Borderline Personality Disorder: Stigma, Shame & Secrets

For Bianca, the catalyst of her Borderline Personality Disorder was the cultural pressure of living in a Middle Eastern family that provided the basics in life, but no emotional connection or support. With eldest-daughter expectations, and the heavy silence that comes when a family outsources its pain to one child, Bianca became the out-of-control truth bearer in her family system.
After her tumultuous upbringing that included self-harm, suicidal thinking, and an abusive relationship, Bianca finally found mentors in her life that taught her how to break free from her trauma through intensive therapy. As a therapist, Bianca now brings practitioner-level clarity to the therapies that helped her, including dialectical behavior therapy and a move towards dignity, respect, and choice.
Is BPD destiny or environment? How do cultural narratives around “keeping up appearances” entrench shame? Why do personality disorders draw harsher judgment than mood disorders, and what happens when we reframe symptoms as human experiences with the dial turned up? For Bianca, identity instability isn’t a life sentence; it’s a signal that can be understood, soothed, and redesigned. 
If this conversation helps you rethink stigma, see yourself with more softness, or pick up one new skill to use when the storm hits, pass it on. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who needs proof that intensity can become intention. Your story might be the mirror someone else is missing.

For more on Bianca, please visit:

https://evolveventurestech.com/evolve-ventures-coaching/therapy-2/

https://www.instagram.com/evolvewithbianca/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/evolveventuressociety

https://www.youtube.com/@EvolvewithBianca/videos

https://www.tiktok.com/@evolvewithbianca

Transcript

Tattoos, Identity, and BPD Stats

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I found a lot of different statistics. This is just a random one, but that there is an increase in tattoos for BPD patients, seven out of 10 people. But, you know, they link it to all the different elements of the disorder. Perhaps it's self-harm, perhaps it's to remember who you are, and it's an identity establishment to use that.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

And then identity formation, yeah. For sure.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

Yeah, identity formation, or it signifies change. And so they, this study was like in 2023, and they went like completely deep. I mean, it was interesting and fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

You know what's funny? I'm actually in the process of getting my tattoos removed because I got a I impulsively got a lot of tattoos, which obviously I'm covered up right now, but like I again, I had no idea who I was. I had no idea what I wanted. I was not thinking long term. And I impulsively got a lot of tattoos that are no longer in alignment with the woman that I am today.

Bianca’s Early Life and Culture

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Welcome to Bipolar She. I'm your host, Janine Noel. The content of this episode does include suicide. If you are ever in need of immediate support, please dial 988 a suicide and crisis lifeline. Today I sit down with Bianca to learn about her life with borderline personality disorder. This is the first time we've talked about personality disorders on the show. A personality disorder is a mental health condition characterized by longtime inflexible patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that deviate from cultural expectations, causing distress in all areas of one's life. For Bianca, the catalyst was her immigrant family's lack of emotional support, then early self-harm and suicidal thoughts. In this episode, we'll learn how Bianca turned down the dial and her symptoms and also now helps others do the same. Welcome, Bianca. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. How are you? I'm great. I'm great. It's been a good day so far. Thank you for having me. Oh, thank you for coming. I'm really excited. There's so much to talk about and so many topics that I haven't covered on the show before. So I'm really interested in your story. We always start the show with a question for you to think about a crisis time in your life, a mental health crisis, either before you were diagnosed or after. It could be current too, whatever you're up for sharing.

