The BPD “Blow-and-Shout” Therapy: Without Pain It Cannot Startle One into Awakening
(The full text is about ten thousand words; reading it requires patience.)
Mental illness has always been difficult to cure, yet cases of self-healing occasionally occur. Dr. Marsha Linehan, a psychologist at the University of Washington in the United States, was just such a case. She not only cured herself of borderline personality disorder (a serious mental illness) but also founded a distinctive form of psychotherapy: dialectical behavior therapy. She wrote a book titled Dialectical Behavior Therapy introducing this method.
Dr. Marsha Linehan recounted that she invented dialectical behavior therapy in the course of studying Zen. If the reader has some grounding in Buddhism, it is not hard to see that Dr. Linehan's work is indeed full of Zen flavor, and is a derivative of the thought of the “Northern gradual” school of Chinese Chan (Zen).
Chinese Chan has another major lineage, the “Southern sudden” school represented by the Sixth Patriarch Huineng. Because Huineng initially preached mainly in southern China, and his doctrine of sudden awakening differed greatly from the Northern school's doctrine of gradual cultivation, this lineage is called the “Southern sudden” school. The founders of Southern-sudden and Northern-gradual were fellow disciples: they were both disciples of the Fifth Patriarch Hongren, and the Southern founder, Huineng, was the junior Dharma brother of the Northern founder, Shenxiu.
The Fifth Patriarch Hongren lived in the Tang Dynasty and built a teaching center on East Mountain in what is now Huangmei County, Huanggang. If we visit Huangmei County today, as soon as we enter the county we can see large signboards bearing two poems.
The first is:
The body is the Bodhi tree, / the mind is like a bright mirror stand. / Diligently polish it at all times, / let no dust settle on it.
The second is:
Bodhi is originally no tree, / the bright mirror is no stand either. / Originally there is nothing at all— / where can dust settle?
The first verse was written by Shenxiu; the second was composed by Huineng after he saw Shenxiu's verse and was inspired. It is said that the line “Originally there is nothing at all” in the second poem was originally “The Buddha-nature is always pure,” and was later revised and polished by Huineng's disciples into “Originally there is nothing at all.”
Behind these two verses lies an anecdote. According to the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, one day the Fifth Patriarch Hongren prepared to pass the robe and bowl to one of his disciples, and asked each disciple to write a gatha so he could see how well they understood the Dharma. Shenxiu wrote the first gatha on the wall of the corridor. Huineng was illiterate, but seeing many people gathered beneath the corridor, he asked what was happening. Those nearby told him, and also read Shenxiu's gatha aloud to him.
Huineng, then just a menial at the temple, on hearing this gatha was immediately inspired and recited the second poem above, asking someone to write it on the wall. After reading it, the Fifth Patriarch Hongren tacitly acknowledged that Huineng's insight was superior to that of the senior monk Shenxiu, and secretly chose Huineng as his successor. But fearing that others might make things difficult for Huineng in contending for the succession, Hongren transmitted the robe to him in the dead of night and told him to go south for a time to avoid danger.
The authenticity of this anecdote is disputed, but these two gathas have been passed down to this day and their influence is profound. Historically, the Southern-sudden and Northern-gradual schools were in fierce rivalry, but as the years passed this rivalry gradually became less important.
In practice people found that Southern-sudden and Northern-gradual each had its strengths. Even after sudden awakening one still needs gradual cultivation to shake off the shadow of the past; in the process of gradual cultivation there are also moments of sudden awakening. The two are like the relationship between qualitative and quantitative change. Some people are suited to gradual cultivation and others to sudden awakening; it is hard to say which is higher. So even today, both Southern-sudden and Northern-gradual still have large numbers of adherents.
When the Southern-sudden school developed into the Song Dynasty, it formed another branch called “Deshan's staff, Linji's shout”—the source of the Chinese idiom “a blow and a shout over the head,” familiar to every Chinese person. It is called this because Linji Yixuan first developed the method of “four shouts and eight blows,” and later Deshan Xuojian perfected the “staff method”; hence the Song-dynasty Wudeng Huiyuan (Five Lanterns Meeting the Source) named this branch “Deshan's staff, Linji's shout.”
The blow-and-shout method is a teaching method in which the Zen master chooses the optimal moment and delivers a blow to the head of the questioner, causing them to awaken suddenly. Because it achieves the effect of sudden awakening, it belongs to the Southern-sudden school, which pursues sudden enlightenment.
