18 Pictures That Show What the 9 Classic Symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder 'Look' Like

“With a vacant mother growing up, my fear of abandonment usually always came from my deep need to be held by my mum, and trying to find a romantic partner to care for me like I needed her to. When partners couldn’t fulfill what I needed, it felt like I was being let down, yet again. Forgotten about. Abandoned.” — Charmaine Selwood

“I fall in love in less than 24 hours, and I devote myself and my whole world to that person. But before I know it, this person who would ‘never hurt me,’ actually hurts me. After someone hurts me, intentionally or unintentionally, that’s it. They are the worst person ever! I cut them out for good. There is no middle ground. You are good, or you are bad. I am in love with you, or I hate you.” — Charmaine Selwood

“With unstable self-image or identity disturbance, before knowing your true self, you mimic those around you. Just until you figure out who the hell you actually are. My artwork around this symptom is always pretty abstract. The image is so distorted, so unusual, so unknown. I am beginning to learn and understand my true identity, and since then, my artwork actually starts to look more and more like me, instead of abstract figures and faces.” — Charmaine Selwood

“I was having very intense emotions — deep, dark, bad ones — and in an attempt to make it all stop, I would go out with a stranger, take drugs and have sex. It was a temporary distraction… yet, it only added to the mess. These behaviors always ended up in more deep regret and shame, with no real solution to any problem whatsoever.” — Charmaine Selwood

“In the past eight months of therapy, I learned to take to my brush when I felt like self-harming, or if I felt like ending it all. It’s a real grit your teeth kind of moment, because the last thing I want to do when I feel this way is paint. Eventually, the rapid, rough marks I wanted to make on myself, I would make on the canvas, with hard splashes of paint, waving movements of the brush while focusing on the colorful, releasing marks I was making. And in the end, I got to look at a piece of artwork filled with emotion, instead of open wounds on my skin.” — Charmaine Selwood

“It wasn’t until last year that I noticed the extreme swings of my moods. ‘I must be bipolar!’ I thought. Extremely happy, buzzing, bouncing of the walls, planning my future, writing songs and poems, drawing and painting just to come rapidly crashing down to an ultimate low minutes later. The depression swallows me up. The happy highs are never that bad, I actually have learnt to enjoy them and make the most of it. But the lows, the depression, the anxiety and the sadness are unbearable at times. Every day was and still is just one hell of a roller coaster.” — Charmaine Selwood

“There are hardly any illustrations — let alone words — to describe accurately how chronic emptiness actually feels. Emptiness for me always leads back to dissociation. It’s like my mind and body feel like it’s better to switch totally off. Emptiness just looks like me lying on my bed. For hours and hours without moving a muscle. Without eating, drinking, picking up the phone — nothing.” — Charmaine Selwood

“When it comes to anger, my anger bursts are short-lived and I don’t usually create any art in that moment. My short anger bursts quickly travel to either self-hate, or feeling very overwhelmed with the intense emotions, leading to dissociating. Anger is a very difficult emotion for me, and so often self-harm, or disappearing into my dissociative world, helped me escape the emotion.” — Charmaine Selwood

“Dissociation has many different looks for me, as it’s hard to really illustrate what dissociation feels like. Ultimately this is what a lot of my overwhelming emotions and feelings come down to: just switching off. Switching off so much to the point where you question if you are even real. Dissociation looks a lot like you’re having a terrible headache from the outside, but even I can’t begin to illustrate how it looks on the inside.” — Charmaine Selwood