Healing from Borderline Personality Disorder: How DBT and EMDR Can Help You Reclaim Your Life

Posted: July 18, 2025

What Is Borderline Personality Disorder and Where Does It Come From?

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a complex, deeply misunderstood condition marked by emotional intensity, identity struggles, relationship instability, and a deep fear of abandonment. If you live with BPD, you might feel like your nervous system is constantly on edge. Like swinging from closeness to panic, confidence to collapse, clarity to confusion.

You might:

Struggle with overwhelming emotions that shift rapidly
React impulsively or feel regret after emotional outbursts
Experience black-and-white thinking in relationships
Feel uncertain about who you are, or carry deep shame
Want connection desperately, but fear getting hurt again

BPD isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a trauma response.

Many people with BPD have experienced early trauma, abuse, neglect, abandonment, or emotional invalidation. Even if you can’t point to a single “event,” years of being dismissed, misunderstood, or punished for your emotions can shape how your brain and body learn to survive. When your world doesn’t feel safe, your emotions can become alarm bells - always ringing, always loud.

How DBT and EMDR Can Help

While DBT and EMDR have distinct approaches, they work beautifully together. DBT helps you manage intense emotions in the present. EMDR helps you heal emotional wounds from the past. Together, they offer both stabilization and deep transformation.

DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy), developed by Dr. Marsha Linehan, was created specifically for people who feel emotions deeply and struggle with staying regulated. DBT is built on four core skills:

Mindfulness (to help you stay grounded and observe your reactions)
Distress tolerance (to get through emotional storms without making things worse)
Emotion regulation (to reduce the intensity and unpredictability of your feelings)
Interpersonal effectiveness (to help you communicate and set boundaries in ways that preserve your sense of self).

These skills don’t just help you survive — they help you build trust in yourself, strengthen relationships, and live in a way that feels more balanced and intentional. DBT also offers structure: individual therapy, skills groups, and sometimes phone coaching. It’s an active, practical process that meets you where you are, even if that place feels messy or fragile.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro offers a different kind of healing. While DBT helps with present-moment skills, EMDR helps you process trauma at the root. It works by guiding you to revisit distressing memories in a safe and structured way while using bilateral stimulation, like eye movements or tapping. This allows your brain to reprocess those memories and “unstick” the emotional charge attached to them.

EMDR isn’t about talking through trauma in detail. The beauty about it is that you do not necessarily even have to speak about what happened to you out loud. It’s about helping your brain and body resolve the sense of danger that trauma imprinted. For many people with BPD, this means unlearning beliefs like “I’m too much,” “I’m unlovable,” or “It was my fault.” EMDR helps shift these deeply rooted narratives, not just cognitively but emotionally and somatically. Over time, shame softens, panic quiets, and a new, gentler sense of self can emerge.

Some people begin with DBT to build safety, structure, and emotional regulation, then transition to EMDR to process trauma. Others may work with both approaches simultaneously, depending on the therapist’s style and the client’s readiness. There’s no single “right” path—the journey is unique to each individual. DBT helps create what’s known as a state change, allowing you to shift from dysregulation or hyper/hypoarousal into a more regulated state within your window of tolerance. EMDR, on the other hand, can lead to a trait change—a deeper transformation that alters long-held patterns or beliefs, creating meaningful and lasting change in your life.

You Deserve to Heal

Healing from BPD is not about becoming someone else. It’s about coming home to who you were always meant to be—before the world taught you to doubt yourself, before trauma made you feel unsafe in your own skin. DBT and EMDR are not quick fixes. They require time, effort, and compassion. But they offer real change.