Development Stages and Delays with Borderline Personality Disorder

Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my family. I have a family member who has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. He has always been one to shut people out, has trouble connecting with others and fearing being abandoned. I have known about his disorder for roughly 10 years. He’s 26 now and it still affects him traumatically. He has never had a steady relationship with others, he’s faced drug addiction, and has experienced severe anger problems which have resulted in jail time.
I remember a few years back; my cousin had gotten into a major argument with his girlfriend at the time. I think they were arguing about who was going to take the car in the morning to go somewhere. I remember them screaming and yelling over each other, and my cousin had decided that neither of them were taking the car the next day, so he went outside with a baseball bat, and busted the windshield. He climbed on top of the car and stomped the sunroof in and dented up all the doors and hood. The car was trashed.

Living with borderline personality disorder can be really tough. It changes the way we think, the way we act, and how we feel. Many view borderline personality disorder, including psychiatrists and mental health professionals, as a psychological condition. According to Nasrallah (2014), “BPD often is conceptualized as a behavioral consequence of childhood trauma; treatment approaches have emphasized intensive psychotherapeutic modalities, less so biological interventions (p. 19)”. BPD is a neuro-biological illness, so it has been found to drastically change how this disorder should be taken care of.

From what I know, when my cousin was growing up, his parents weren’t the best. His mom left him and his siblings to my mom for her to take care of. Before my mom had taken them in though, there were times that they would all have to find their way home from school. They were left on the street many times because both of their parents were doing drugs in the house. They weren’t properly cared for before my parents had started raising them. This goes to show that borderline personality disorder is truly caused by childhood abuse. Ever since then, he has always been a problem child. He dropped out of school, he has never kept a steady job, he never got a GED, and he is always in trouble with substance abuse.

Many believe that borderline personality disorder is made up, but really, it isn’t. It is a serious disabling brain disorder, and not so much a personality issue. As Nasrallah (2014) says, “symptoms of BPD are listed as: feelings of abandonment; unstable and intense interpersonal relationships; un¬stable sense of self; impulsivity; suicidal or self-mutilating behavior; affective in-stability (dysphoria, irritability, anxiety); chronic feelings of emptiness; intense anger episodes; and transient paranoid or dissociative symptoms (p. 19)”. The symptoms caused by BPD are clusters of psychopathological and behavioral symptoms that reflect a pervasive brain disorder associated with abnormal biology. Marangoni shows that “Borderline Personality Disorder’s symptoms also mirror Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Bipolar Disorder. These disorders can be difficult to differentiate and accurately diagnose. Therefore, it is important to take into account other information, such as family history, developmental stages and delays, age and type of onset course of illness, previous and current treatments, and type of comorbidity (p. 20)”.