First, I would like to make a correction. I am not ‘recovering’ from Borderline Personality Disorder. Rather, I authentically recovered from it years ago. Authentic recovery is what happens when one completely rids himself or herself of the disorder and begins to enjoy genuine emotional health - just as one always would have enjoyed it, had they been raised in a healthy family environment, with emotional teachers who themselves had healthy attitudes and healthy underlying perspectives.
The way the question here is asked reveals in itself a profoundly inaccurate, distorted understanding of the very nature of what Borderline Personality Disorder is, and what it is not. First of all, it equates the disorder somebody has as being inherent to who they are. (Not a person with Borderline, but a borderline person.) This reinforces already profoundly-false concepts about the true nature of what the disorder is and what it is not.
Secondly, nobody should be asking about, or be interested in “coping methods”. The only reason anybody does this is because they have been led to believe - often by respected people in authority who truly have no clue what they are talking about - that emotional disorders are unfixable, and so learning to ‘cope’ with the symptoms is the best anybody can reasonably hope for.
Well, regardless of where you picked up these notions, they are all lies.
Emotional disorders - which in reality is what Borderline Personality Disorder actually is - are curable. There is absolutely nothing that makes them incurable - except for perhaps the misdirection and lies being spread about like free candy.
The speculation and false science claiming that they are genetic in nature, that they alter the amygdala, and hosts of other misinformation, is utter bullshit, or completely misinterpreted, by people who are either not very smart, or who are completely devoid of insight. I encourage you to read my other articles here at The Last Symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder (thelastsymptom.com) if you are interested in the comprehensive reasons for why the things I’m telling you are true, and for why most of what you believe on the subject currently is completely false.
Particularly, in my free, weekly podcast, The Last Symptom, which is available on every major podcast platform of your preference, I go into great detail explaining these things, and proving these destructive lies for what they are.
I myself had Borderline Personality Disorder for at least the first 35 years of my life, completely unaware. After a crisis which resulted in the loss of everything I held dear in my life at that time, I became a foremost authority on the Disorder out of genuine necessity, for the purpose of identifying its true causes, and eliminating it once and for all. This is something that I managed to do over a period of roughly seven years, and it is now something that I help others to do for themselves as well.
Taking aspirin does nothing to cure a brain tumor. As long as you are more concerned about the symptoms of your disorder, rather than the cause, the problem will never be identified and addressed.
I would like to focus on the part of the question presented here that deals with stress:
There are two distinct, unrelated things people with emotional disorders are dealing with:
1. The human condition.
2. A disorder.
One of these two things is not a problem, and since it’s not a problem, it’s not anything you can ever fix, even if you want to “fix” it.
Can you guess which one of the two things I mentioned is not a problem?
The human condition.
Now, what is the natural thing that happens to all humans when placed under great stress, hunger, exhaustion, and so forth?
Take the healthiest person in the world, put them under intense stress, and guess what? They will mismanage situations, as well as do and say things they later regret.
So each of us need to have the wisdom and insight to try to separate what is simply a natural limitation of being an imperfect human being from what is our disorder, and then be forgiving and compassionate with ourselves in those instances.
Only behaviors that can be traced directly back to the underlying causes creating Borderline Personality Disorder can appropriately be considered symptoms of the disorder itself. Everything else is merely part of the human condition, which all people are dealing with, and which you need to come to accept.
Here’s the second point:
When you understand what the true nature of Borderline Personality Disorder is, or any emotional disorder, you then understand what the solution to it is: Sincerity, or genuineness in approach, followed by accurate information (or education), and finally, insight.
You, and most people who follow my work, are learning. You’re taking in accurate information about what it is you’re dealing with, and how to correct it. This is the solution to authentically recovering from (fixing) the erroneous emotional education of your childhood home life, which is the true, underlying cause of your Borderline Personality Disorder.
As a person who is learning new things every day, can you ever know, or understand, less today than you knew, or understood, yesterday?
No, you can’t.
So take comfort in the reality that you can’t “slip backwards” in your recovery.
You can slip, and fall down in place. But when you get back up, are you starting from further behind where you fell? No, you’re not.
Boxers also fall in place. And often, they wait until the referee counts all the way up to 9 before they get back to their feet.
Do they do this because they are weak, or failures?
No. They do it strategically. They know that if they get up at the count of 2, before they’re ready, they will just get clobbered again.
So instead, they lie there regaining their strength up until the very last minute, and then they get to their feet with renewed energy to win the fight.
Likewise, there is no reason whatsoever for you to not allow yourself to lie in place after a ‘failure’, until you have regained your strength, and can tackle these things again with renewed enthusiasm and power.
This is not weak. Weak would be giving up, or never trying at all.