Abuse, Silence, and Stigma

Mentors, Education, and Being Seen

Doing the Work: CBT, DBT, IFS

SPEAKER_00 2:57

To be honest, there's been a lot of really significant crises in my life. So growing up, I was the eldest daughter. So there were a lot of very heavy expectations in just in my culture in general. Middle Eastern culture is very image-based and very, you have to look and be and act a certain way because you need to make the family look good. And from a girl's perspective, there's a lot of expectations on the women and what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a part of our culture. And growing up, I was just so vehemently against it. I was like, you're not gonna tell me what to do. I don't agree with any of this. This culture is so toxic. And I knew that from a very young age. So I was the rebel child through and through. And I fought against it, and it caused a lot of tension between my mom and I and in my culture in general. I mean, I got hit when I was a kid, I was always getting punished. I would cause trouble in school because I was acting out and I didn't understand how I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to do and who I like just how life worked. So I got in trouble a lot. And going through that, I mean, my parents, they had no idea how to handle me. They had no idea how to how to really be parents. I mean, they tried their best. They, they're the typical, like, we're gonna provide everything for you, but we're gonna give you no emotional nurturance. And that's supposed to suffice. So you mix that in with I'm rebelling against everything you stand for, and it caused a lot of difficulty and challenge, so much so that I was self-harming from a young age. I was suicidal from a very young age. And when I was 16, I had gotten into this relationship where I was being sexually, mentally, and psychologically abused. And I couldn't tell them because I would rather me get hurt than have them be able to tell me I told you so. So I like made it work and I stayed in that relationship for four years. And I was also terrified of him. Like he had threatened my life, he had threatened to blackmail me, he had done a lot of crazy stuff. So being in that, I it was better for me than having to face that I told you so. And we knew you shouldn't have done this, and you should have just listened to us, and so on and so forth. So all of those things mixed in together is what led me to later on in life be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which is for anyone listening, and I'm sure you know this, it is one of the most stigmatized, misunderstood, like shamed mental health diagnoses because people just don't understand it. And they they think that the people struggling with it are just problematic, not really understanding the deeper layers and the fundamentals of it. So if you look back on my life, everything that I was doing was basically a scream and a cry for help. My therapist calls it, I was the siren. So I was basically the one like waving my hands in the air, saying, something's wrong here when everyone is like looking away, pretending it wasn't happening. So I had gotten out of that relationship when I was 20. I was so lost and broken, and anyone who was paying attention would have noticed, but nobody was paying attention still, because I was still the problem. So five years go by and I'm basically ping-ponging, trying to just figure out what to do and where to go and who I am and what I want and what like what the path is supposed to look like for me. But I ended up getting my master's degree in that time, and I meet these mentors of mine. And it was the first time in my life that anyone had ever really seen me, like past the drama, past the BS, past the past the struggle. It was like, oh, I'm being seen, really seen for the first time. And it opened my eyes to, you know, what was really possible. So I was like, oh my God, this is what I've been looking for. This is what I've always wanted. I've always yearned for these really deep, meaningful connections, but I could never find them because nobody in my life actually had the emotional intelligence to want that. And I wasn't emotionally intelligent enough to actually like engage in those types of dynamics, but I was like yearning for it. So I meet them and they introduce me to all of this, and then I meet my business partner, Amelia, and it's all going great, wonderful. I'm I move out of my parents' house and I'm trying to not go back there, and I'm trying to figure out who I am and what I'm supposed to do in the world, but like I'm still this broken little girl. On the outside, nobody would have known. I mean, I was, I looked confident and I knew how to dress and I knew how to put myself together because that was my culture. So it was like, put on a show, but like hide everything behind the scenes. It's like you just you look great. Do that. That's fine. But I was a mess. And she and I are working together for two years, and she ends up saying, because she's a she's a mental health practitioner too, and she's amazing at it. And so she like really saw me. And a couple of years go by, and I was in and out of bad relationships still, and she's like, Bianca, you're not ready for this yet. I want you as my partner. I want you here so badly, but you're not doing the work. You've come so far, but there's so much you haven't done yet. There's so much work you haven't navigated through. You're not processing your trauma. You keep ending up in these really disruptive circumstances. Like, we can't do this. I want you here. So go work on you. And so I did. I actually started really doing the work and really navigating all of the inner turmoil and low self-worth and low self-esteem and the you know, borderline symptoms that I was having, and you know, using CBT and DBT and these tools that I now teach clients to actually do here, like really do that inner work and it saved my life.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

I find this so interesting because I understand self-harm and I understand intense emotions, but I don't understand feeling shaky about one's identity. And so I'm so curious about that sense of self and how you would describe like not feeling it.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

It was never cultivated for me. My entire life and my entire childhood and foundation was I'm not wanted by my family. I am the problem. Be really helpful and to appease. So my brother became the fixer of everything. That became his identity. He's gonna take over to basically appease mom. And my sister was very much, I'm gonna help, but I'm gonna stay in the background. And I was, like I said, I was the siren. I was like, something is wrong here, causing fights, getting into issues, arguing with my parents, causing a ruh, amok, basically. I mean, not really, but basically stirring trouble. And so I felt deeply unwanted because I was always the problem. I was always getting into fights, I was always punished, I was always getting hit. I so I never got good at anything. I never pursued anything, I never tried at anything, I never challenged myself. So when I became an adult, I had no stable sense of self, which is one of the fundamental pillars of borderline personality disorder. It's the emotional dysregulation, suicidality, disruptive relationships, and unstable sense of self. And there's a few other ones that I can't remember off the top of my head, but I struggled with them so significantly because my entire foundation was I'm being villainized as this horrible human because I'm calling out what's wrong, and you guys have no capacity to change.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

It's very similar to the identified patient theory. So that's when one person in the family takes on all the family's problems and they don't look at themselves, they look at that person as sick, and perhaps they are sick. For me, I was, but everything in the family that is going wrong is assigned to one person. And in that role, you don't know how, other than to be quiet and be silenced, to keep that household running. And it's up to you to fill that job.

