Talking to a Loved One With Borderline Personality Disorder

In this compassionate guide, Jerold Kreisman—author of I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me—offers a powerful set of tools to help you express yourself, set boundaries, and cultivate healthy communication with a loved one who is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD).

If you have a loved one with BPD, you need real, proven-effective strategies to help you navigate the intense emotions and conflict that can arise in daily interactions and conversations. People with BPD often feel anger, pain, and hurt from a history of invalidation and disappointment, and their difficulty in regulating emotions can lead to moments of lashing out that can confuse and upset those around them.

Written by a psychiatrist with more than 40 years of experience in treating BPD, I Hate You, Tell Me You Love Me offers a breakthrough, compassionate approach to communicating with a loved one who has BPD. The SET (support, empathy, truth) method outlined in this book is a powerful and simple tool that will allow you to honestly address your loved one’s demands, assertions, and feelings while still maintaining appropriate boundaries. Each step builds on the last, helping you build up a consistent and reliable communication process.

In this book, you’ll find a review of BPD and the common communication problems inherent in the disorder. You’ll learn how SET can address these issues. And finally, you’ll find detailed examples of specific scenarios that can arise when talking to a loved one with BPD.

Remember—validation isn’t the same as agreement. You can help your loved one feel validated while still maintaining your own boundaries. This essential guide will show you how.

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Jerold J. Kreisman, MD, is a psychiatrist and leading expert on borderline personality disorder. His 1989 bestseller, I Hate You, Don't Leave Me, is considered a classic of both the popular and academic literature on BPD, and has been completely revised and updated in 2010. His book, Sometimes I Act Crazy, describes how families and friends can cope with the disorder. Kreisman produces a blog for Psychology Today. He is in private practice in St. Louis.