Borderline Personality Disorder Treatment in New York

If someone has said the words “borderline personality disorder” to you — or if you looked them up yourself and recognised more than you wanted to — this page is for you.

BPD is treatable. Not merely managed or endured: treatable. That has been settled in the research for a long time, even if most of what you find online has not caught up. What follows is what treatment actually looks like here, in plain language.

Who this is for

You have a BPD diagnosis, or you suspect one and nobody has taken the question seriously.
Your closest relationships begin intensely and end badly, and you can see the pattern happening without being able to stop it.
You hurt yourself, or think about it, when the feeling gets too big to hold.
You have been in therapy before and were told you were too complicated, too much, or not ready.
You are the parent, partner or sibling of someone with BPD and you are trying to work out what real help looks like.

You do not need to be in crisis to come. A lot of people arrive functioning perfectly well at work and falling apart everywhere else.

What the treatment actually is

There is no single BPD treatment. There are several that work, and the useful question is which combination fits you. All of these are available in one place, so you are not sent across the city to assemble your own care:

Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) — works on the split between who you are on your own and who you become with other people. It uses the relationship with your therapist as the place where the pattern shows up and can be changed.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) — the skills side. How to get through a crisis without making it worse, and how to stop self-harm being the only thing that works.
DBT skills group — the same skills learned in a room with other people who are working on the same thing.
Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT) — building the ability to read your own mind, and other people’s, at the moments when emotion makes that hardest.
Schema Therapy — for the patterns that formed early and have been running ever since.
Radically Open DBT — if your version of this is not chaos but control: rigidity, restriction, holding everything in.
Medication — where it helps, alongside therapy rather than instead of it.

For people who need more than a weekly session but do not need a hospital, there is an intensive outpatient program.

What to expect

The first conversation. You call or write, and we talk about what is happening. Nothing is decided in that conversation.

An assessment before a plan. Treatment here starts with a proper clinical assessment, because “borderline” covers very different people. What helps one person is wrong for another, and getting that right at the start saves years.

A plan you understand. You should be able to say, in your own words, what you are doing and why. If you cannot, we have not explained it properly.

It is work. This is not a course you sit through. The parts that change are the parts you would rather not look at, and there will be weeks when you want to stop. That is expected, and it is not a reason to be discharged.

What we will not do

We will not tell you that you are manipulative, attention-seeking, or untreatable. Those words come from clinicians who were not trained for this, and they have done a great deal of damage. We will not end your treatment because you had a bad week.

How to start

Call 917-374-5803, email info@thekimberlycenternyc.com, or use the contact form. We are at 59 West 12th Street, Suite 1E, in Greenwich Village, New York, NY 10011.

If you are not sure whether any of this applies to you, the BPD self-assessment is a reasonable place to start. It is not a diagnosis, but it will tell you whether the conversation is worth having.

If you are in immediate danger, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or go to your nearest emergency room. This page is not emergency care.