Hi M4YYp2Q: WelcomeDid you use a password generator to come up with your alias, LOL?
It's great that your partner is getting treatment. A willingness and enthusiasm to get treatment is a good sign.
Everyone is different, so outcomes are hard to predict. People with a BPD diagnosis typically have one or more mental health issues. Along with BPD (i.e. anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD and a host of other possibilities). The root cause can be because of brain wiring, chemistry and/or environmental issues.
If she is prescribed meds, that can help to set the stage to make progress in therapy. Meds can be a trial & error situation. The best possibility for someone who is prescribed a med is to have it tolerated well and minimize their symptoms.
Hopefully, she gets some therapy that is geared towards learning DBT skills. If she truly embraces learning the skills, she will learn to practice ways to manage her emotions.
It seems to be typical that even with treatment, people with BPD can have relapses during stressful times or after stressful life events (i.e. death in the family, birth of a child, job loss, moving, etc.).
Technically, if someone learns to manage some of the BPD traits (and ends up with less than 5), for a certain period of time, they might lose the diagnosis of BPD. The chance of someone losing all the BPD traits forever is unlikely.
Someone with a diagnosis of just anxiety or depression (without BPD), generally can have periods of time (maybe years), where their disorder is managed. Generally, there are flare up time to time, during a lifetime. The same would generally be the case with BPD.
What type of treatment is she starting? DBT? Is she seeing a psychiatrist, along with a psychologist, or just a psychologist.
It could be helpful for you to explore some of the DBT skills yourself, so you can have some idea of what skills can be beneficial for your partner. I find that the website, at the link below, can give you an idea of some skills that can help your partner:
www.dbtselfhelp.comThis website has a lot of great tools. To start learning some, go to the green band at the top of the page and explore the "tools" menu. Learning about boundaries and validation/don't invalidate, can be good places to start.
The challenge can be to keep people on meds, if that is advised by a professional. Sometimes, people tire of taking meds. and/or don't really make the effort to learn new skills and practice them. People with BPD need to master and consistently use the DBT tools for distress tolerance and management of their emotions and learn more emotionally intelligent ways to communicate.
It's a good sign that your partner had a desire to get better. Hopefully, she puts in the work and gets a good result. Don't expect miracles. Anticipate that in the best of cases, a relapse could happen in the future. By learning the communication skills on this website, you can help yourself. You can't change her, but you can learn to better manage the way you interact with your partner and the way you react to her.
