50 Borderline Personality Disorder Quotes For Beating Fear And Finding Peace

By Clifton Sankofa

School Leader, Language Arts Expert & Master Quote Curator

Published March 6, 2023

Take a moment to check out our borderline personality disorder quotes.

We have some of the best borderline personality disorder quotes from doctors, therapists, authors, and more.

What is borderline personality disorder?

Borderline personality disorder, or BPD, is a mental health disorder.

People with the disorder usually have unstable moods, behavior, and relationships.

Doctors, researchers, and scientists do not fully understand how or why BPD manifests.

The diagnosis of BPD is usually based on systems observed in the patient.

Check out some symptoms of borderline personality disorder below:

Emotional instability
Feelings of worthlessness
Insecurity, impulsivity, and impaired social relationships

Don’t forget to check out this article about mental health’s importance!

How do doctors and therapists treat BPD?

Professionals treat BPD differently, including talk therapy, medications, and sometimes hospitalization.

Doctors and scientists conduct research at the intersection of clinical psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive-affective neuroscience.

By focusing on psychopathology, suicidal thinking, and depression, they aim to unlock the mysteries behind some of these disorders.

Therapist Keischa Pruden notes we describe people with BPD as dramatic, troublemakers, or needy.

She says the reasoning for these labels is that those with BPD “learned early on to trust chaos in their families of origin.”

Unfortunately, their reasoning as an adult causes them not to trust peaceful situations or healthy relationships.

These borderline personality disorder quotes will discuss our relationships with loved ones who have this disorder.

Creating a narrative and inner dialogue based on fear, abandonment, or being alone causes people with BPD to make rash decisions or poor choices.

Did you know that personality disorders are common in the US population?

About nine percent of people have a personality disorder.

1.4% of adults in the United States experience borderline personality disorder.

Over three million people in America suffer from BPD, yet, this trend is not something we hear about often.

Currently, there are ten distinct personality disorders classified in the DSM.

While many doctors would agree there is a stigma regarding BPD, more and more people are addressing the disorder.

BPD may not have the prevalence of autism, depression, or schizophrenia, but more people are talking about it publicly.

For more BPD quotes, check out our excellent content below.

Short borderline personality disorder quotes about life

These BPD quotes say a lot in a few words.

1. “Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis.” ― Kate Zambreno

2. “The role of the therapist is to reflect the being/accepting self that was never allowed to be in the borderline.” ― Michael Adzema

3. “Stimulate a passion, and the borderline emotionally bleeds to death.” ― Jerold Kreisman, Hal Straus, I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me

4. “The borderline Queen experiences what therapists call oral greediness.” ― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother

5. “People with BPD are like people with third-degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.” ― Marsha Linehan

6. “After all, how could I know if my boisterous humor were spontaneous or just a borderline desire to be the center of attention?” ― Rachel Reiland, Get Me Out of Here

7. “I couldn’t trust my own emotions. Which emotional reactions were justified if any? And which ones were tainted by the mental illness of BPD?” ― Rachel Reiland, Get Me Out of Here

8. “The desperate hunger of the borderline Queen is akin to the behavior of an infant who had gone too long between feelings.” ― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother

9. “To a large degree, a particular collision of genes and temperament with a suboptimal or hostile environment may explain the development of borderline personality disorder.” ― Dolores Mosquera

10. “This is to some extent understandable as some of the features of DID appear superficially to mimic those of schizophrenia and/or Borderline Personality Disorder.” ― Joan Coleman, Attachment, Trauma, and Multiplicity

Loving someone with borderline personality quotes for deep bonds

11. “Many MPD patients have spent years in unproductive therapies based on the assumption that they were borderlines.” ― Donald R. Ross

12. “I write in Heroines: The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize—too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries.” ― Kate Zambreno

13. “I honestly didn’t realize at the time that I was dealing with myself. But I suppose it’s true that I developed a therapy that provides the things I needed for so many years and never got.” ― Marsha Linehan

14. “A borderline suffers a kind of emotional hemophilia; [s]he lacks the clotting mechanism needed to moderate [his or her] spurts of feeling.” ― Jerold Kreisman, Hal Straus

15. “The term ‘borderline’ functions to rationalize sadistic counter-transference, and to legitimize rejecting triaging decisions within the health-care system.” ― Colin A. Ross

Borderline personality disorder quotes to offer perspective

Take a moment and think about how people with this disorder feel.

