New Tips for Loved Ones to Handle a Teen with Borderline Personality Disorder

If you believe that your teen suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, you trek unimaginable lands to seek the help needed. Your instinctual reaction, to find all available Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) resources, is a God-given gift. Our society treats Borderline Personality Disorder merely as a "science". It only addresses the mind and the body. The psychiatrist handles the physiological aspect (body), the therapist handles the thought and behavior patterns (mind), who will handle the soul?

The soul of the Borderline is often ignored, if not neglected. The approach to treatment focus on "band-aid" solutions that masks the problems. You are advised to give your Borderline teens medications for anxiety, unstable moods, impulsive acts, suicidal gestures and self-injury, depression and feelings of emptiness, paranoid or dissociative symptoms. The mental health providers believe that at one point, one or two (or more) of the available drugs in the pharmaceutical industry might eventually work.

In the meantime, the Borderline and their loved ones wait patiently for the right mix of medications that will mimic a state of normalcy in their lives. Before they reach that stage, the prescribed drugs affects their blood chemistry. They experience adverse side effects such as delusions, hallucinations, psychoses, and suicidal obsessions. The symptoms refuse to go away. For many Borderline sufferers, BPD indications become more intense and worse. They either stop taking the medications in the middle of the treatment or they search for alternative non-medical therapies. Hopelessness and despair set in. Not only do you have a Borderline teen, you also have a highly anxious spouse with depression. Other family members suffer from another form of disorder creating further family dysfunctions.

How can one treat deep emotional pains and feelings of abandonment that Borderline sufferers experience? How can loved ones deal with the rages of a Borderline? How can you continue your life with a Borderline who has caused you deep emotional wounds of betrayal, constant lies, and manipulation?

The turbulent relationship between Borderline teens and their parents amplify the already confusing stage of puberty and adolescent years. Just to push reality in your world and theirs, you and your spouse have to re-group. You must look at your relationship with your teen with a fresh set of eyes, particularly one with "spiritual glasses".

The chaotic relationship emotionally drains you to the point that you do not want to be around a teen with Borderline Personality Disorder. You find yourself in a "time warp" where all of a sudden there is no time left in a day to address the many issues. Actually, even if you have great intentions to help your Borderline teen, they will seemingly push you away. This is part of their illness.

The spiritual dimension to handling Borderline Personality Disorder requires the involvement of the entire family. The worsening of this disorder occurs if the Borderline teen is deprived of a loving family life. Parents of Borderline teens are exasperated with the rebellious, manipulative behaviors that they send them to relatives, friends or boarding schools for short term relief.

The family is not only a human institution. It is also a Divine institution, that is, God created families for each member's well being. Members of the family give affirmation to each other. It is in our own families where we acquire the initial training to love, respect, learn, behave and know God. Families show their respect for one another by giving each other a sense of dignity. Families should be a safe refuge for anyone who suffers from a disorder. The family has a legal right to provide safety and a sense of security to its members.

However, the opposite of what we want to achieve occurs in the modern family life. Your estranged teens are forced to deal with their issues because we do not know how to reach them. Parents tend to encourage the BPD teen to live on their own especially if he or she does not respect their boundaries. Isolation is the opposite of family life. When you begin to isolate your loved one with Borderline Personality Disorder or they move out of your home, the bonding they need to heal will be weakened and eventually lost. Why? It is because isolation creates an emotional vacuum or void, which aggravates the current state of the BPD sufferer.

A teen, particularly those suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, needs to foster relationship first within their families. The family members need to forgive each other from the betrayal and misunderstandings that occurred as a result of BPD diagnosis. Resentments, frustrations, exasperation, accusations, rages, angers, confusion, envy, jealousy, self-pity, depression are negativities that need not exist within families. On a daily basis, each member of the family must resist these negative tendencies by affirming the opposite virtues of love, kindness, joy, patience, perseverance, understanding, serenity, knowledge, piety, gentleness, and self-control.

The family is a sacred unit in society. It is a vehicle to transport us from isolation and eternal despair to the joy of a sense of belonging and feelings of love. If family members work together to help the disordered member heal, outstanding outcomes will occur. Family life, even if surged with problems, is the hope of a teen with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Source:

Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, "Exorcism and the Church Militant"