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The same coin: understanding ASD and BPD
Difficulties with personal relationships, emotional and behavioral dysregulation. Two pillars of two disorders, with a particular, peculiar manifestation in girls and women, cisgendered or trans. Two diagnoses. Two sides of the same coin.
I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in my 20s, after a difficult childhood and adolescence, lived at the intersection of not-entirely-Westernized cultural values, familial trauma, and financial hardship.
Bluntly, I was a strange, smart child and an angry, stubborn teenager out of place everywhere, always.
BPD answered as many questions as it, simultaneously, raised. Its cornerstone treatment, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) gave me some skills to make myself, well, more palatable to the world, to mitigate my nature in the “ways that count.”
My strangeness, smartness, anger, and stubbornness still leak out, in ways that don’t “count,” as much — and this led to my discovery that I may be on the Autism spectrum.
Instead? In addition?
It feels like having come this far, that these are reasonable questions. BPD and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are like the opposite sides of a coin.
But opposite sides are just that: two sides of the same coin. They lean on one…
