Books to Help You Navigate Relationships with Someone Diagnosed with BPD

Whether it’s a family member or someone you’re dating, navigating a relationship with someone who has Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is often difficult. You may be frustrated with their fluctuating moods and unsure of how to handle their issues with abandonment and self-harm. 

If you’re not yet ready to engage in BPD treatment with your loved one – or even if you have – there are many books available that can help you gain a better understanding of Borderline Personality Disorder and learn ways to more effectively navigate your relationship. Here are our top picks. 

The Essential Family Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder: New Tools and Techniques to Stop Walking on Eggshells 

Randi Kreger, author of Stop Walking on Eggshells, created this guide specifically for family members of people with BPD. In The Essential Family Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder, Kreger provides family members tools to repair their relationships with loved ones who have BPD, including techniques for setting boundaries and for more effective communication.    

Understanding and Treating Borderline Personality Disorder: A Guide for Professionals and Families 

This guide, edited by Perry Hoffman, PhD, and John Gunderson, PhD, brings together advice and guidance from experts in BPD. In Understanding and Treating Borderline Personality Disorder, you will learn the basis for a BPD diagnosis, available BPD treatments, and ways to build effective support systems for you and your loved one. 

Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder: How to Keep Out-of-Control Emotions from Destroying Your Relationship 

One of the primary challenges of Borderline Personality Disorder is instability in interpersonal relationships. Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, by Shari Manning, offers family and friends skills in how to establish better boundaries and defuse crises to create more stable relationships. This book is grounded in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a treatment specifically created to treat BPD by Marsha Linehan, who wrote the book’s foreword. 

Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder: A Family Guide for Healing and Change 

In Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder, author Valerie Porr teaches empirically-supported and effective coping behaviors and interpersonal skills based on DBT and Mentalization-based Therapy (MBT). These skills can reduce conflict in your relationship with someone with BPD and build trust. 

Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem 

Being raised by a parent with Borderline Personality Disorder isn’t always easy, and may have impacted you well into adulthood. Surviving a Borderline Parent, by Kimberlee Roth and Freda Friedman, is a step-by-step guide for adult children of parents with Borderline Personality Disorder that provides coping strategies for dealing with issues commonly experienced by that population. 

Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship 

In Understanding the Borderline Mother, Christine Ann Lawson examines different types of borderline mothers and how they relate to their children. These types include the waif mother, the hermit mother, the queen mother, and the witch. Lawson offers specific suggestions for creating healthier relationships with each type of borderline mother. 

If you know of any other books that cover relationships with people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, post them in the comments below.