Suffer The Little Children

How a parent with Borderline Personality Disorder shapes their offspring

Allan Milne Lees
8 min readOct 22, 2024
Image credit: Well Mind

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is one of the Cluster-B disorders and although DSM-5 does not specify sub-divisions, therapists who specialize in this illness generally acknowledge there are four main categories within BPD: angry external, angry internal/depressive, impulsive, and petulant. That said, it’s common for someone who suffers from BPD to exhibit symptoms that bleed over from one form to the next, so a sufferer may exhibit a wide range of behaviors during dysregulation.

This article will focus on BPD of the petulant sub-type, and specifically on the impact this form of BPD has on children who grow up with a petulant sub-type parent.

BPD sufferers of the petulant sub-type are characterized by a few important traits. The first is that, provided all is going well, they can present as more-or-less normal functioning adults, albeit with some quirks. If BPD co-presents with another disorder such as obsessive compulsion (the requirement for things to be in a precise place, repetitive physical actions, etc.) it is often be mis-diagnosed as an Autism Spectrum ailment by therapists insufficiently experienced in Cluster-B disorders.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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