Showing posts with label invalidation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label invalidation. Show all posts

Friday, February 23, 2007

Don't call me a borderline

I have borderline personality disorder. I am a person who has a personality disorder.

However, I am not a personality disorder. I am a person.

I've always balked at the use of the term "she's a borderline." It feels wrong PBB definitiongrammatically, but it also feels very invalidating. When therapists write they write about their "borderline clients." Would they also say "my depression clients"? Probably not -- they'd say "my depressed clients," which is a description.


A better term I read recently described people like me as PBB. I had to scope around and see if he meant "peanut butter babies," or "pure bullshit barometers" or "pushes buttons battalion," but what he was abbreviating is People with Borderline Behaviors, or as I like to think of it People with BPD behaviors, because we're actually people with behaviors that fit the definition of the diagnosis, but we are not the diagnosis.

I know a person who believes that everything -- life -- is "just a conversation." He says that our feelings are conversations with ourselves. It's all about the language we use to describe things, internally and externally. In my conversations about BPD, I think I will try to use the term PBB. It is the only descriptor that remembers that I'm a person.