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Terms and Definitions Used With Borderline Personality Disorder

There are so many terms you may have heard in association with Borderline Personality Disorder that you may be confused, not knowing how they are used and what they mean. Hopefully, this list will help you to understand these terms.

Acting Out: Expression of unconscious emotional feelings or conflicts (often hostility or love), through obvious behavior, thus bypassing conscious awareness and experience of feeling.

Affect: An experienced emotion or feeling and the observable behavior (body language) that represents it.

Behavior Modification: The process in which the patient’s behavior patterns are directly altered in order to minimize his/her self-defeating trends and heighten personal goals and productivity.

Borderline Personality Disorder: Personality disorder characterized by extreme impulsivity and instability, fear of abandonment, and self-injury behavior.

Boundaries: Another word for “personal space.” Specifically, the concept of boundaries being the learning of respect for another person’s personal space, since Borderline Personality Disorder patients often have a problem with this, and treatment involves setting limits (boundaries).

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Type of psychotherapy in which the therapist teaches the patient to restructure his/her thought patterns (cognitive beliefs) and, therefore, his/her behavior.

Co-morbidity: The existence of additional illnesses or disorders along with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Co-occurring Disorders: Another name for co-morbidity.

Countertransference: The emotional response of the therapist to the transference (see Transference). At times, negative countertransference can cause limitations and interfere with the patient's treatment.

Cutting: One of the types of self-injury, a common practice among borderlines to self-injure by cutting their own skin with knives, other sharp instruments, or even fingernails.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): Manual published by the American Psychiatric Association that classifies and defines different psychiatric diagnoses and lists the criteria for them – used by psychiatrists to diagnose patients.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT): Form of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (psychotherapy) designed specifically for Borderline Personality Disorder patients which teaches skills to reverse their negative thoughts and behaviors, emphasizing balance between acceptance and change.

Object Relations: School of thought which emphasizes importance of mental representation of self and others. In this theory, the individual's perception of external reality is largely directed by the internal (unconscious) representation of him/herself and others, which may not adequately represent the true reality of the situation – for instance, this could explain why someone with Borderline Personality Disorder may be convinced that another person is abandoning them, when that isn’t really the case.

Paranoid Ideation: Thinking involving suspiciousness, or the belief that the person is being unfairly treated, harassed, or persecuted. In some cases, this may be so extreme that the person can no longer distinguish reality correctly, and then it becomes part of a psychotic illness.

Projection: Unconscious defense mechanism in which what is emotionally unacceptable in the self is unconsciously rejected and projected (attributed) to others, often the therapist.

Splitting: Mental mechanism whereby the self or others are reviewed as “all bad” or “all good.” Often the person with Borderline Personality Disorder will alternate between idealizing and devaluing (love-hate) the same person.

Suicidal ideations (ideology): Having thoughts of suicide; intention or behavior that suggests the person is going to take his/her own life.

Transference: Unconscious assignment from the person who has Borderline Personality Disorder to others of his/her feelings and attitudes that were originally associated with important figures (parents, siblings, etc.) in his/her early life. This transference may be a distortion of what actually occurred, since it is based on early experiences as perceived by the person as a young child. The therapist utilizes transference as a therapeutic tool to help the patient understand emotional problems and their origins. In the patient-therapist relationship, transference may be positive (affectionate) or negative (hostile). In Borderline Personality Disorder, transference often alternates between negative and positive.

About the Author

David Oliver is the founder of BorderlineCentral.com a one stop source of information on how to cope and deal with borderline personality disorder.

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