In the book Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Dr. Marsha Linehan used many Zen cultivation methods, the chief of which are maintaining precepts, forbearance (patience under insult), and meditation. The greatest problems of borderline personality disorder patients are their uncontrollable impulsivity and their black-and-white thinking, which make their words and actions appear extremely torn, as if two people lived inside one body. Dr. Linehan designed a series of cognitive-behavioral therapies around these features.
When I spoke at length with a borderline personality disorder patient, she described herself like this: she said that every moment she felt deep inside her a “little white person” and a “little black person” fighting each other. Sometimes the white one gained the upper hand, and sometimes the black one. This left her unable to control her thoughts and emotions; every day was like sitting on a roller coaster, up and down, often in a state of loss of control and collapse, which left her exhausted and drained those around her.
Gradually she lost lovers, friends, and family; her career did not prosper, her investments failed, and her life again and again fell into dire straits; in her short life there were only memories too painful to revisit. Whenever she thought of them, she could not help bursting into tears.
Borderline personality disorder, also called emotionally unstable personality disorder, was at one time named impulsive personality disorder in Chinese psychiatric textbooks. Its full English name is Borderline Personality Disorder, abbreviated BPD.
DSM-5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association) lists nine criteria for diagnosing borderline personality disorder; a person meeting five or more of them may be diagnosed with BPD.
These nine criteria are:
1. Fear of abandonment: frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, excluding suicidal or self-harming behavior.
2. Extreme instability of interpersonal relationships: alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation, with unstable relationships.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
4. Impulsive behavior: impulsivity in at least two areas that is potentially self-damaging, such as spending, sexuality, substance abuse, reckless driving, or binge eating.
5. Suicidal or self-harming behavior: recurrent suicidal behavior, suicidal gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
6. Affective instability: marked mood reactivity causing emotional instability, such as intense irritability, irritability, or anxiety, usually lasting a few hours and rarely more than a few days.
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness: long-standing inner emptiness.
8. Difficulty controlling anger: inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling temper, such as frequent temper outbursts, constant anger, or repeated physical fights.
9. Paranoid or dissociative symptoms: transient stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.
Borderline personality disorder is known the world over for instability in cognition, character, and emotion; the life of a BPD is full of quarrels, and they can destroy almost any relationship they have. The most severe BPD patients have not a single relative or friend by their side.
In the book Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Personality Disorders (edited by the American psychiatrists Aaron T. Beck, Denise D. Davis, and Arthur Freeman), there is a dedicated chapter on this disorder. I recall that the book uses the phrase “accident-prone” to describe the lives of such people. These patients are like vehicles driving the wrong way on a highway, constantly colliding with other vehicles—at best causing injury, at worst ending in the wreck of car and person.
Borderline personality disorder is usually first noticed in adolescence by family or friends around the patient. But according to the view put forward by the Dutch brain scientist Dick Swaab in We Are Our Brains, BPD patients actually developed abnormalities as early as in the womb; some abnormal mutations in their chromosomes caused problems in their nervous systems. It is just that our social culture generally assumes that children are inherently impulsive, so their earliest symptoms were masked by their age.
A growing number of BPD researchers argue that diagnosing BPD early and taking appropriate intervention is crucial to a patient's whole life. If the correct diagnosis can be given in adolescence and the patient guided to cope properly with their illness, many tragedies can be avoided in their life. Because the lives of borderline personality disorder (BPD) patients almost without exception repeat tragedy endlessly.
However, counselors and psychiatrists who have dealt with BPD patients should all find such patients daunting; borderline personality disorder has a nickname, “the counselor killer” (it also has another nickname, “the lover killer”), because counselors often lose out to BPD patients.
Every love affair of a BPD begins with great fanfare, yet usually collapses in an instant. They quickly fall in love with someone, and when they decide to end a relationship, they do so just as quickly and decisively. This is often called a “cliff-edge breakup,” and this way of breaking up leaves many of those who loved them in agony.
After ending a romance, or even while one is ongoing, BPD patients often quickly begin another one or several; some severely ill BPD patients even report having sex with one lover in the morning and with another in the afternoon and evening.
Baidu Baike introduces BPD as people who spend their whole lives frantically searching for a partner. They not only crave the opposite sex, but may also, upon meeting a same-sex person willing to get close to them, change their sexual orientation and form a partnership with someone of the same sex.
