Terms explained

BPD glossary

The vocabulary you will meet in therapy, in the book, and in BPD communities — defined in plain language, with a link to the full guide where one exists.

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How you feel and why

Terms describing the experience itself.

Term	What it means
Emotional dysregulation	Emotions arriving faster, peaking higher and taking longer to settle than they do for most people. Not an overreaction chosen in the moment — a description of how the nervous system is currently responding.
Emotional sensitivity	The underlying trait: a lower threshold for emotional response. Usually persists through recovery, and most people stop wanting it gone once the intensity has somewhere to go.
Chronic emptiness	A hollowness that stays whether or not anything is wrong. Distinct from depression — an absence rather than a heaviness — and typically the slowest symptom to shift.
Identity disturbance	Values, goals and self-description shifting depending on context or company. Often described as not knowing who you are when nobody else is in the room.
Dissociation	Feeling detached from your body, your surroundings or yourself. Frequently a response to overwhelm, and one reason body awareness is taught early.
Emotional flooding	The point where intensity exceeds what you can process, and reasoning stops being available. The level at which reflective skills stop working and physiological ones start.

Relationships

The vocabulary for what happens between people.

Term	What it means
Favorite person (FP)	One person elevated far above everyone else, whose ordinary behaviour has extraordinary consequences for how you feel. A community term, not a clinical one, and one of the most accurate pieces of language anyone has produced for the experience.
Splitting	A mixed picture collapsing into all-good or all-bad, usually under stress. Not deliberate — the filtering happens before you see the person.
Idealization and devaluation	The two ends of splitting as a cycle: someone becomes nearly perfect, then a reality check arrives, then the filter inverts. The person has not changed; what you notice about them has.
Abandonment fear	Anticipating being left, often triggered by ambiguity rather than by anything said. Frequently produces the distance it predicts.
Rejection sensitivity	A detector tuned to catch every real rejection, which therefore also catches a great many things that were not rejection at all.
Relationship sabotage	Ending or damaging something good before it can be taken away. Preemptive, and usually experienced as self-protection at the time.

Skills and techniques

The named tools, mostly from DBT. Each has a full guide on this site.

Term	What it means
TIPP	Temperature, Intense exercise, Paced breathing, Progressive muscle relaxation. Physiological interventions for the point where reasoning is no longer reachable.
ACCEPTS	Activities, Contributing, Comparisons, Emotions, Push away, Thoughts, Sensation. Seven distraction strategies for getting through a specific moment without making it worse.
DEAR MAN	Describe, Express, Assert, Reinforce, Mindful, Appear confident, Negotiate. Used when getting your request honoured matters most.
GIVE	Gentle, Interested, Validate, Easy manner. Used when the relationship matters more than the outcome of the conversation.
FAST	Fair, Apology, Stick to values, Truthful. Used when your self-respect is what is at stake.
Opposite action	Deliberately doing the opposite of what an emotion urges, when the urge does not fit the facts. Changing the emotion by changing the behaviour.
Cognitive defusion	Treating a thought as a thought rather than as a fact. Not disputing it — loosening its grip so it stops steering.
Grounding	Using the senses to return attention to the present. Most useful when dissociation or flooding has taken you out of the room.
Self-soothing	Deliberate sensory comfort — sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Works at moderate intensity and not at a peak, which is why it is often wrongly written off.
Distress tolerance	Getting through a crisis without making it worse. Distinct from emotion regulation, which changes how you feel; tolerance is for when changing it is not available.

Being understood

Validation is the most misunderstood term in this vocabulary, so it gets several entries.

Term	What it means
Validation	Acknowledging that a feeling makes sense given the circumstances. Explicitly not agreement, and not approval of what was done about it.
Self-validation	Doing the same for yourself. Described in the book as the hardest and most important level, because it is the one that does not depend on anyone else being present.
Invalidation	Having a feeling dismissed, corrected or punished. A repeatedly invalidating environment is one half of the standard model for how BPD develops.
Mentalization	Holding in mind that other people have their own separate internal states — and that your reading of them is a guess rather than a perception.
Interpersonal effectiveness	The general skill of getting needs met while keeping the relationship and your self-respect intact. DEAR MAN, GIVE and FAST are its three modules.
Healthy boundaries	Limits that protect you without pushing people away. The book treats these as a skill to be practised rather than a personality trait.

Treatment and recovery

What you will encounter in clinical settings.

Term	What it means
DBT	Dialectical Behavior Therapy. The treatment with the strongest evidence for BPD. A full programme is individual therapy, a skills group, phone coaching and a therapist consultation team — not only the skills.
MBT	Mentalization-Based Therapy. Focuses on strengthening the capacity to hold your own and other people's mental states in mind, particularly under stress.
Schema therapy	Works on long-standing patterns formed early, and the modes a person switches between. Another approach with an evidence base for BPD.
EUPD	Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder — the ICD term for substantially what the DSM calls BPD. Which one you meet depends mostly on where you are treated.
Remission	No longer meeting the diagnostic threshold. Long-term follow-up finds most people reach it at some point, and relapse is less common than in several conditions considered more treatable.
Emotional relapse	Stage one of the relapse process: skipped appointments, stopped practice, isolation, poor sleep. You are not thinking about the behaviour yet, and this is the stage where it can still be interrupted.

Why the vocabulary matters more than it looks

Learning terminology sounds like the least useful part of any of this, and it is one of the most useful. A great deal of what makes borderline personality disorder difficult to get help with is that the experience is hard to describe — and “I don't know, everything is just too much” is a poor starting point for a first appointment.

Being able to say “this is dysregulation, it comes on in about ninety seconds and takes me most of a day to come down from” changes that conversation completely. It is the same information, made actionable.

It also changes how you relate to the experience. Naming something while it happens moves it from something occurring to you into something you are observing, which is the entire basis of the mindfulness chapter. The vocabulary is not decoration on the skills; for several of them it is the mechanism.

One caution: recognising yourself in these definitions is not a diagnosis. Several conditions share these features and separating them takes a clinician with your full history. Recognition is a reason to seek assessment, not a substitute for one.

Something you can name is something you can tell a clinician about.

Educational disclaimer: this page supports book discovery and general learning about borderline personality disorder. It does not diagnose, replace individualised professional care, or provide emergency support. If you are in crisis, contact local emergency services or a crisis line — see the crisis support page.