Crossposting: DBT & ME Podcast Sara's Story
Crossposting: DBT & ME Podcast Sara's Story

Bold Beautiful Borderline

Therapists Kate and Michelle talk with Sarah about her experiences of BPD, DBT, stigma and sobriety, mixing clinical insight with lived experience. The conversation offers practical ideas for using DBT skills, finding community, and holding on to reasons to stay alive during very dark moments.

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54:11•4 May 2026

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Sarah’s BPD Story: Stigma, DBT Skills and Finding Reasons to Stay

Episode Overview

Learning one DBT skill at a time and teaching it to loved ones can make the skills feel less overwhelming and more usable.
Supportive partners and friends who are willing to learn DBT alongside you can make a huge difference to relationships and recovery.
Newly diagnosed people are warned away from stigmatizing books and unmoderated online spaces and encouraged to seek peer support groups instead.
It’s valid to keep a BPD diagnosis private; coming to terms with it yourself does not require sharing it widely.
On the hardest days, intentionally seeking small moments of joy and avoiding isolation can help, even when you don’t feel like doing anything.

“My very first thought is don’t go on Reddit. That’s not going to get you anywhere.”

How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? This crossposted conversation from DBT & ME follows Sarah, host of Bold Beautiful Borderline, as she talks frankly with therapists Kate and Michelle about life with Borderline Personality Disorder, her relationship with DBT, and why staying alive has sometimes felt like hard work. You’ll hear Sarah trace early signs of BPD back to childhood, from sleepless nights to intense emotions and self-harm, and how multiple family suicides magnified everything.

Her first contact with the diagnosis was anything but gentle: a professor once said their least favourite client was the “young bisexual borderline girl”, and later a psychiatrist told her she had BPD in the very first appointment. As Sarah puts it, that left her feeling, “I know what that is. And you hate me.” The chat digs into how a full DBT programme at 26 became a turning point.

Sarah shares practical favourites like fact-checking, the TIP and STOP skills, and wise mind, along with the very human reality of being “pissed off” in group and still choosing to “stay in the chair.” She also talks about being three and a half years sober and how surrender, structure and skills all intertwine.

For anyone newly diagnosed, Sarah is clear and direct: avoid unhelpful online rabbit holes, seek peer support, and don’t feel pressured to disclose your diagnosis before you’re ready. She stresses the importance of supportive partners who learn DBT too, contrasting an ex who refused family sessions with her current husband, who had already been doing DBT himself.

The episode lands on values and survival: being in service of others and actively “seeking joy” — getting outside, making art, doing the thing even when you don’t want to. It’s messy, honest, and might leave you asking yourself what keeps you going on your hardest days.

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