BPD patients are extremely jealous; in every respect they want to be the only favored one and to exclude others. So if a BPD's friends or partners still have contact with other people—even very normal contact—it often invites open or hidden retaliation from the BPD.
They try to build exclusive relationships, wanting the whole world to consist only of themselves and their partner. Yet they lack trust in any relationship; a BPD cannot even trust their own mother, and some BPD patients try to spread the risk of abandonment by forming multiple relationships.
No one can fully meet a BPD's demands for love. They are usually urgent: when a thought flashes through their mind that makes them feel unsafe, they need their lover or family to fill that void. These demands are sometimes completely unreasonable, and sometimes even require taking great risks.
For example, a BPD may make risky investments that could sink a family's life savings; when the family refuses, the BPD rushes ahead regardless. The BPD will insist that between lovers and kin there should be no reasoning, only love.
This reaction is completely psychotic; at other times the BPD comes to their senses and realizes this, but usually by then the great mistake has already been made and cannot be undone. So if their lovers or relatives are not clear-headed and are always held hostage by the BPD's emotions, their family life and financial situation will be disastrous, constantly in chaos.
A BPD's first impression is usually that of being easy to approach; they can even be regarded as experts at building relationships. They are as if able to read other people's minds, knowing what others need and giving them exactly what they want. At the beginning of a relationship, BPD patients often do their utmost to ingratiate themselves, are very good at flattering, and give gifts generously, leaving a good impression.
In fact, in the eyes of ordinary friends who are not close to them, BPD patients easily win people's favor, and they often label themselves as having a “people-pleasing personality.” Only, all of this is, like the title of a film about a BPD, a “fatal temptation”; once others form an intimate relationship with them, everything changes completely.
After deeper acquaintance, we find that deep inside the BPD is extremely self-abased, thinking themselves worthless, deeply afraid of being abandoned, and having a pathological need for recognition and respect. This is because BPD patients are as empty as if they had no self; they need the recognition of others to perceive their own existence. They always feel that no one thinks much of them and that they are always living in others' eyes—in fact, it is they themselves who demand this of themselves; no one imposes such demands on them.
They are also called people without an emotional skin. Some words or actions that seem trivial to ordinary people are, to them, an unbearable stimulus that can detonate their emotions and set them raging. Quarreling and roaring are everyday occurrences for BPD; some BPD patients who look pretty and refined can, when out of emotional control, hurl abuse like a shrew, their words sharp, biting, and unacceptable.
Many of a BPD's perceptions are magnified countless times in their own mind; an absent-minded glance from a lover or friend is interpreted by them as a signal of abandonment or rejection, leaving them in deep unease. BPD patients lack security all their lives, and their common catchphrases are: “I'm afraid,” “I'm scared,” “I'm worried,” “I don't feel secure.”
If a lover fails to soothe their fragile heart in time, their emotion swells within minutes to hours to the extreme, finally expressed in unacceptable anger. One BPD told me she once brandished a kitchen knife and forced her boyfriend to open the door; her boyfriend trembled with fear, yet she herself did not think it was over the top.
BPD patients will often stop at nothing—using all kinds of extreme means and threats—to build a relationship or hold on to one, such as threatening to expose others' privacy or threatening self-harm and suicide to make the person leaving them feel deeply guilty. They may do the same when they are the ones breaking up.
Yet BPD patients are indeed the group with the highest suicide rate; their suicide rate is 50–400 times that of the general population. So it is hard for us to judge whether their suicidal threats are merely a posture or a real intention. Those who have had deep involvement with a BPD often find it extremely difficult to end the relationship, because they fear the BPD's threats may come true.
On the surface they look like masters of emotional manipulation. In reality, it is only because their emotions are so intense that not only can they not control them themselves, but even experienced counselors are often wounded by them.
BPD patients often do not acknowledge that they themselves are BPD; they think the others around them are the BPD, while they themselves are the perfect victim. They often complain about how badly their relatives and friends have treated them and how well they themselves have treated them, always fond of accusing others of ingratitude.
But if we go deep into their circle of relatives and friends to find out the situation, we find that most of their loved ones have been driven to a dead end by the BPD's unpredictable emotions and repeated extreme behavior, and had no choice but to keep their distance. Even so, those relatives and friends basically still care about the BPD. It is just that the BPD feels despised and refuses to let them get close, so their loved ones often feel that the BPD is driving them away.
