Tips for Communicating with Someone With Borderline Disorder
1. Be realistic. You will not eliminate another person's borderline behavior, no matter how well you communicate. Only that person can do that. Your goal is simply to communicate in a way that respects you and the personal with borderline personality disorder (BP).
2. Leave if necessary. You do not have to tolerate physical threats or emotional or verbal abuse.
3. Simplify. When speaking with a BP, especially about sensitive issues, remember emotion is likely to be so strong that neither of you can do high-level thinking. Make each sentence short, simple, and direct. Leave no room for misinterpretation.
4. Separate the person from the behavior. Make it clear to the BP that when you dislike behavior, you do not dislike the person. You may have to reinforce this often.
5. Address feelings before facts. In ordinary conversation, we put facts before feelings. We assess facts and react with our feelings to them. But people with BPD often reverse this process. They have certain feelings—such as the fear that a partner will abandon them—and so they change the facts to match their feelings.
For example, their partner isn't going to the grocery store; he is walking out on the relationship. A non-BP confronted with that accusation may want to try to point out the facts (he's taking a grocery list, there is no food in the refrigerator, or so on), but in the BP's emotional state, that will be irrelevant. Instead, the non-BP may get farther by acknowledging an empathizing the BP's feelings (not facts) rather than discounting them. Then the non-BP can insert her reality.