Borderline personality disorder and substance use disorders
frequently occur together and there's a lot of overlap in symptoms. So how do you
tell the difference? How do you pull the pieces apart to figure out if you are a loved one, has
just addiction, just borderline personality disorder. Or both.
Yeah, it can be a little bit complicated, but stay tuned because I'm going to give you
a way to think about this that might help you decide what is, what now,
the first thing I'd like to do is just kind of give you a quick rundown of the
symptoms of borderline personality disorder, a person with borderline personality disorder.
Doesn't have to have all these symptoms,
but it's going to have a number of these. You're going to see frantic efforts to avoid real. Or
even imagined abandonment. You're going to see a pattern of intense and unstable emotions. People
with border on personality disorder often engage in dangerous impulsive acts like
binge eating, reckless driving, excessive shopping, unsafe sex, and substance use disorders.
There it is. It is literally one of the criteria that can happen as a symptom
of borderline personality disorder. You may also see self-harming behaviors and
recurrent suicidal ideation. You're going to see some intense mood swings in someone with
borderline personality disorder, and they often struggle with feelings of emptiness.
People with BPD may demonstrate inappropriate, very intense anger, and at times feel very
disassociated from themselves and the world around them. Now, as you can see looking at
all of these symptoms, I could literally take pretty much any of these and throw them right into
the symptoms of what it looks like when someone is struggling with a substance use disorder, right?
Intense mood swings, impulsivity, inconsistent sense of self feeling, empty feeling, dissociated,
moodiness. Right. All of these symptoms overlap, which is why it's difficult to pull these two
diagnoses apart, but there's a couple of ways that might help you think through the
situation. If you're trying to figure this out for yourself or for somebody that you care about,
there's one key symptom in here that I want you to pay close attention to,
and that symptom is the frantic efforts to avoid real or perceived abandonment.
Someone with an addiction will have frantic efforts to avoid not having the substance or
the behavior or whatever they're addicted to, but not necessarily the abandonment.
Now it could get a little confusing here because sometimes someone that just has a
substance abuse problem might try to make you feel guilty and say, you're abandoning me.
Like if you won't give them money for the drug, but you can really see that that behavior is
really a manipulation and it's about getting the drug, not necessarily about the relationship,
although they will use the relationship as a weapon or tool to get what they need related
to the addiction. Probably the biggest question you can ask yourself to help you figure this out
is to think about what you or your loved one was like before they ever had an addiction.
Did they have all these symptoms in place? Pretty much forever from like young adulthood on even
before the addiction or do these symptoms really start to show themselves mostly when they're in
an active, addictive state, that's gonna give you a huge clue on whether or not someone has
just borderline person disorder or just addiction, or sometimes both now in both situations,
someone with a substance use disorder and someone with borderline personality disorder,
they're very likely to be using the addiction as a way to emotionally regulate and.
There's a high statistical chance of trauma in the backgrounds of either and or both of these
disorders. Now, why might it be difficult for you to figure out exactly what you're
dealing with when it comes to substance abuse and borderline personality disorder?
The answer to that is. Treatment and outcome, if you're mostly dealing with these behaviors
and they're just really related to the substance abuse, once you treat the substance abuse problem,
most of these behaviors will go away or at least very much stabilize.
If you're dealing with someone who has borderline personality disorder and you get
the substance abuse stabilized, but you haven't dealt with the borderline personality disorder,
then you're still gonna see a lot of the symptoms. And even if they're not using drugs,
alcohol engaging in addictive behavior, you may see those dangerous impulsive acts come out.
In other ways, ask yourself this question. Are these behaviors
a reflection of the substance? Or it's the substance use of reflection of
these behaviors. It's kind of a chicken or the egg question here, but if you can figure that out,
then you'll have your answer. Now, your next question might be, well, what kind
of help do you get for someone who has borderline personnel disorder and or substance use disorder?
Well, there are tons of videos on my channel about getting help for substance use disorders.
So I won't go into all of those. There are special kinds of help that someone
with borderline personality disorder might want to look into. Namely there's a type
of specific therapy called D B T. That stands for dialectical behavior therapy.
If you're looking for help for yourself or for a loved one, then a really great fast place to get
started is through better help. Now better help is the sponsor of today's video. So I
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help.com/put the shovel down. And I'm going to include that link in the description for you. Now,
we went through all the criteria for borderline personnel disorder, and I'm guessing that you
have a pretty good general understanding of what the criteria for substance use disorder are,
but in case you don't, I want you to watch this video next, because in this video,
I'm gonna go through all the criteria for you, the official ones for having a.
Alcohol use disorder. And if you're thinking to yourself, well, maybe the problem isn't alcohol,
it's something else. These are the same criteria for any addiction.
All the substance use disorders, you can just replace the word alcohol with any other drug
insert name, and you still have the same criteria.
I'm gonna link it up for you here so you can watch it next.
I'd like to send a big heartfelt thanks to all of you who help support this. Your likes, shares
and donations are helping us spread the message of recovery. And without you, this wouldn't be
possible. Now this next video has been hand selected to go right along with this one.
And don't forget to check the description for additional resources.