Family Roles and Identified Patient

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Me and my siblings definitely each had our own role. My brother was the fixer. So he very much took on the role of mom is dysregulated. So I'm gonna jump in and step in and learn how to do everything so that mom doesn't freak out. My sister was the punching bag. So when I would get into fights with my family, and when I would get into fights with my brother and my mom, she ended up, my sister ended up getting the backlash of it. So me and mom would get into a fight. Mom would be pissed and go take it out on my sister. So she very much came, became the silent child, learned how to be helpful, but basically became the silent child. And I was, I was the shame bearer. So everything wrong in the family, it basically was you're the scapegoat. So we're gonna blame you for the problem rather than actually acknowledge what's really going on here. And that's very common with people with PTSD and borderline personality disorder. A lot of the harm and blame ends up getting put on the person rather than the system as a whole being looked at and being pinpointed as what's actually going on here. Because you have to have capacity to be able to do that. And unfortunately, my parents grew up in very, very old school Middle East, where that's not a thing. They fled the Middle East because of the wars that were happening over there at the time, and you'd have a better life here, but they didn't learn emotional intelligence, they didn't learn any of these things. In their minds, they did the best that they could, and they did, but it was only half the picture. They provided physically, but they could not provide emotionally. And my mom was struggling with her own mental health stuff that she never addressed. And so we all faced the burden of it. And my dad is just trying to keep everything together.

Childhood Suicidality and School

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Did you ever act out in school or was this hidden within your family?

SPEAKER_00 15:14

So I was a young kid. I was like, how old are you in fifth grade? 10? And I said to the teacher that I was thinking about dying and wanting to die and wanting to kill myself. And obviously, you hear that from a 10 from a 10-year-old, and you're like, uh, what is going on? So the school ended up calling my parents, and I didn't get in trouble at school, but I definitely got in trouble at home.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Were those feelings of self-harm or suicidality, did it get stronger? Did it ever feel really oppressive to you?

SPEAKER_00 15:48

I lived with suicidal thoughts until I was 20. And I thankfully never acted on it, but the thoughts were there of I would be better off dead, and my family would be better off because I'm the problem. I think I was like eight or nine when I started self-harming, and I didn't stop until I was 14, 15, and then the abusive relationships started. So that kind of like it kind of like took the place of it.

Techniques That Actually Help

SPEAKER_01 16:20

So you talk about doing this inner work and also working with mentors and feeling your life transform. I'm curious what techniques, what types of therapy were very helpful for you and what you suggest to your clients.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

So I got licensed in cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT is one of the most evidence-based treatments out there, and it has the highest efficacy rates. And then I also use, and in my own personal life, I've used DBT, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which was specifically made for people struggling with borderline personality disorder and suicidality. I also use acceptance and commitment therapy and internal family systems, and then a lot of like the off-branches of that, like exposure treatment and mindfulness-based techniques and whatnot. So I'm licensed in CBT, and I also use a lot of these other very credible modalities. And those were what really helped me throughout this journey. So having the mentors that I did who helped me in professional and personal development, and then going into therapy myself and working with my business partner on IFS and DBT and CBT and acceptance and commitment therapy and some of these other methodologies and modalities. They really saved my life. I mean, actually having to sit down and look in the metaphorical mirror of your life and what actually happened and how your personality got shaped as a byproduct of it, and how you developed beliefs the way that you did, and why you acted how you did based on those beliefs, it opened up my eyes to who I was and why I was and what led to all of that.

Nature, Nurture, and BPD Development

SPEAKER_01 18:26

So do you believe that if you had no family trauma, you may not have developed borderline personality disorder?

SPEAKER_00 18:36

In my case, I believe that if my parents had the capacity for the emotional nurturance that I needed, I would not be struggling with it today. I do believe my mom had it, which is why I think I had a biological predisposition for it. But if I had the emotional nurturing that I needed, I don't believe I would have developed it.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Is that something difficult to think about, or have you just integrated that?

