BPD Diaries: Stories and Science
Oct 23, 2026 · 8 min · 8 segments
What do people with borderline personality disorder wish everyone else understood? I asked around, and here are the answers I got. In this short episode, we see that BPD is more than its symptoms…
The first would be that people with BPD feel everything at an extremely high volume, and they don't choose how intensely they feel.
So something that seems small to someone else might feel enormous to someone with BPD, whether that's a change in someone's tone, a message left unanswered, a moment of distance from someone they love.
Where someone might see a minor inconvenience, Someone with BPD might experience a sudden wave of fear, shame or rejection that feels completely overwhelming.
And that doesn't mean that their interpretation of what happened is necessarily accurate, but the emotion itself is real.
And being told to just stop or just calm down or it's all in your head or hey, it's not that deep or stop being so dramatic is the worst and it is extremely unhelpful.
Believe me, if people with BPD could simply switch it off, I'm sure they would have done so already.
They're trying to survive feelings that feel unsurvivable.
And it often comes from complex early trauma, meaning that intense reactions are often trauma responses rather than attention-seeking tricks.
And there is usually so much more happening beneath the reaction than you can see.
The first would be that people with BPD feel everything at an extremely high volume, and they don't choose how intensely they feel.
So something that seems small to someone else might feel enormous to someone with BPD, whether that's a change in someone's tone, a message left unanswered, a moment of distance from someone they love.
Where someone might see a minor inconvenience, Someone with BPD might experience a sudden wave of fear, shame or rejection that feels completely overwhelming.
And that doesn't mean that their interpretation of what happened is necessarily accurate, but the emotion itself is real.
And being told to just stop or just calm down or it's all in your head or hey, it's not that deep or stop being so dramatic is the worst and it is extremely unhelpful.
Believe me, if people with BPD could simply switch it off, I'm sure they would have done so already.
They're trying to survive feelings that feel unsurvivable.
And it often comes from complex early trauma, meaning that intense reactions are often trauma responses rather than attention-seeking tricks.
And there is usually so much more happening beneath the reaction than you can see.
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