Borderline personality disorder, or BPD, can make everyday life a struggle, and this includes people who struggle with memory issues due to BPD. Borderline personality disorder and memory loss go hand in hand for some individuals with the disorder. While memory issues aren’t as widely recognized as other symptoms of BPD, they can have a significant impact on a person’s daily life and relationships.
What is Borderline Personality Disorder?
Borderline personality disorder is a mental health condition that affects how a person thinks and feels about themselves and others. It can cause difficulty in managing emotions, which can lead to more severe issues including:
- Impulsive behaviors
- Unstable relationships
- Distorted self-image
- Intense fear of abandonment
- Self-harming behaviors
- Anxiety disorders
Although BPD is considered a personality disorder, it can have several physical effects that manifest differently. Many people report feeling issues related to memory, false memories, and even amnesia. New research suggests that the tie between borderline personality disorder and memory loss is quite real, supporting anecdotal evidence and experiences.
How Does Borderline Personality Disorder Affect Memory?
While not everyone with borderline personality disorder will experience memory loss, studies have shown that those with BPD are more likely to struggle with various types of memory issues. These include the following.
Subjective Memory Issues
Subjective memory complaints include those that a person feels they are experiencing, but cannot accurately measure. This can include trouble remembering specific details about an event or feeling like their memory is foggy. It can be difficult to truly get a measurement for subjective memory issues, which is what researchers tried to do in a study of BPD patients.
What they found was that people with BPD are more likely to report subjective memory complaints, although they might test normally on memory tests. Issues like depression might impact these memory complaints. While this study doesn’t provide accurate measurements of all BPD patients, it does suggest that subjective memory issues are common and can be difficult to express for patients.
Cognitive Flexibility and Social Cognition
Cognitive flexibility is one of the most important subsets of executive functioning. From making plans to focusing on future goals and action plans, executive functioning helps people manage their lives. Cognitive flexibility is a core of executive functioning, which allows someone to readily switch between tasks, thoughts, and ideas.
Unfortunately, research shows that people with BPD struggle with both cognitive flexibility and social cognition. Social cognition refers to being able to interpret social cues, such as facial expressions or body language, and respond appropriately. This can lead to difficulties in social situations, as individuals with BPD may struggle to understand others’ perspectives or intentions.
In all, this new research shows that people with BPD struggle with specific aspects of memory and cognitive functioning, including:
- Set shifting (changing between tasks and adapting to change)
- Decision making
- Planning and problem-solving
- Social cognition abilities
If you have BPD and constantly feel stuck, have difficulty remembering to plan ahead or adapt quickly to change, these might all be attributed to your disorder. This study further found that past experiences, including physical and psychic trauma, can greatly impact overall cognitive abilities in people with BPD.
False Memory
Trauma has also been shown to lead to memory issues in individuals with BPD. Specifically, a study found that people with BPD are more likely to have false memories than those without the disorder. False memories involve remembering events that didn’t actually occur or altering memories of actual events.
This can be incredibly distressing for individuals with BPD, as they may struggle to differentiate between real and false memories, misinterpret events, or outright forget positive experiences. It also adds to the difficulty of accurately recalling past experiences, further complicating therapy and healing.
Amnesia
Similar to false memories, people with BPD are also more likely to suffer from retrograde and anterograde amnesia in response to negative emotional stimuli. On the other hand, researchers found little reaction to positive stimuli, showing that the brain in people with BPD actively responds to negative stimuli differently (and more intensely) than those without the disorder.
Get Help For Borderline Personality Disorder and Memory Loss
Completing forgetting positive events, masking negative events, and trying to heal from past trauma can all make it extremely difficult for someone with BPD to make progress. Thankfully, there are many treatment options available that can help individuals with borderline personality disorder and memory loss. At Atlanta Recovery Place, we offer high-quality mental health treatment for BPD in Atlanta and the surrounding areas. From partial hospitalization to intensive outpatient treatment, our goal is to help you maintain flexibility in your daily life while getting the necessary support and therapy to heal.
If you or someone you know is struggling with BPD and memory loss, don’t hesitate to reach out for help. Our team of experienced professionals is here to guide you through the healing process and provide tools and resources for managing symptoms like memory loss, from individual to group therapy, medication management, anger management, art therapy, and more. Call us to learn more about our BPD treatment programs today.
