The history of borderline
Borderline is one of the most incomprehensible concepts in the practice of medicine or psychiatry. The word arised decennia ago when psychiatrist used the term to indicated diseases where they didn't know the cause of.
What is borderline?
Borderline is a diagnose that isn't regarded as a diagnose in most of the diagnostic manuals. The official diagnose, that is the closest to borderline, is post traumatic stress disorder, also known as PTSD.
Borderline and post traumatic stress disorder
A post traumatic disorder arises because people experienced an intens and negative, soms life-threatening experience. Examples are: rape, incest, car accident, war-related trauma, a robbery or a heavy fire.
How does a trauma causes borderline?
During a trauma, there's a extreme peak of the stress hormone in our blood. This stress hormone fixates or changes memories of the traumatic moment so hard that we cannot forget the painfull memories. The traumatic event flashes before your eyes whether it is an appropriate moment or not. This happens in the shape of nightmares, flashbacks or incontrable emotional reactions when it's triggered.The consequence of this is that we do things we don't want to. These things have a reverse effect on our environment.
How stress sabotaged a borderline patient
A young women had a consultation in my practise. She was in love with a boy, who she wanted to live with. She had a nice boyfriend, but everytime he came close, something weird happened. She got scared and pushed him away, the boy got confused over her intentions and thought she didn't want him.
Treating borderline by declining underlying stress
When I heard this story, I thought that something probably triggered her memory. Indeed, her boyfriend had, without knowing, the same tone of voice as someone who harassed her sexually when she was little. She wasn't aware of this memory until we talked about it.
Borderline and the online self-helpprogram
I explained to her how she could deal with this. The first step is to decline the underlying stress and anxiety. The goal of this was to make her less sensitive for the stimuli. She did that using the online self-helpprogram 15Minutes4Me. After 3 weeks she noticed that she was less sensitive and that she had more and more good moments where she had control over herself.
Treat borderline by communicating about it
The second intervention we discussed, was that she talked to her boyfriend about her reaction and explain to him that it had nothing to do with him. Her boyfriend was very understanding and wanted to support her to overcome this. In the following months she didn't show these unexplainable reactions as much as before and if it happened, they could talk about it. Slowly the symptoms of borderline dissapeared. A year later I got a card... with the announcment of their marriage.
Online self-test for stress with borderline
The symptoms of borderline, also as PTSD, dissapear if you resolve the underlying stress. Do you want to know if you have stress? Do the free selftest.
Dr. Paul Koeck
