Losing a loved one with Borderline Personality Disorder to completed suicide happens all-too-often for so many people. Statistics continue to indicate that 10% of all people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder will commit suicide. There is not way to measure the accuracy of an old percentage. It is likely even higher than 10%.
The death of one, with Borderline Personality (BPD) is one too many. Many, but not all, with BPD struggle continually with suicidality.
- When a Borderline Partner Commits Suicide – 4 Months Since She Took Her Life A.J.’s Experience
- Complex Complicated Grief A.J. Mahari Reflects on Her own Grief Process
I am a Life, Mental Health Coach and a counsellor. In December of 2018 I lost my partner to suicide. She was a person wit quiet, high-functioning BPD and I did not know that she had BPD. It was kept hidden from me.
If you have lost a loved one with BPD (or even who did not have BPD) to suicide, then you know the trauma it causes. The complex and complicated grief.
Though BPD continues to be pathologized (largely by psychiatry) and stigmatized online endlessly, people with BPD are people who have been through trauma in early childhood.
For many, they do not find their way to learning to cope with this devastating life-altering unasked for and undeserved early childhood trauma. Many do not seek treatment. Many continue to suffer, acting in or acting out, and they are in tremendous pain, so many with BPD, but not all, have suicidal ideation. It goes with the territory of not having been loved or nurtured on top of actually being abused in early childhood, in 75% of those diagnosed with BPD.
If you have had a loved one with BPD commit suicide, as I have, please remember, as much as it is traumatizing, we can’t take responsibility in our individual lives for these tragedies. Emotionally, in complex grief, we do, don’t we? That is why it is so important to seek professional help for your trauma and complex grief. A grief that we will not ever get over but that we can learn, moment by moment, day by day to grow, ever so slowly, around.
The above video I recorded in 2017, a year and months before a partner I loved dearly, with BPD (unknown to me) took her life. June 27/19 it will be 6 months ago, and it seems like it was 5 minutes ago.
People will try to understand. People will care. But, people do not know what to say. It can get very quiet after an initial time or friends and/or family that rally around you. They really don’t know what to say. They often don’t have much knowledge or really any understanding of Borderline Personality Disorder.
© A.J. Mahari June 21, 2019 – Video © A.J. Mahari, September 2017 – All rights reserved.