16. “The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc.”― Kate Zambreno

17. “This is to some extent understandable as some of the features of DID appear superficially to mimic those of schizophrenia and/or Borderline Personality Disorder.” ― Joan Coleman

18. “Because the borderline finds solitude so difficult to tolerate, she is trapped in a relentless metaphysical loneliness from which the only relief comes from of the physical presence of others.” ― Jerold J. Kreisman

19. “It doesn’t occur to me that alcohol might be unhinging me, that drinking at the rate I am can induce depression, impulsive behavior, and symptoms of bipolar and borderline personality disorder.” ― Koren Zailckas

20. “Actually, most of the time, in my experience, the splitting is coming from the staff, not the patient, and it is the mental health professionals who are using projection and denial. This is an example of ‘blaming the victim,’ which is a fundamental borderline psychodynamic.” ― Colin A. Ross

Living with someone with borderline personality disorder quotes

Life can be challenging for those living with someone suffering from BPD.

21. “To stave off the panic associated with the absence of a primary object, borderline patients frequently will impulsively engage in behaviors that numb the panic and establish contact with and control over some new object.” ― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother

22. “What does borderline personality mean, anyhow? It appears to be a way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche. Though to quote my post-Melvin psychiatrist: “It’s what they call people whose lifestyles bother them.” ― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

23. “Borderlines create the vicious circles they fear most. They become angry and drive the relationship to the breaking point, then switch to a posture of helplessness and contrition, beg for reconciliation. If both parties are equally enmeshed, chaos and conflict become the soul of the relationship.” ― Theodore Millon

24. “Unbearable pain that is expressed and acknowledged becomes bearable. But borderlines received no such responses in their childhood. Therefore, they are stuck in the past, trying to elicit what they needed as a child; validation of their unbearable pain.” ― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother

25. “There is inadequate recognition within mental health services of the prevalence and importance of Dissociative Disorders, sufferers of which are frequently misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or, in the cases of DID, schizophrenia.” — Joan Coleman, Attachment, Trauma, and Multiplicity

Learn to understand more about BPD with these quotes

Living with this disorder is difficult, but we can do some things.

26. “Adult children of a BPD parent may seem old before their time or like an old soul (and probably were that way as children too.) They may easily assume the role of fixer and nurturer. They’re the ones friends lean on, the ones to whom people tell their problems.” ― Kimberlee Roth, Surviving a Borderline Parent

27. “Therapists sometimes warn family members not to depend on the person with BPD to validate their self-worth, yet young children have no choice. They can and will do anything to hold onto the good mother (the loving, caring person) who unpredictably turns into the Witch mother (the terrifying, raging beast).” ― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother

28. “Although, in principle, the psychoanalytical theory of borderlines is not punitive, in practice, ‘borderline’ is almost always used to indicate that the patient is hostile, demanding, unpleasant, manipulative, attention-seeking, and prone to regression and dependency if admitted to hospital; in other words, patient is a witch by Malleus Maleficarum criteria.” ― Colin A. Ross, Satanic Ritual Abuse

29. “The borderline Witch’s merger-hungry personality leaves her children feeling devoured, suffocated, oppressed, and imprisoned. Even as adults, her children may dream about prison camps, holocausts, invasions, wars, and natural disasters.” ― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother

30. “As I talk, I feel this pain leaking out, not just the core symptom of BPD, but all the years of being blamed or ignored for my condition and all the years I’ve blamed others for how I am. It’s the pain of being told I was too needy even as could never get the help I needed.” ― Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha, and the Borderline

BPD quotes for creating a happy environment in life

Experiencing borderline personality disorder is a challenging experience, but happiness is possible for people suffering from BPD.

31. “The primary driver to pathological dissociation is attachment disorganization in early life: when that is followed by severe and repeated trauma, then a major disorder of structural dissociation is created.” — Lyons-Ruth, Dutra, Schuder, & Bianchi

32. “Some patients with BPD have severe dissociative symptoms and may actually border on DDNOS or DID. Our clinical observations suggest that dissociative parts in BPD patients have less emancipation and elaboration, and less distinct sense of self than in DDNOS or DID.” ― Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis, The Haunted Self

33. “Dissociative symptoms—primarily depersonalization and derealization—are elements in other DSM-IV disorders, including schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder, and in the neurologic syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy, also called complex partial seizures.” ― James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives

34. “At St Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg, many staff members expressed the opinion, in my presence, that borderlines and multiple personality disorder patients did not have a legitimate right to in-patient treatment, and the out-patient department would not accept patients with either diagnosis.” ― Colin A. Ross, Satanic Ritual Abuse

35. “Within the mental health system in North America, the borderline victim of severe childhood trauma is usually blamed for her behavior, which is regarded as having no legitimate basis and being self-indulgent; her trauma history is ignored and not talked about; and she is given as little treatment and follow-up as possible.” ― Colin A. Ross, Satanic Ritual Abuse

Borderline personality quotes from books

These well-written books offer knowledge about this disorder.

