Borderline personality disorder (BPD) can be difficult to live with. It can be even more challenging when you are in recovery from addiction. This article will discuss BPD, how it relates to recovery, and ways to cope if you suffer from BPD and substance use disorder (SUD).
BPD is a mental health disorder that makes it challenging to regulate your emotions. If you have this disorder, it can increase impulsivity, affect how you feel about yourself, and impact your relationship with others.
Many signs and symptoms can indicate that you have BPD. You might see things in extremes, such as all good or all bad. Interests and values can also change quickly.
BPD often comes with a chronic feeling of emptiness, which can lead you to develop a negative view of yourself. It can also cause you to want to hide away from your friends and family, negatively impacting those relationships.
Feelings of emptiness can lead to you doing things to "fill the void" in your physical, emotional, or social worlds. This can appear in impulsive behavior such as going on spending sprees, reckless driving, or substance abuse.
BPD is a serious mental health disorder that often requires treatment and medication. Having BPD can mean you struggle with dangerous things like substance abuse, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. If you believe you may have BPD, talk to a psychiatrist for proper diagnosis and treatment options.
When you are in recovery, you may struggle with urges and cravings. If you have BPD, those urges and cravings may fluctuate and change. One day could be especially hard; you don't even think about substances the next day. This is BPD at work.
Both BPD and SUD are mental health disorders. SUD happens when the influence of substances rewires the brain. This wiring problem makes you unable to control your substance use, even knowing that the substance is harmful. BPD can influence chronic and compulsive substance use, making it an added complication in the recovery process.
If you suffer from BPD and SUD, you have co-occurring disorders, also known as a dual diagnosis. This is important to know about yourself because it greatly impacts your treatment and recovery journey. If you are only treating one of these disorders without addressing the other, chances are you won't be able to heal fully.
Think of a dual diagnosis as a weed. If you cut the weed but don't pull out the roots, the weed will just grow back. Because mental health disorders influence each other, treating both BPD and SUD simultaneously is not only cutting the weed but also digging up the roots so it can't grow back.
People with SUD tend to use substances as a form of self-medication. Whether it was knowingly or not, substances may have been a way you attempted to cope with your BPD. BPD is often associated with a lack of impulse control, which could have led you to develop SUD.
There is a misconception that entering recovery means quitting substance use. While this is true, it is not the whole story. You may find that even though you quit substances, you still don't feel a full sense of well-being. This may be because you have a dual diagnosis. If you only treat one mental health disorder without addressing others you may have, you have made progress, but you have also made room for your other mental health disorders to bloom.
If you've quit using substances but you're still not happy, your life is still unmanageable, or your cravings are not getting any easier, these could all be signs that you have an unaddressed mental health disorder like BPD. Luckily, there are ways to treat it.
The most common way to treat BPD is dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). DBT is a common treatment for SUD. You may not know that DBT was originally designed to treat BPD.
DBT works on the principles of teaching new behaviors and responses to thought patterns. For example, your BPD might make you think, "I hate myself for waking up late." With DBT, you train your brain to trigger a different, less critical response until it turns into, "I made a mistake by waking up late, but that's okay, and I can handle this situation." Using DBT changes your thought patterns so you can react better to triggers and manage life a little more easily.
All this is to say that living with BPD in recovery can be very challenging. With that being said, there are things that you can do to treat it. Through DBT, you can change your thoughts so that you can live a happy, meaningful life.
Living with BPD and being in recovery can be difficult, but there are ways to overcome this hardship. Many treatment facilities specialize in customizing treatment plans to serve their clients best. NorthStar Transitions in Boulder, Colorado, can be the place where you get the treatment you need to get your life back on track. It is one thing to quit using substances, but it's a whole other beast to treat BPD. With NorthStar Transitions, you can get the treatment that you need. If you or someone you know is struggling with borderline personality disorder alongside substance use disorder, please reach out today by calling (303) 558-6400 to see how NorthStar can help.
