Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a life-threatening disorder characterized by emotion dysregulation, impulsivity, interpersonal dysfunction, identity disturbance, and suicidal or self-injurious thoughts and behaviours. Several BPD symptoms involve disrupted relationship processes, such as idealization and devaluation of significant others. Accordingly, romantic relationship quality is negatively impacted when one partner has BPD. Theory suggests that BPD symptoms and romantic dysfunction may exacerbate each other and thereby maintain the disorder. Therefore, improving relationship functioning may reduce BPD symptom severity, and couple therapies for BPD have accordingly been developed. Understanding strengths of romantic relationships could be leveraged to optimize relationship functioning and, perhaps consequently, improve BPD symptoms. However, the strengths in relationships between people with BPD and their partners are unknown. Therefore, this study will qualitatively investigate relationship strengths and ways such strengths could be leveraged to enhance dyadic interventions for BPD. This study will be one component of an existing CIHR-funded longitudinal study being conducted by this student’s supervisor, Dr. Skye Fitzpatrick, which investigates the communication processes of couples wherein one partner has BPD. Approximately 20 adults with full or subthreshold BPD and their romantic partners will participate in individual semi-structured interviews about strengths in their relationship. Reflexive thematic analysis will be conducted in an inductive semantic framework to generate themes. This study could inform couple interventions that harness romantic relationship strengths to improve relationship satisfaction and, potentially, BPD outcomes.