently there's disagreement among psychiatrists about BPD as well, with some rejecting a simple yes/no approach on symptoms in favour of a more flexible dimension-based approach (like, instead of having you being impulsive and hurtful towards others on a yes/no basis, having that on a 0-100% scale to get a better picture).

In the past, I used to do a lot of online personality tests, but they weren't really helpful, their results usually being that I've got all personality disorders except for antisocial. I've done several instances of the Myers-Briggs test, only to find that I'm one personality one day and a completely different one the next.

Where this seems to fit BPD is that i was incredibly anxious to have any identity, even if it's a personality disorder. And that's where I'm cautious now too, what if I'm just readily accepting BPD only to have a trace of identity?

One perhaps important point is that this desperate search for identity is well in line with the definition of BPD. And for all my experience with diagnoses and stupid online tests, the BPD thing seems to hold more water than anything else.

I'm still not sure about it, but the more I learn about it, the more it fits. The more I talk with other people who have been diagnosed with BPD, the better it fits.

I may seem very friendly and agreeable and helpful on the outside, but I always have to take extreme care when talking about my feelings. That repeatedly got me into trouble because when I was talking even a little freely, I was unaware of how terrible, disturbing, even frightening my thoughts and feelings could be to others.

i compared myself a lot to other borderlines when i was first diagnosed. i matched enough of the symptoms to be diagnosed but only just (i don't really get the risk + impulse related symptoms). i found it hard to accept my diagnosis. i went into group therapy for borderlines and it was a nightmare of being compared and made to feel like i wasn't "ill enough" to have BPD. it turns out in the end i either have co-morbid BPD with DID/OSDD, in which the risk/impulse related symptoms from BPD aren't displayed due to co-morbid conditions (it's very hard to tell which condition does what at this point), or i only have BPD traits. due to a lack of self-awareness and denial on my part, and a lack of understanding of trauma + dissociative conditions from my mental health team at the time, the underlying dissociative condition and trauma i was dealing with went unnoticed, until recently. there's a lot of symptom crossover between BPD and PTSD, which in turn has crossover with DID/OSDD, so i can understand why things turned out this way diagnosis-wise.

i'm not saying this to suggest that you or anyone else with quiet BPD doesn't in fact have BPD at all. i thought i'd share my experiences nonetheless because misdiagnosis is a thing that happens, and it's rarely ever obvious if you have one condition over another. symptoms can also get messy and confusing when you have co-morbid conditions that offset each other. it's good to take things like this with a pinch of salt and take time to come to any decisions. mental health is confusing and hard to navigate at the best of times.

the hard thing with all of that is the identity issues that come with BPD. god knows i found it hard questioning whether i had BPD or not because of the identity crisis breakdowns it brought on. in the end though, it helped me to realise that it was okay if i didn't have BPD in the end. it didn't mean my symptoms weren't real, or that i'd made it up, or that i was overreacting - it meant it was simply something else that still required treatment.

tl;dr it's okay to question whether a diagnosis fits but when it reaches the point of constantly comparing yourself and devaluing your symptoms, taking a step back from that is important.

@Introvekii Thank you so much for your reply, I can't put into words how comforting it was to read that, knowing you're experiencing similar to myself.
When you mention about being in a therapeutic community, this is how I feel on my current DBT course, I mean there's a few quiet people, but I feel the majority of the other members are very outward and "typical" style BPD, as well as a lot of mental health workers also explaining BPD as if it's only that way too.
I sometimes feel that people with "Quiet BPD" or "Over-controlled" are kind of left in the shadows, as in we're seen to be dealing better than other people as we don't outwardly show everything. I also completely agree with being happy when I was diagnosed, forever I thought I was just so sensitive, so shy and quiet and needy, but when I was given the diagnosis it just totally fit, until I started learning about 'classic bpd'.
Thanks again for your reply, it means so much!
Callum


@FrozenSpine
Your reply made me see things from a different perspective, now that I've read your post, a light has flickered in my head, I keep getting reminded from my mental health team not to see myself as my diagnosis, and it's kind of been going over my head, but after reading your post I can understand why they keep telling me this. I think it's very easy to get wrapped up in the label, especially once you get given a specific 'title' or a 'name' for why you experience things the way you do.
A percentage scale is something I've been learning about in DBT too, to rate your feelings 1-100 instead of just a blanket statement of how you were feeling. For example, one day I may take a 100% reaction to absolute perceived rejection, yet the next it wouldn't even cross my mind, and if I just answered that based on the last time I experienced that event, I would have a different answer every time! I hope I've understood what you said.
The main thing in your post that will stick with me in the future is the bike analogy. BPD is a very complex diagnosis, and regardless of how each and every person displays or experiences the symptoms, each one will have met the criteria, so thanks for clearing that up.

@raptureblues
It's not so much me struggling to accept my diagnosis, although maybe it is.. I just feel like I compare myself to others a lot, so for example if I'm in DBT and another member of the group is explaining a situation where they reacted in a negative manner, I may think "I wouldn't act that way? I don't think that would bother me" then in my head I will have a whirring of thoughts doubting that I have BPD, because I don't experience the same thing as them, and they have been diagnosed, so I must have been misdiagnosed. Going back to what I said to Frozenspine though, every single person will experience this disorder differently, and each person has had a different life, and is unique.
I'm sorry to hear you had trouble with misdiagnosis etc, but I am grateful for you sharing your experience, thank you for helping me! I'll remember to take a step back.

Thank you all once again for your replies! It really means a lot to me

It's easy to compare yourself to others, but pwBPD are as unique to one another as are non-disordered people.

I know it has already been said that everyone experiences BPD differently, but bear with me here. Just how different sometimes goes over our heads:

In the DSM, you have to meet 5 of the 9 criteria
If someone meets just 5 criteria, there are 126 different possible combinations.
If someone meets 6 criteria, add an extra 84 combinations
For 7 criteria met, add 36
for 8, add 9
for all 9, there is only 1 possible combination (ie, all of them).

Altogether this makes 255 ways to be borderline!

So no wonder the way we experience borderline can be very different! Therefore watching generic borderline experience videos can be unhelpful- someone might meet criteria 1,3,5,7,9, and you might meet criteria 2,4,6,8 and 9. The particular things you struggle with, and how they manifest then, could be very different.

Notice also that within each criterion there can be polar opposite reactions. Someone with fear of abandonment might be extremely clingy, loyal and dependent,
another might isolate themselves away and barely make connections,
another might have big fiery relationships and then dramatically cut them off.
Criterion 9 includes both states of paranoia and dissociation- you might have one, the other, or both!

So rather than looking outside for validation, it is better to look within: how do these symptoms manifest in my life, in my experiences?- possibly with the help of friends or therapists.

Hope this helps a little ! x