Understanding Borderline Personalities through Internal Family Systems

(Please note that sound effects are used in this episode and may be triggering to parts.)

In this episode, I take you inside the experience of Tina, a 32-year-old Catholic woman with “borderline personality” and introduce you to seven of her parts and how they switch inside her.  These switches involve not only emotions, but all of Tina’s internal experience, so her parts are not merely transient mood states.  We review the IFS understanding of innermost self, exiled parts, manager parts, and firefighter parts.  And then we break down everything that happened in the restaurant in her conflict with her fiancé, Phillip, walking through each DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for BPD and seeing how her parts contributed to the symptom, getting to the “Why” of borderline behaviors.