An insecure and unstable sense of identity is fundamental to borderline personality disorder (BPD). Even as researchers in the field urge that clinicians move away from categorizing people with personality disorders to seeing their disturbances as resting on a continuum, this fact remains indisputable. The question is, though, how best to capture these features of identity in a systematic way.
If you have a friend or relative with BPD, you can relate to the existence of these identity disturbances. The person may constantly ask you for reassurance, behave in completely different ways with different people, and complain of having a chronic sense of emptiness. As sympathetic toward the person as this makes you feel, it can also be exhausting and confusing to know how to act. Imagining what it’s like on the “inside” for this person may be hard but could also be informative as you figure out how to be more empathetic.
Exploring Identity Dimensions in BPD
According to a new study by University of Amsterdam’s Annabel Bogaerts and colleagues (2024), identity disturbance is fundamental not only to BPD but also, potentially, to other personality disorders. The best way to conceptualize this disturbance, furthermore, is to see it as emerging during the transition from adolescence to adulthood, when the search for self-definition is more or less universal.
This developmental perspective is particularly helpful in seeing people with BPD as having faltered in grappling with questions such as “Who am I?” and “What do I want out of life?” These individuals also, as noted by the U. Amsterdam authors, struggle with understanding themselves in relation to other people, particularly given that they may have been parented in a confusing and inconsistent manner.
To get to the root of identity disturbance, which Bogaerts et al. regard as a fundamental feature of BPD, there are two approaches. One is to administer self-report questionnaires tapping into an individual’s sense of identity. The other is to ask people to provide a narrative, or story-based, account of their lives up to the present. This narrative approach allows researchers to discern themes in the words and phrases people use that can reveal identity themes. Rather than ask, point-blank, “How empty do you feel?” for example, a narrative approach looks for themes that express this key feature of the inner experience of people with BPD.
Narrative approaches to identity, the construction of a “life story,” can be captured by asking people to describe the main turning points in their lives (Whitbourne, 1986). You can do this yourself by thinking, for a few minutes, about which events in your past shaped you to be the person you are now. Reflecting on these past events in the context of your life now can be an instructive exercise to conduct every now and then.
Narrative vs. Self-Reports in BPD
The contrast between the two approaches to measuring identity formed the crux of the Bogaerts et al. study. Not only did the authors include measures tapping BPD, but they also expanded their investigation to antisocial personality disorder. This made it possible for them to discern whether identity disturbances would also be found in people with another, related, personality disorder.
The 331 young adult Dutch participants in the study (averaging 23 years old; 72 percent female) completed a narrative identity task similar to the above prompt you tried out on yourself. The first identity questionnaire was the Self-Concept and Identity Measure with scales measuring consolidated identity (“I always have a good sense of what is important to me”), disturbed identity (“I am so different with different people that I’m not sure which is the ‘real me’”) and lack of identity (“I feel empty inside, like a person without a soul”). The other identity questionnaire was a Self and Interpersonal Disturbance scale with “Self” items such as “I have no sense of where I want to go in my life” and “Interpersonal” including “My relationships and friendships never last long.” Participants also completed standard questionnaires measuring borderline and antisocial traits.
The narratives provided intriguing insights into the developmental process of identity formation in these young adult participants. Using a scoring system based on a previously constructed manual (McAdams, 2008), the authors rated motivational themes of “agency” (e.g., motivation and sense of control) and “communion” (sense of love, friendship, and belongingness). The scores based on this coding were correlated, as the authors predicted, with questionnaire measures of identity.
Borderline Personality Disorder Essential Reads
You can get a sense of how participants struggling with their identity described their inner experiences from this excerpt from a young woman who showed many borderline features along with low agency and communion narrative ratings:
The moment that changed my life was when my sister took her life. Her sudden loss left us all reeling with shock and disbelief. I felt like a part of me died alongside my sister. Our family was shattered. In the aftermath, I grappled with an eating disorder, depression, and self-harm. These burdens continue to weigh heavily on me. Over the years, my feelings and thoughts have been mainly pitch black.
Overall, the narrative identity scores, compared to the questionnaire measures of identity, provided additional statistical predictability. As the authors concluded, “These findings suggest that the disturbances in self- and other understanding that characterize individuals with personality pathology may also be evident from the stories they share.”
What This Inner Look Reveals
Because the U. Amsterdam study was conducted on young adults dealing with the immediate developmental task of arriving at a secure sense of identity, the findings provide a real-time look at the personality disorder formation process. The young woman whose quote you just read conveys the turmoil of passing from what may have been an unremarkable set of identity-related decisions to a sense that everything is “pitch black.” It’s hard to know how she will move through her adult years, but this quote and her other questionnaire scores would suggest that it will be a very difficult pathway. Her revelation also illustrates that learning to listen to people with BPD may be painful and uncomfortable, especially if their behavior sets you off in other ways, such as not adhering to boundaries. However, opening your mind to their stories can help you better serve as their source of support.
To sum up, the diagnosis of BPD must remain a process based on assessing individuals according to standard criteria rather than rating narratives. However, peeling the layers of their lives back by having them tell you their stories may help you understand how they got to this point and how they can move to greater fulfillment.