For those who are naive or unfamiliar with them, these words and actions easily win others' sympathy. Once sympathy is aroused for the BPD, they easily exploit that sympathy, forming deep relationships with those who sympathize with them, demanding more and more emotional comfort and affirmation, and finally capturing them as prey.
To avoid being captured by a BPD, the best approach is to keep a safe distance from them, maintaining a relationship that is neither too close nor too far. BPD patients are born sensitive and do not dare approach too closely those who deliberately keep their distance. Over time, the BPD will leave such a relationship on their own.
So just how many people have borderline personality disorder? The figure given by DSM-5 is about 2%—that is, about 150 million people in the world are BPD. Most epidemiological statistics suggest the prevalence may be much higher. At present, the psychiatric community generally believes the prevalence should lie between 1.6% and 6.9%.
Some scholars even think that about 10% of people have borderline personality disorder, because a large number of BPD patients have not been diagnosed and are hidden among the population. Surveys of psychiatric outpatients show that about 40% of those attending psychiatric clinics have borderline personality disorder. Of course, some patients' cases are very complex; they have not only BPD but also comorbid other mental illnesses.
Jeffrey Young, the psychologist who invented schema therapy, proposed that a core cognition of borderline personality disorder patients is: “I am a defective person; I have come into a malicious world; I will eventually be abandoned.” They spend most of their lives trapped in this cognitive dilemma, both wanting to approach others and deeply doubting them.
Their core is deeply self-abased, but it is often wrapped in a mask of extreme arrogance. They need constant affirmation from others to perceive their own existence. They are highly sensitive, always judging others' “sincerity” from tiny details; Jeffrey Young calls this the “hypercritical schema,” one of the several schemas present in BPD.
On Zhihu, a borderline personality disorder patient described himself like this: he said, “We are borderline hedgehogs. We long to be close to people, but once we draw near to others, we are pricked by their spines, and at the same time our own spines prick them. So we choose to move away; but after we have stayed away for a while, we find that they meant no harm. We feel regret, then draw near again, repeating the process. We keep going round in this vicious circle, until everyone around us can finally bear us no longer and really leaves us.”
There are many books on borderline personality disorder, some already well known, such as Talking Back to Emotional Negativity: How to Free Yourself from Others' Negative Energy; Borderline Personality Disorder—Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Emotion Dysregulation; Both Loving and Hating—Entering Borderline Personality Disorder; The Most Intimate Stranger: When You Love Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder; Saying Goodbye to a Disordered Life—A Self-Help Book for Those with BPD and Their Families; and The Borderline Personality Disorder Survival Guide, among others.
But there are not many effective methods for treating borderline personality disorder; Dr. Marsha Linehan's dialectical behavior therapy is currently recognized as one of the more effective methods.
I have been involved in this field for exactly ten years. Over the last two or three years, in the course of working with borderline personality disorder patients, I have tried another method derived from Chinese Chan thought, which I have named the “blow-and-shout” therapy. It is a method of seizing the right moment and delivering a blow-and-shout-style conversation to such patients in order to change their cognition. Such a conversation is a very deep and direct exchange, with the power to sweep everything before it, enough to crack open the protective shell of a BPD.
However, this blow-and-shout therapy requires the therapist to have profound learning and rich life experience, the ability to see into people's hearts, the timing to seize the opportunity, and superb conversational skill; it is indeed very demanding.
But borderline patients' interest in others is usually hard to sustain; their enthusiasm for people comes quickly and goes quickly. Once they develop a “point of aversion” toward someone, they easily sentence the relationship to death and never have dealings with them again. So to make such patients recognize where their own problems lie and to enlighten their thinking, one must seize the moment in time.
The first three months of contact with a person are usually the idealization phase for a borderline patient toward that person. If, during this period, that person can make the BPD suddenly realize that they have some maladaptive ways, and inspire them to find the answers themselves, it will be of great help to them.
There is a saying in Chinese Chan: “When deluded, the master ferries one across; when awakened, one ferries oneself.” When a BPD suddenly realizes that they are BPD, they begin the path of self-reflection.
Many BPD patients, when exposed to knowledge about borderline personality disorder, feel they have met something long-sought; because those emotional and affective problems that had constantly plagued them throughout their lives all find answers in these books. They finally understand why their own lives have been so painful and wretched.