36. “We propose that BPD involves secondary structural dissociation. Consistent with this, Golynkina and Ryle (1999) found that patients with BPD encompassed a dissociative part of the personality that seems to represent an ANP (a coping ANP) and more than one EP (abuser rage, victim rage, passive victim, and zombie).” ― Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis, The Haunted Self

37. “Women find the tables turned letters in their files trumped-up, trumped up charges; isolation and transfer are common, as are court-ordered psychiatric referrals that label the women as lying or incompatible with military service because they are “Borderline Personality Disorders” or mentally unbalanced.” ― Diane Chamberlain, Conduct Unbecoming

38. “The case of a patient with dissociative identity disorder follows: Cindy, a 24-year-old woman, was transferred to the psychiatry service to facilitate community placement. Over the years, she had received many different diagnoses, including schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder.” ― Donald W. Black, Introductory Textbook of Psychiatry

39. “There is inadequate recognition within mental health services of the prevalence and importance of Dissociative Disorders, sufferers of which are frequently misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or, in the cases of DID, schizophrenia.” ― Joan Coleman, Attachment, Trauma, and Multiplicity

40. “Lorraine’s psychiatrist was initially opposed to my seeing her, as her friend Teresa had been stigmatized with the “borderline personality disorder” diagnosis when in hospital, so was seen as a bad inﬂuence on her. But after Lorraine spent a couple of months in hospital calling herself Susie and acting consistently like a child, he was humble enough to acknowledge that perhaps he could learn some new things, and someone else’s help might be a good idea.” ― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself

BPD quotes for maintaining relationships

One of the most challenging aspects of BPD is maintaining meaningful connections with others.

41. “People with Personality Disorders struggle to maintain distance as well as intimacy within relationships.” — Dian Grier, LCSW

42. “The sensitivity that people with BPD feel can also be a gift that allows them to feel love and joy more deeply than others.” — Linnea Butler, LMFT

43. “A person with BPD frantically avoids abandonment by shapeshifting to become who others want them to be, instead of who they truly are.” — Hailey Shafir, LCMHCS

44. “Most of the time, BPD arises from complex trauma and attachment wounds in childhood, and the symptoms of BPD are just defense mechanisms that protect these old wounds.” — Hailey Shafir, LCMHCS

45. “What breaks my heart is that BPD is maligned and pathologized. In reality, it is something that occurs when someone is highly sensitive and has been exposed to an invalidating or abusive environment.” — Linnea Butler, LMFT

More borderline personality quotes to learn from

There is vital information we can learn from these great minds.

46. “A borderline personality disorder is essentially a dysregulated limbic system. Feelings are so big that they cannot be contained, and everything spills over, creating emotional messes that other people end up being victims too.” — Krista Jordan, Ph.D

47. “People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) frequently dread abandonment, struggle to establish healthy relationships, experience powerful emotions, act impulsively, and may even develop paranoia and dissociation.” — Dr. Elizabeth Lombardo, Ph.D

48. “The reality is that BPD is treatable, and research shows that people can recover from BPD with various therapy approaches, including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and psychodynamic therapy, though DBT is considered the gold standard treatment for BPD.” — Linnea Butler, LMFT

49. “BPD has been called a “trash can diagnosis,” meaning that it was originally a catch-all for problems that didn’t fit well within other diagnoses. It has long been pathologized by the mental health community as something inherent to a person’s personality and therefore untreatable.” — Linnea Butler, LMFT

50. “Feeling the need to quickly exit relationships before people find out the “real you?” Finding relief and closeness in intense but brief sexual encounters? Rapidly and repeatedly changing identity in order to find a way to escape? This is the heart of BPD and common reactions people suffering from BPD have to everyday situations.” — Dr. Nicolas Sikaczowski, Peace Behavioral Health

Help is available for those who seek it

Healthcare professionals encourage people to remember that people experiencing borderline personality disorder usually come from a traumatic background of perceived chaos.

Feelings of abandonment and negative self-speak create a belief system that says the individual is not worthy of love.

These types of feelings can lead a person into a dangerous spiral of toxicity.

It is common for people with BPD to feel that they cannot trust others or that people they connect to will leave them.

They amplify some of these negative feelings in their relationships, be they romantic, with family or friends.

Can you imagine living this way?

Do you have borderline personality disorder and know how this feels?

Silvi Saxena is a therapist who notes:

“Personality disorders often come from childhood trauma and emotional neglect where children from a young age are taught certain beliefs about emotional expression that are unhealthy.”