Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder

No matter what you’re experiencing, you might be realizing it’s time to seek professional support. We offer therapy for individuals dealing with borderline personality disorder, helping you manage intense emotions, build meaningful relationships, and find a path toward healing and growth.

BPD Is More Common Than You May Think

It’s not unusual to encounter difficulties such as feeling misunderstood, struggling to maintain relationships, or experiencing intense mood swings. These challenges can sometimes indicate deeper issues like emotional disregulation, but with the right guidance and therapy, it’s possible to learn new coping strategies and build a more stable, fulfilling life.

Emotional volatility becomes noticeable

You may find yourself frequently overwhelmed by emotions that seem to come out of nowhere. This can lead to outbursts, impulsive decisions, and strained interactions with others, as you might struggle to regulate your responses in stressful situations.

Detachment and numbness take hold

Alternatively, you may feel yourself pulling away from those around you, becoming increasingly disconnected and indifferent. It might feel safer to isolate yourself, avoiding activities you once enjoyed or withdrawing from social connections, leaving you feeling empty and detached.

Therapy can help

Regardless of your struggles, you may be considering that it’s time to talk to a therapist.

How Environments That Invalidate Our Emotional Responses Fosters BPD

The dysregulation associated with emotional sensitivity is exacerbated when we are exposed to an invalidating environment. Rather than being shown empathy and understanding by our caregivers, we are made to believe our emotional reactions are inappropriate. These experiences may take the form of ostracization, abuse, or neglect. Subtler forms of invalidation occur whenever someone doesn’t believe our feelings or difficulties are real enough or when we don’t fit in with the rest of our family or culture.

With BPD, we often lack the skills to better know ourselves, either because we never learned or practiced them. Without learning the proper tools to regulate our emotions, we may have difficulty fitting in, trusting our thoughts and feelings, and knowing how to change how we behave and see the world.

Fortunately, an effective treatment for borderline personality disorder is available—Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).

Borderline Personality Disorder Therapy Can Help You Create A Life Worth Living

As someone with borderline personality disorder symptoms, you might have tried counseling before with little to no success, making you skeptical that therapy can help. However, giving DBT a chance can be life-changing. Once you build trust with a therapist, you can learn a multitude of life skills that address the behaviors associated with BPD.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based treatment for the management of BPD. Research has shown that DBT is effective in helping people with BPD “build and maintain meaningful relationships, gain control over their emotions, curtail problematic impulses, and generally feel more in control.” [2]

Navigating Advice for BPD Can Be Overwhelming

There’s a lot of conflicting advice on managing borderline personality disorder, making it hard to know what truly works. Mainstream methods often don’t address individual needs. Therapy is essential in these cases, helping you understand your emotions, develop coping strategies, and find a path to healing.

You May Have Some Questions About Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder…

How Comprehensive DBT Therapy For Borderline Personality Disorder Works

Our comprehensive DBT program offers six-month to one-year cycles of group skills training. Once enrolled, you will also meet with your therapist once per week individually and have access to phone coaching. Your therapist is part of a DBT team that meets regularly to ensure you are getting the optimal level of care and support.

While our DBT classes teach practical life skills, individual therapy is where you can apply these skills to your specific needs and goals. Even if you are not enrolled in comprehensive DBT, your therapist can weave in DBT strategies where relevant to meet your treatment goals.

Your safety and well-being will be our number one priority as you collaborate with your therapist to set the agenda that best fits your needs for each session. Together, we will focus on identifying and targeting specific behaviors you want to either promote—like taking a pause before reacting—or decrease—like self-harm or impulsive texting.

We will also analyze the factors that lead you to engage in unwanted behaviors as well as what happens afterward. This helps us understand the function this behavior serves so you can identify healthier alternatives moving forward. And tracking your behaviors, emotions, and skills and reviewing them in each session helps keep you accountable.

The Skills Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Teaches For BPD

DBT offers life skills that are helpful for BPD, including:

Mindfulness to help you stay in the present moment so you can learn how to pause before acting impulsively, thereby providing you better options for responding to thoughts, feelings, and behaviors;
Emotion Regulation to enhance control over intense reactions and decrease the chances of them happening in the first place;
Interpersonal effectiveness to teach you how to ask for what you want as well as how to say no, in addition to maintaining positive relationships and keeping your self-respect;
Middle path skills to modify problematic behaviors, promote thinking more flexibly, and improve acceptance of yourself and others;
Distress tolerance to increase your ability to get through difficult moments without making them worse and accept circumstances that cannot be immediately changed.

The overall goal of BPD therapy is to help you build a satisfying and meaningful life according to your values. With DBT, you can feel more in control, learn to trust yourself, and find your inner wisdom so you have hope for the future.

Going to both individual therapy and the DBT group is a lot of time and money. Can I just attend individual therapy?

Although we understand it’s a commitment, according to the most recent research, comprehensive DBT—consisting of individual and group therapy, phone coaching, and access to a therapist consultation team—is the gold standard treatment for BPD. [3] Whereas the DBT group for borderline personality disorder offers a class in life skills, individual therapy is where you learn how to apply these skills to your own life. Given the benefits of comprehensive DBT treatment for anyone suffering from borderline personality disorder, it’s worth the commitment and is shown to actually save time and money in the future.

I’ve been in therapy for BPD for years and nothing has really helped.

It’s important to find a treatment that’s a good fit for your needs. As specialists in borderline personality disorder, we are highly trained in BPD and are confident Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) can work for you. If you are willing to give DBT a chance and trust the process, you will see results. We are happy to answer any questions you have and, if things aren’t working, we will troubleshoot to find the best solutions for you. We also offer BPD couples therapy if needed.

It’s important that my therapist gets me.

Based on your initial call, we will do our best to match you with the most suitable BPD therapist for your needs. Once you have gotten to know them, we encourage you to be open and honest about what has been helpful in the past and what hasn’t. Please feel free to give them feedback along the way. We are in this together and will partner with you to help you create the life you want.