I first heard about borderline personality disorder 20 years ago in psychopathology class, I was 24, I had never heard of borderline personality disorder before, I had never even heard of personality disorders before.

I remember the instructor telling us that personality disorders were the only disorders in the DSM that required six months of client data before you could diagnose someone with it.

I thought to myself six months, that's a long time. Why does it take so long? Contrary to this, he also told us that we could diagnose depression and anxiety within a short five minute interview with a client.

And borderline personality disorder takes six months. That's weird, huh? And the symptom list was weird to me too. I'd never heard of personality disorders. They seemed so strange to me.

I'd heard of depressed people before, and I had experienced anxiety myself by then, but personality disorders sounded completely foreign to me, and I was sort of scared of them to be honest.

Then a year later at my internship, I had a very difficult client. She would alternate between making me feel like the best therapist in the world, and making me feel like a worthless person.

And I remembered that this was a red flag for borderline. In that borderline clients often make therapists feel this way. So I began assessing for borderline with this client.

And sure enough, after several months, and after consulting with experts on borderline, it seemed I had my first borderline client.

And then people told me to refer her to someone else because these clients are no fun to work with. But I found that I actually enjoyed the struggle with this client. It felt like real therapy to me.

It involved all the things I enjoyed about being a therapist, things like transference and counter transference, and projective identification, and corrective experiences, and the therapeutic relationship, and so on.

But it was hard, hard work. She was exhausting and frustrating at times. And after our sessions, I often felt mildly traumatized by her.

But ultimately, it was highly rewarding to work with her. The struggle was worth it because after months and years, her symptoms decreased.

She found that she began to like herself. She found that she was able to trust others for the first time in her life. And my work with her was very meaningful to me in this way.

But then I heard people talking at my agency, and they had also had borderline clients, and they hated working with them. I heard them saying very hateful things, very judgmental things about them.

They said it was a waste of time to work with borderlines because therapy just reinforces their dependent and dramatic nature. These therapists looked for ways to get rid of these clients.

So I told them to send them to me because I liked working with them. And since that time, I've worked with many borderline clients in my 20 years of being a therapist, some successfully, and some not so successfully.

I've read everything I can get my hands on regarding borderline. I've lectured on the treatment of borderline personality disorder, and all of my supervisors eventually need help with a borderline client if not several borderline clients.

I've even had borderline students before, actually, that might surprise you that sometimes people diagnosed with borderline who fit the criteria, they decide to become therapists, and so that happens at times too.

And then I saw borderline personality disorder being portrayed in movies. In fatal attraction, Glenn Close's character was identified by some to be indicative of borderline. And as a result, people thought that borderline people would try to kill you if you broke up with them.

In the movie Girl Interrupted, the Winona Rider character was supposed to have borderline personality disorder. But to me, she just seemed a little depressed. And as a result of this popular movie, people got a very inaccurate representation of borderline in my opinion.

Some people even think that Darth Vader is borderline because of the way he behaved as a young man. For example, he loved Obi-Wan, and then suddenly hated him. And he intensely loved Padme in a self-destructive manner, which is also somewhat indicative of borderline.

But I think it's a little silly to equate Darth Vader as borderline. He doesn't really fit it.

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