Looking for advice on living with Borderline Personality Disorder

If you can avoid a clinical diagnosis of BPD, do so. Let them call you depressed, anxious, even bipolar on your charts, but BPD is very stigmatized in the psychiatric community. A great deal of cases, especially those diagnosed in women and/or teenagers, are often cases of PTSD and C-PTSD which feature more emotional dysregulation, interpersonal relationship issues, and risk-taking behaviors as opposed to intrusive memories or flashbacks. It's also fairly common with American psychiatrists to slap a label of "personality disorder" onto mental health problems which don't respond well to medication. OCD symptoms not resolving with Prozac? Easier to call them OCPD. The minute it becomes a "personality disorder," psychiatrists are relieved of a lot of liability. "Is it something we can fix easily? If not, these problematic thoughts and behaviors must be embedded your personality. There, see? We tried!" Sorry, I've got a bitter taste in my mouth about PDs at this point. My partner has a dx of BPD, and I've come close to getting one of my own, but I have a degree in clinical psychology and know that it's common for folks with childhood trauma to receive this label and never get properly treated for their PTSD. When I was in my university classes, I actually wanted to work with patients who had "dramatic cluster personality disorders." Now, I see how frequently people are having their trauma symptoms marked as them just being defiant or dramatic, looking for attention, and it makes me hella sad cause my girlfriend would be much better off if she got some trauma-focused therapy, as opposed to trying a couple meds which didn't work and then deciding she just needed to stuff down all her emotions, which always works out alright up until they overwhelm her. Too bad she didn't get a C-PTSD dx and get therapy for her childhood abuse and neglect and learn DBT skills to regulate herself in interpersonal communication. Because honestly, what actually tends to help folks with BPD diagnoses is the exact same treatments that help with PTSD. A lot of times the trauma is either so early in your life that you didn't remember, or you were abused/neglected by caregivers, or both. I'm a both, nice to meet you. If you grew up already fighting for your life in one way or another, something in you finds it hard to give up that fight-or-flight even as an adult. And because it happened while your brain was developing, there are issues related to where you were in development when a lot of it occurred. My girlfriend was neglected by her parents most of her life (which gives her anxiety about being independent, and also a complex about being cared for) and was "adopted" and groomed by someone about a decade older from like 15-21 (which caused her to contextualize romantic relationships through BDSM roles, and also sort of locked a lot of her responses to relationship issues to those of teenagers, major mood swings and idealization/devaluation.) I underwent a traumatic sexual event when I was 2, forced through potty-training, had my mother emotionally abusing and gaslighting me most of my childhood, bullies at school, a couple bad relationships in high school, a few more examples of sex trauma, and now, I can't handle conflict, I cannot stand secrets or people hiding anything. I can go full toddler tantrum in response to a trigger (like the sound of a baby crying, arguments, and the silent treatment.) We both have pretty bad trauma disorders. I'm just lucky enough to have a degree in this and know to try to steer clear of having my trauma history dismissed and my chart say BPD because I don't respond well to ANY antidepressant, mood stabilizer, daily anxiolytic medication, or antipsychotic.