Does your daughter need help coping with borderline personality disorder? Call us to learn how our fully-integrated DBT treatment center can help your family. 866-754-4807<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Pamela began intense, explosive, short-lived romantic relationships with her male peers at a young age. This caused marked stress between Pamela and her mother. All of have patterns of behavior, patterns of thought, and patterns of feeling. When we say we like or dislike someone’s personality, it’s really these sets of patterns that we are referring to. People’s personalities are evident when they report how they perceive the world\u00a0when they act in the world, and when they express emotion about the world and other people.<\/p>\n A personality is disordered when one’s behaviors, thoughts, and feeling patterns toward the world, toward oneself, and toward others are maladaptive, incongruent, or inflexible. A personality disorder impairs one’s ability to function in the world. According to the DSM-IV, the American Psychological Association’s diagnostic manual, in order to diagnose a person with BPD, that person must manifest a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affect, accompanied by marked impulsivity. These symptoms begin by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by at least five of the following:<\/p>\n No one is sure what causes BPD in teens, but most experts agree that a bio-psycho-social model is the best explanation. A person with BPD might have a history like this:<\/p>\n There are many popular treatments for BPD. Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) <\/a>has been steadily gaining followers and press over the last two decades. Aaron Beck published Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders in 1990 to showcase how his Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)\u2013the most widely researched therapeutic style\u2013could help persons with BPD. To date, most research on the treatment of BPD has been done with adults. Clear, consistent, lovingly-applied, somewhat strict boundaries create a climate of security and predictability for teens with BPD.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4573,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[75,76,117],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6993"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6993"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8089,"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6993\/revisions\/8089"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBy the age of 15, Pamela had a highly conflicted relationship with her mother, mostly centered around Pamela’s use of drugs, Pamela’s poor choice in boyfriends, and Mom never being home. When I met Pamela as her therapist in a treatment program, she showed great difficulty trusting staff, peers, and other professionals due to the trauma she’d experienced from the wreckage of past relationships.
\nHer cutting subsided after she experienced living in a structured residential treatment environment, but her depression, intense interpersonal relationships, addictive thinking patterns, and low self-esteem remained problems. She was unsure she would ever want to, or be able to, quit cutting when she turned eighteen and was no longer under her parents’ care.
\nWhile there was no serious abuse in her history, the neglect Pamela suffered was enough to stir within her intense feelings of worthlessness and pain. What she wanted more than anything was acceptance<\/a>, attention, and love. Not receiving it from peers or family was more than she could bear. Pamela is one of a growing number of adolescent females diagnosed with borderline personality disorder or BPD.<\/p>\nWhat is a Personality?<\/h2>\n
The Disordered Personality<\/h2>\n
\nA disordered personality can manifest in a variety of ways, including:<\/p>\n\n
Borderline Personality Disorder in Teens<\/h2>\n
\n
![\"Facts](\"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/borderline-personality-disorder-in-teens.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
![\"BPD](\"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/bpd-in-teens.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
BPD is one of the most highly publicized personality disorders. Research shows that about 11% of people who seek outpatient treatment and about 19% of those treated in inpatient settings have BPD. About 74% of those diagnosed with BPD are women.
\nMore and more, I work with adolescent girls who have been misdiagnosed with BPD. Therapists should be use care when considering such a diagnosis for an adolescent, noting, in particular, the importance of detecting a pervasive pattern of five or more of these behaviors for more than one consecutive year. Still, teens with pervasive personality disorders such as BPD do exist and can benefit from the appropriate treatment.<\/p>\nWhat Causes Borderline Personality Disorder in Teens?<\/h2>\n
\n
Is BPD in Teens Treatable?<\/h2>\n
\nIn general, Sunrise\u00a0Residential Treatment Center proposes a systemic approach to healing families and individuals; our approach to treating Borderline Personality Disorder in teens is no different. Interestingly, research shows that the best treatment for any client struggling with any issue is for her therapist to have an open, healthy therapeutic relationship<\/a> with her. I assert that how a therapist interacts with a client with BPD is the key to successful treatment and is the best predictor of a positive outcome.
\nThat said, we can infer that parents should be able to master the same relationship-building skills that therapists spend years in school mastering. This requires parents to think clearly about their feelings toward their daughter, their behaviors toward her, and their thoughts about her. In short, like therapists, parents must master their own personalities if they ever hope to be able to influence their daughters’ disordered personality!
\nOver the years, I’ve found that clear, consistent, lovingly-applied, somewhat strict boundaries create a climate of security and predictability for teens with BPD. Unlike some other clients, I have found that I can never give them an inch, even if they’ve been “good” for a long period of time. My expectations must remain fair and constant, or it sends the teen into a tail-spin. No matter the loop-hole they think they may have found, I must remain true to the literal meaning and the intended purpose of the established rules.
\nLook back at the case of Patricia. Like Patricia, most teens with BPD are great weather-testers. In other words, they are always standing with a wet finger lifted to the sky, assessing any changes in the wind’s strength or direction. They never feel secure just being themselves. They morph, chameleon-like, into whatever they believe we want them to be. They are also adept at applying social pressure to get us to act the way they want us to. They are never comfortable simply being who they really are. In fact, if I were to ask Patricia or most any teen with BPD who she is, she will tell me (when she is being honest) that she doesn’t know who she is, that she is confused, or that she feels too “empty” to even begin an answer to that question.
\nA teen with BPD feels so unsafe, feels so fearful of being rejected by those she loves, that she thinks she has to control every social interaction. And yet, by doing this, she feeds the very insecurity which keeps her from having meaningful relationships. This prohibits her from ever healing from the fear of abandonment and loneliness she struggles to manage.
\nAgain, a healthy relationship and rigid, clear rules and expectations<\/a> are the most important things parents and therapists can implement to help a teen with BPD begin healing. \u00a0And remember, borderline personality disorder in teens affects the whole family. \u00a0If your daughter and family need help, please contact us at 866-754-4807.
\n—
\nBy Dustin Tibbitts, LMFT. \u00a0Dustin is the former Executive Director for New Haven Residential Treatment Center<\/a>, and current president of\u00a0InnerChange<\/a>, a\u00a0family of adolescent treatment programs.
\n![\"Borderline](\"https:\/\/sunrisertc.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/Borderline-Personality-Disorder-Test.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
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