Coping Skills for Borderline Personality Disorder
When you are having an intense emotion, it can be hard to know what to do. If you have borderline personality disorder (BPD), your emotions can be overwhelming.
The symptoms of BPD, including erratic mood shifts, self-harming behaviors, suicidality, intense emotional experiences, sensitivity to problems in your relationships and problems with impulsive behaviors, may all be related to one core feature: emotion dysregulation.
Because of this emotion dysregulation, you may have very strong emotional responses and difficulty managing those responses. Unfortunately, many people with BPD turn to unhealthy behaviors in an attempt to cope with emotional pain, such as violence, self-harm or substance abuse.
Coping skills can help to reduce emotion dysregulation and the other symptoms of BPD.
What Are Coping Skills?
Since emotion dysregulation is such an important feature of BPD, many treatments for BPD emphasize the importance of building coping skills to better manage emotions when they arise. What exactly are coping skills? They are healthier ways of addressing situations and their resulting emotions.