Reader tools
None of these diagnose anything, and none of them produce a result you should take to an argument as evidence. What they do is turn a vague impression into something specific enough to act on — or to say out loud in an appointment.
What each one is for
Pick by the question you actually have, not by the order they are listed in.
- 01
“Is this dysregulation, or am I just upset?”
The dysregulation checklist. Fourteen statements about speed, height and duration rather than about how bad you feel. It separates intensity that settles from intensity that does not, which is the distinction that matters clinically and the one hardest to make from inside it.
- 02
“Is this person a favorite person, or do I just love them?”
The favorite-person checklist. Sixteen statements about how much of your emotional state is currently outsourced to one person's ordinary behaviour. Attachment on its own is not the pattern; the asymmetry is.
- 03
“Where in the book should I start?”
The reader-path quiz. Answers route to a specific chapter and a specific guide rather than to a general recommendation to read from the beginning, which for most people is the wrong instruction.
- 04
“I was doing well and I've stopped.”
The recovery checklist. Built around the fact that relapse begins with skipped practice and withdrawn contact long before anything dramatic happens — so it asks about the boring indicators, which are the early ones.
- 05
“I want to know which edition to buy.”
That is on the formats page now, along with a comparison table and the questions people ask at checkout. It outgrew being a tool.
What a checklist can and cannot do
Worth reading before the results of any of these mean anything to you.
Diagnose borderline personality disorder, or rule it out. Nothing on this site does that, and anything online that claims to is selling something.
Give you specific language for an appointment. 'Fourteen out of sixteen, particularly the ones about duration' is a far better opening than 'I think something is wrong'.
Tell you whether a relationship is healthy. That involves another person, and none of these ask about them.
Show you a pattern you had noticed but not connected — which is the most common reaction people report to the favorite-person list.
Measure progress reliably from one week to the next. Mood makes these swing.
Show a direction over three months, if you date them and keep them. Three data points beat one impression.
Settle a disagreement about who is right.
Be answered honestly and privately, which is the only way the answers are worth anything.
How to answer these so the result is worth having
The single biggest distortion in any self-assessment is the state you are in while completing it. Filled in during a bad hour, everything looks true; filled in on a good afternoon, most of it looks like an exaggeration. The instruction that fixes this is to answer for the last month rather than for right now — a pattern is what these are trying to detect, and today is not a pattern.
The second is honesty about the unflattering items. There are two or three statements in each list that most people would rather not tick, and they tend to be the most diagnostic ones. Nobody sees this. A checklist you answered defensively has told you nothing you did not already believe.
The third is what you do with it. A score in your head evaporates in a day. A dated note — the score, the two or three items that surprised you, and one sentence about the week — is something you can put in front of a clinician in three months, and it is materially more useful than a recollection.
And if any of these lands badly, that is a reasonable outcome to have. Recognising a pattern in writing is not the same as reading about it in the abstract, and it can be a heavy afternoon. The crisis page is there, and the book is not going anywhere.
Answer as you were last month, not as you are this hour.