Borderline Personality Features and Impeded Personal Growth Initiative: the Importance of Dispositional Optimism

Excerpt

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious condition involving identity disturbance, emotion dysregulation, and interpersonal problems (Leichsenring et al. 2011). Individuals with features of BPD tend to experience considerable dysphoria, with many engaging in self-injurious or suicidal behaviours (Almeida and Horta 2018). Moreover, social impairment tends to be severe and chronic among patients with BPD (Javaras et al. 2017). Thus, providing focused treatment for BPD is a priority for mental health care systems, with several evidence-based approaches now available (Leichsenring et al. 2011). Given that BPD tends to be chronic and debilitating, and that treatments are often time-intensive and of long-term duration, it is important to understand patients’ motivation for initiating and maintaining positive change. While BPD features have been associated with treatment drop-out (Preti et al. 2015), and additional personality features, such as narcissism and antisocial tendencies, have been found to hinder BPD patients’ therapy adherence (Gamache et al. 2018), less is known about patient characteristics aligned with motivation for behavioural change and personal growth. …