Look Who it Was Random video

9 Characteristics Of Borderline Personality Disorder

2,852 views · Published 21 May 2018 · 28:30 · Indexed 28 October 2026

Channel: Mark Smith Family Tree Life Coaching · 2018 · People & Blogs

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Mark E. Smith, MSW is the Founder and Director of Family Tree Life Coaching. He previously worked as a highly respected therapist and author in the Indianapolis area for 32+ years. He now practices as a Life and Relationship Coach. He offers coaching for individuals, couples, families, family businesses, executive leaders, pastors, and therapists. He has world class coaching expertise in Affair Recovery, Relationship Issues, Narcissistic Abuse Syndrome, Sexual Addiction, Abuse, Trauma, Complex PTSD, Anxiety, Mid-Life Issues, Shame and Abandonment Issues. If you need a safe, courageous, cutting, marriage-jolting healer, he is your guy. You can contact Mark Smith at [email protected] and 317-507-8866.

Mark Smith discusses Carol W. Berman, M.D.'s Blog on the Huffington Post entitled '9 Characteristics Of Borderline Personality Disorder'  In this video Mark will strive to give a cutting edge, compassionate, enlightened, non-myth filled accounting on the true nature of Borderline Personality Disorder.  

- Carol W. Berman, M.D., is assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at NYU Medical Center and the author of Personality Disorders: A Practical Guide.
- Blog on the Huffington Post https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/9-tips-on-how-to-recogniz_b_5224432
Let me try this again. ‘9 Clinical Criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder’ is our #1 video but also our most criticized video. I share all of my videos from the same heart of caring and a sincere desire to help people by telling them the truth. But I do feel a calling to bust some growing myths about BPD  

1. Borderlines are on a continuum 
2. They are NOT just codependents
3.  They are NOT Empaths
4. They tend to have a lot of shame and defensiveness and anger and make lots of comments of YouTube channels
5. I am NOT saying that people with BPD are bad people – most of them are lovely people
6.  They ARE Cluster B’s – Narcissists, Histrionic, Anti-Social and Borderline

“Any personality disorder is a fixed, lasting pattern of thinking, feeling and acting that usually leads the person into emotionally and/or physically dangerous situations.”

1) You are idealized sometimes as the greatest person alive, while at other times you are seen as the worst person. People with BPD often have skewed views of people, whether they are acquaintances or people that are an everyday part of their lives.
- They can make you feel so good and they can emasculate you until you are shreaded
- Catty devaluation/dislike/competition

2) The person’s sense of self is distorted. The person doesn’t truly understand who he or she really is, so he or she tries on different behaviors. It is not uncommon for them to be distant, authoritative, friendly or hostile with the same person in the same day.
- They do not know who they are.  Wrong place, with the wrong people, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons
- They take polls a lot
- Chameleons 

3) The person frantically tries to avoid what she considers abandonment. The person may act overly needy when their support system is removed, even temporarily, such as when a close friend goes on vacation.
- The movie ‘What About Bob’
- My Book – why you have to understand this
- The source of most of the conflict with some couples

4) The person might half halfheartedly try to kill him — or herself or engages in self-mutilation. 

5) The person is intensely reactive to situations or events that most people would just ignore or brush off. Another example is the way a person with BPD might obsess about a situation or statement. If someone tells this individual something in an angry way, then he or she might keep thinking about the statement obsessively and cannot “let it go.”

6) He or she constantly feels empty or not really there. My patient reported these feelings of emptiness many times and often thought she wasn’t really in this world.
- The goal of recovery – to develop an individuated sense of self – ‘Finding Your authentic Self In the Sweet Darkness’
- A lack of joy, passions, color, things that define them

7) Anger is their most common emotion even when other feelings might be more appropriate. 
8) Paranoid thoughts are common. People with this disorder often become paranoid and imagine that people are “colluding” against them.
- Very difficult to develop a therapeutic alliance with an extreme BPD because they can’t trust

9) These people act impulsively and in self-damaging ways, for example, engaging in compulsive sex, binge-eating or gambling. Because of this, BPD can often be confused with other personality disorders, such as histrionic personality disorder.

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