Silver Linings Playbook: Tiffany

The petulant borderline personality

What is borderline personality disorder?

Borderline personality disorder is a cluster B disorder that severely impacts a person's ability to manage their emotions. This loss of emotional control can increase impulsivity, affect how a person feels about themselves, and negatively impact their relationships with others. There are 9 symptoms of BPD, which are:

• Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment;

• A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships;

• Identity disturbance, manifested in markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self;

• A tendency to act rashly in states of high negative affect, leading to potentially self-damaging behaviours;

• Recurrent episodes of self-harm;

• Emotional instability due to marked reactivity of mood;

• Chronic feelings of emptiness;

• Inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger;

• Transient dissociative symptoms or psychotic-like features in situations of high affective arousal.

Tiffany from Silver Linings Playbook is definitely an emotionally reactive character and some of her behaviors are similar to that of a borderline personality. She’s impulsive, Tiffany’s a clever girl but there are times when she makes decisions without thinking about it, often as the result of feeling a strong emotion. For example when she pushed all the food off the table at the diner to express her anger towards Pat. Tiffany also has rapidly shifting moods, she’s unpredictable, you don’t know what she’s feeling or how she might react. At dinner with Veronica, Ronnie, and Pat she seems timid and disinterested then for a little bit she becomes cheerful while talking to Pat about medication but then she creates a sort of dilemma about being tired and wanting to go home. Her relationship with Pat has a roller coaster feel to it, she goes from seeing him as a trophy to dumpster trash. There is a phenomenon known as splitting which is when a person sees the world as all good or all bad. This is common in people with BPD, in relationships they idealize their partner (so this is the best person ever, this is their person) but when something goes wrong (if they experience disappointment in the relationship) they completely devalue their partner (and this happens very quickly).

There are 4 subtypes of borderline personality disorder. Tiffany gives kind of a petulant borderline ‘vibe’. Psychologist Theodore Millon proposed these subtypes and describes the petulant borderline as negative, impatient, resentful, and easily feeling insulted. There's another side to the petulant borderline, the full name of the subtype was histrionic/petulant borderline Histrionic personality is another cluster b disorder that is characterized by attention-seeking, shallow and dramatic behavior. Tiffany doesn’t seem like an attention-seeking person but she can be quite animated when she wants someone to like her and let’s just say she knows how to own a room. Like the scene where she proves Pat’s father’s superstitions wrong. Heres a little more about the Petulant borderline personality:

So that was the petulant borderline personality and its fantastic portrayal in the character Tiffany played by Jennifer Lawrence. Thank you for reading this article, we hope it was enjoyable and we hope you were able to learn something from it. Subscribe to our free newsletter to learn more about difficult personalities.