Although BPD emotions are too intense and it is always hard for them to truly recognize their own problems, among all patients with personality disorders, BPD is also the group most likely to recover. Some research on BPD has found that most of them, after going through a series of tragic life events, by around the age of forty see their clinical symptoms ease, and some are no longer diagnosed as BPD—much like what Confucius said, “at forty I had no doubts.”
Only the price is too terrible. Many people, because of this illness, have lost family, friends, and property; their marriages have broken up, their careers have come to nothing, disease has beset them, and debts have piled up. When they finally heal, they can almost be described as “having nothing at all” and “being alone in the world.”
Some researchers suspect that such patients' anger does not finally disappear but is overwhelmed by the boundless, unfaceable past, until at last they reach a state of emptiness and numbness.
So if such patients can be given proper guidance early in life, many of their life tragedies can be avoided. Although on Zhihu I have also seen some borderline personality disorder patients say that even though they recognize they are BPD and have reasoned out many things, they still cannot live their lives well. But in fact this is a cognitive bias. Most patients, in the course of recognizing they are BPD and actively learning about the illness, see their condition ease considerably, and their impulsive decisions become fewer and fewer, which can greatly reduce the damage they do to their own lives.
The moment of tearing off the scab is always painful, but without pain, how can it startle one into awakening? Delivering a blow-and-shout to a BPD can be called “a bodhisattva's heart of compassion, with thunder-and-lightning means.” One BPD joked with me afterward: “Hearing your words was like being struck by five thunders; but after being struck, I suddenly saw the light and gained a great deal.”
Whether or not they are diagnosed early, most BPD lives cannot avoid a bumpy road; their fate is rougher than that of ordinary people. But early diagnosis still has positive meaning; after all, driving the wrong way on a dark night is more dangerous than driving the wrong way in bright daylight.
In reality, the proportion of diagnosed borderline personality disorder patients in China is not high, because there are still very few psychiatrists in China who understand BPD. In clinical practice, many BPD patients are misdiagnosed as anxiety disorder, postpartum depression, and other illnesses. These patients are treated as if they had anxiety or depression, generally with no effect at all, while their families usually blame them for refusing to cooperate with taking antidepressants—a cognitive blind spot caused by an information gap.
The youngest BPD I have encountered is a 17-year-old high school student, and the oldest an elderly person in their seventies. Whether young or old, they cannot escape that deep suffering, and their families are tormented as well.
Most BPD actually feel guilty about the burden they place on their families; some patients leave rows of scars on their wrists. The patient I know who has self-harmed the most has more than 2,000 scars on her wrists. They use this way to soothe their own pain, simply because they do not know what is wrong with them, much less how to escape this vicious circle.
The reaction of most BPD at the moment they first fully understand their illness is shock. Two BPD patients in their thirties, after one in-depth blow-and-shout conversation with me, said that after living more than thirty years, it was the first time they understood what was wrong with them and saw themselves clearly. The 17-year-old high school student, after the conversation, also for the first time felt that he had been deeply understood; I believe that from now on he will no longer be bewildered and at a loss about his own suffering.
I know that seeing is not the same as healing, but on their long road through life, they will henceforth have a beacon. They later took the initiative to learn about BPD, interpreting their own lives from a new perspective and facing their future in a new way. Although they are helpless about their nervous system, this knowledge has given their lives, to a certain extent, a degree of controllability.
Our popular science on borderline personality disorder is still far from enough, which leaves many people having never even heard of this disease, although there are at least tens of millions of BPD patients in China. Most of them are treated by relatives and friends as people with a bad temper or an odd personality, and few realize they are ill.
As far as I know, borderline personality disorder cannot basically be cured by medication, and relief of its symptoms can only rely on the gradual recovery of the patient's insight. For patients and their families, pursuing a cure may be unrealistic and a waste of money. My personal advice is to let the patient and their family understand the pathological features of this illness as much as possible and take targeted control measures—for example, controlling the patient's large spending and self-harming behavior—to minimize the damage the illness does to the patient and the family.
At present, among Chinese medical institutions with more experience in diagnosing and treating borderline personality disorder are the Shanghai Mental Health Center, Beijing Anding Hospital, Nanjing Brain Hospital, and the Third People's Hospital of Mianyang, Sichuan (the Sichuan Provincial Mental Health Center), among others. Among them, the Mianyang Third Hospital is one of the earliest institutions in China to carry out dialectical behavior therapy.
Borderline personality disorder has a certain degree of familial heritability; one view is that about 60% of BPD patients have other BPD patients, or patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or mania, among their family members.
