“Your perceptions are off, and as a result of that you read signals in ways that are incorrect,” says Rebbie Ratner, who has BPD and directed the documentary Borderline, along with running the YouTube channel BorderlinerNotes. “And based on those incorrect reads, you react.”
It’s the kind of pattern that gets misread constantly—written off as manipulation, drama, or someone being “too much.” Over time, it can wreck the very thing the person is trying to protect. “Do it enough, and you blow your relationships,” Ratner says. “You blow your ability to build connections. You get lonely. You lose your ties to people.”
None of that is accurate. We asked experts and people with BPD to break down the most common myths about the condition—and what they wish more people understood.
“They are deep, deep feelers,” says Lauren Hunter, a psychotherapist in New York who treats BPD and whose father has the condition. “If somebody shared a devastating scenario, they would almost take on those feelings.”
Part of why this myth persists, Masland says, is that the hardest moments are the most visible ones. Someone in the grip of intense emotion might lash out or say something cutting, and that can be mistaken for not caring. “It’s not coming from a place of actually trying to hurt anyone else,” she says. “It’s coming from this place of dysregulation.”
Myth: People with BPD are manipulative or attention-seeking
“Something that may seem like attention-seeking might actually be help-seeking,” says Priscilla María Gutiérrez, a mental-health advocate in Sarasota, Fla., who was diagnosed with BPD in 2018. “Safety-seeking. Connection-seeking. Relief-from-pain seeking.”
The cycles Ratner fell into with romantic partners—lashing out, then apologizing, then resenting herself for apologizing—often looked, from the outside, like calculated efforts to manipulate. “I don’t think that’s what was going on,” she says. “It was much more about doing behaviors to assist in regulating and managing my feelings.”
“Not everyone is going to have the same five out of nine,” Gutiérrez says. Her own presentation was what some clinicians informally call “quiet BPD”—the volatility turned inward rather than outward. “My outbursts were kind of rare but very intense,” she says. “A lot of it was internal. I took it out on myself.” She has never attempted suicide, she notes, though suicidal ideation and self-harm are common among people with the condition.
Myth: BPD is just another name for bipolar disorder
The two conditions get confused all the time—partly because of the similar acronyms, and partly because both involve intense mood shifts. But they’re fundamentally different, and the distinction matters because the treatments aren’t the same.
Trauma is a major risk factor for BPD; many people with the condition have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. But it doesn’t apply to everyone, and assuming it does can create problems of its own.
The messages aren't always intentionally cruel. Sometimes they sound like attempts to calm a child down: It's not a big deal. Don't make such a fuss. But over time, they teach kids that their emotions aren’t legitimate, Masland says, and as a result, they never develop the tools to manage what they’re feeling.
Myth: People with BPD can’t have healthy relationships
Relationships can be especially challenging for people with BPD; the fear of abandonment runs so deep that even small ruptures can feel catastrophic. But the idea that healthy connection is off the table is wrong.
Gutiérrez, who has done years of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT, the most effective treatment for the disorder), says she had to work hard at the relationship skills most people absorb in childhood. “We feel things deeply, and so it’s not that we’re incapable of loving or learning boundaries or learning how to regulate our emotions,” she says. “It’s just that we didn’t really have that foundation growing up. But we’re more than capable of growing and learning and healing.”
“When we look at good epidemiological studies, it actually turns out that the prevalence is equal for men and women,” Masland says. “It’s just that men are not getting the diagnosis.” Men, she explains, are less likely to seek treatment in the first place—and when they do, clinicians often default to other diagnoses because the cultural image of BPD is so heavily gendered. Pete Davidson and former NFL player Brandon Marshall are two of the few male public figures who have spoken openly about having the condition.
Myth: BPD can’t be treated
At its core, DBT teaches skills that many people with BPD never had the chance to learn. It’s “a whole curriculum of distress tolerance, of coping skills, of how to talk to people—just really foundational human skills,” says Gutiérrez, who began DBT shortly after her diagnosis. Combined with medication and ongoing therapy, she says, the work has been transformative. “I would describe my BPD as in remission. If a psychiatrist were to analyze me, I wouldn’t meet the criteria.”
Ratner especially appreciates learning how to question her initial reactions. “One of the core capacities that’s brought forth when one gets treatment is learning how to cast doubt into your perceptions,” she says. The unreturned text she once read as rejection? Now she can pause to consider other possibilities—her friend was busy, didn’t see the message as urgent, or simply didn’t get to it yet.
And she refuses to let stigma slow her recovery down. “It is really not my business what other people think about [BPD] or me,” she says. “I will be damned if I am to be distracted by their opinion of it to the extent that it in any way impacts my efforts at recovery.”
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