Turning Suffering into Growth

SPEAKER_00 19:04

I've made a lot of meaning out of it. I'm not someone who believes everything happens for a reason. But what you can do is you can generate and create meaning out of suffering. That's what CBT really teaches. And, or at least that's what I've pulled from it. Your suffering can either be the thing that destroys you, or it can be the catalyst for significant change. It's the difference between post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth, which is actually a researched theory and concept. It's it's like the concept of anti-fragile. I'm not sure if you've heard of that, but anti-fragile is basically the idea that the more you attack something, the more it grows and the better it actually gets. It's a nice concept, hard in practice, but it is doable. And so I initially was a victim of my trauma. I was a victim of the circumstances. And then when I actually had the right supports and I actually went and got help, and I actually was willing to do the really uncomfortable work of challenging myself and growing and facing my demons, my trauma stopped being the thing that was ruining me. And it became the thing that allowed me to be a wonderful person and a wonderful therapist to people who had way worse dynamics than I did.

Therapist Disclosure and Boundaries

SPEAKER_01 20:33

So, as a therapist, do you disclose having borderline personality disorder? Or I mean, I worked as a writing coach and a lot of people were writing, yeah, everyone was writing about, you know, bipolar issues, mental health issues in the family. And at that point, I did not have this podcast and I wasn't speaking publicly about it. And I chose to hold back my story so they could tell their story. But I wonder, as a therapist, if it is a connecting point for you to share your diagnosis with a patient you're working with. I do when it's relevant.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

I am very much a therapist that I'm not gonna follow the typical textbook of like, oh, you're not supposed to know anything about your therapist, and you're just supposed to be a sounding board. And yes, I'm very much, I will tell you whatever is gonna help you.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

Well, since I met you on that first call, I was kind of impressed by how composed you were and how grounded and you present in this very solid way. And I wonder if that is something that you sort of, I mean, kind of how to work towards. I for me with bipolar, I'm like, I can't look disheveled. I can't like, you know what I mean? Like I have to be a little bit careful about how I present myself because I need to, you know, kind of hide this a bit. But do you think it's it's led to a persona that takes that in?

Persona, Presentation, and Respect

SPEAKER_00 22:15

It used to be a 100% show. This composed version of me has been sculpted because I was never naturally this. I was I was loud and rambunctious, and I was annoying for lack of a better phrase. Like I was just very out there and I would yell obscenities, and I just I was trying to gain significance and get people to like me and want me in any way that I could, and a lot of that has gone down, thankfully. But like I try to hold myself with respect and empowerment, and I still also have my fun and goofy sides and these cute sides of me. And I try to be a whole person.

Why Personality Disorders Scare People

SPEAKER_01 23:12

My other question is with BPD is just why is a personality disorder a little bit more frightening than a mood disorder? Like personality meaning it's really like it's stuck in you. Maybe it was, you know, you were born with it, you were born with that personality. But I think the stigma is a little bit harsher still on the idea of a personality disorder.

Diagnosis as Mirror, Not Sentence

Human Symptoms, Higher Dial

SPEAKER_00 23:41

I think people are wildly misinformed about what mental health disorders are, and so a lot of the stigma comes from misinformation. We hear, and in the media doesn't help. The media makes personality disorders these god-awful things. And when you think of someone as a whole, that, oh my God, you have this thing wrong with you, you're seen as this really broken, incompetent, and capable human being that's incapable of change. But did the diagnosis help you? Did it help you see yourself? For me personally, it did. Not for everybody. A lot of my clients, I don't tell them what I think they have unless they ask. Obviously, I am very ethical. I have informed decision. I talk to my clients, but for a lot of them, they're like, I don't want to know. I just want to know you can help me. And for some people, they need to know. I think we have to understand human functioning at a much bigger level and understand why, as a society and why, as human beings, do we do what we do? And how do we do it better? How do we evolve? How do we grow? How do we become the best versions of ourselves and learn how to navigate these very normal symptoms when they come up? Even something like borderline personality disorder, if you look at the symptoms, they're very human symptoms. Just the dial is turned higher.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

So thank you so much, Bianca. I really love your story. It's really powerful. It's a new story, so it means a lot to get the conversation going. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

Thank you for having me. Thank you for your vulnerability and sharing some of the things that you shared.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Bipolar She. We are working hard to normalize mental illness through stories from new voices that need to be heard. If you can share an episode with a friend or family member, it helps us to continue to produce the show. And as always, thank you for your support.