Hi Dancing Lady,

Thanks for your response; I think I understand your points. Of course I don't take your opinion the wrong way.
Sorry things are still very difficult - I know from my own experience it can be so difficult to stay positive and hope you will not give up!

About older "borderline" people doing well, there is not going to be much scientific data on this, mainly because it is not an issue that's going to get much funding (i.e. not that many people want to know "can older borderlines do as well as younger borderlines?"... most people with BPD are young when first treated, anyway.)

My opinion came from what I consider common sense; I don't mean that the wrong way. For one thing I've seen my mother, who had severe borderline traits (never diagnosed, but she probably could have been) and was married to a physically abusive man for 30 years, go to therapy, decide to leave my father, get her Master's, work a full time job for the first time after age 50, and find a new better relationship with a much better man. For another thing I've read long treatment accounts of older "borderlines" recovering, in books by the writer Lawrence Hedges (In Search of the Lost Mother of Infancy), Jeffrey Seinfeld (The Bad Object), and a couple of others. Common sense tells me that if with sufficient help they can recover, why can't any old borderline? :-)

But the bigger reason is, why couldn't older "borderlines" do as well as younger ones? All other things being equal, it might be "less likely" on a group level, but that is really meaningless and not how the world works IMO. What matters is whether a person can get good enough help, frequently enough, for long enough, to do what they want. If the sufficient conditions of support are present, anyone can do well. It doesn't make sense to me to say "older borderlines are less likely to get better", because any one of them could do well to different degrees.

The deeper problem with all of this is that BPD is simply not a valid or reliable syndrome (i.e. its traits are subjective, descriptive, based on researchers subjectively assessing when various observed traits reach a supposed "borderline" threshold of intensity or severity... this is impossible to do consistently/scientifically). So all research associated with BPD could be considered suspect on this basis alone. A lot of people don't appreciate how little actual science lies behind our current "mental illnesses". But to me that is a positive thing because it helped me to stop identifying with the label BPD.