On social media such as Zhihu and Xiaohongshu, many BPD patients and their families share their experience of fighting borderline personality disorder; I advise such patients and their families to follow this kind of information more. Accepting reality, coexisting with the disease, and reducing harm—this may be the most correct thing patients and their families can do.
Words written at the end:
Late May ten years ago, a reader who was in extreme inner pain without knowing the cause of his suffering arranged to meet me. We met for the first time at the Pinnuo Café in the National Library, and he broke into tears right in front of me. At the time he told me that doctors had diagnosed him with depression. He had come to know me through some posts I wrote about Beijing Longquan Temple on the Tianya forum; in those posts many people discussed various aspects of Buddhism with me, and the answers I gave and the restrained attitude I showed made a deep impression on him.
He was actually a BPD patient, but at that time I knew nothing about this disease, he himself knew nothing about it, and the psychiatrist and psychological counselor who saw him were also unfamiliar with BPD. He had successively visited several top psychiatric hospitals, but no one was able to diagnose the cause of his illness; those psychiatrists could only diagnose him with depression or anxiety disorder.
From then on we began a deep exchange that lasted nine years. Over those nine years, reading the clues he revealed, I taught myself psychiatry bit by bit, learning as I went, and finally found that his symptoms matched BPD closely. I began to introduce BPD to him and recommended some books on it. Once he opened this door, he too suddenly found the source of his various troubles.
Friends who have worked as psychological counselors and psychiatrists should know that maintaining nine years of deep spiritual exchange with a BPD is an extremely difficult thing, because their interpersonal relationships are almost always short-lived. Over those nine years, not only was he growing rapidly, but I was growing rapidly too. If it had not been for his seeking help, I do not think I would have deepened my own work in psychiatry to this extent.
One day the year before last, a psychiatry teacher from a medical school came to Beijing to see me. Coincidentally, our first meeting was at the same spot in the Pinnuo Café at the National Library.
He came to me for help because of his father's cancer, but he was also very interested in my research on psychiatry, so he took the opportunity to exchange some knowledge of psychiatry with me. At the end of our exchange, he was astonished by the depth of my psychiatric research, admitting that even a professor of professional psychiatry would find it hard to do such deep research.
I am sincerely grateful to the first BPD patient I met. Physician and patient achieve something together: while the physician helps the patient, he also achieves self-growth with the patient's help. Compared with the me of ten years ago, the present me not only knows BPD deeply but understands many of life's problems far better than before.
While I was learning psychiatry and helping this patient ease his pain, I opened a new door and gained a deeper understanding of both disease and human nature. After him, many other BPD patients came to me for help, and my methods and techniques for handling BPD became more and more skillful. Now, these BPD patients who seek me out can basically get along with me like friends, in prolonged contact and at peace.
Most BPD are, like left-handers, born people whose nervous systems differ from others, which determines that the world as they see it is not quite the same as the world others see. Scholars who study BPD basically agree on this: BPD patients are very intelligent, sharp-minded, and, at the outset, attentive and considerate toward others.
They are very sensitive and prone to suspicion; if we look carefully into the problems they point out in other people, we find they have a certain objectivity. It is just that, as one recovered BPD said, their greatest problem is making a mountain out of a molehill. Because of this, the lives of unrecovered BPD patients are like constant self-destruction, destroying all the familial, romantic, and friendly love they possess.
I feel great sympathy for this group and very much hope they can avoid these tragic life experiences. But after seeing so many, I find that their lives are like solving a problem with a wrong mathematical formula, repeatedly, over a long time, going through the process that produces the wrong result again and again. Only when, one day, they have suffered enough and endured enough hardship do they suddenly wake up and truly want to escape from this sea of suffering; some lucky patients grow through these lessons.
Of course, if we rise to a philosophical height to look at life, many of these so-called setbacks amid the years of joy and sorrow amount to very little. BPD is merely experiencing a particular kind of life, and this experience is not up to them either; the power of innate genes is hard for human effort to change.
Religion and philosophy enable many BPD patients finally to achieve spiritual self-consistency and reach a state of peace of mind. In this diverse, boundless world, as long as people can live with more tolerance, wisdom, and open-mindedness, then to look again at BPD is really no big deal. I also hope that every BPD can finally attain the peace of mind they once longed for. If only they could discover their abnormality earlier and correct it, avoiding the life setbacks that can be avoided, that would of course be even better.
This is why I have written this article.