Stories, Science, and Solidarity at the Borderline
A community resource emerging from Stories That Hold UsEverywhere I looked, Borderline Personality Disorder was being managed and contained. It was described in symptoms, reduced to behaviours, and treated like a problem to solve. What was missing was the question that felt most obvious to me: what happened to you, and what are you still carrying?
So this is not a manual on BPD. It is not a guide to fixing yourself. It is a collection of voices, questions, and research that take emotional intensity seriously instead of trying to shrink it.
BPD does not exist in a vacuum. It takes shape inside systems that harm and abandon people. Many people who receive this diagnosis have lived through trauma, neglect, control, or chronic invalidation. Research has consistently shown that a large proportion report histories of abuse. And yet, the dominant response is still to individualise the distress.
We are told the problem is instability. Too much feeling. Too much need. Too much reaction.
But what if these responses make sense?
What if anger, panic, attachment, and fear are not signs of brokenness, but signs of a nervous system that learned to survive in unpredictable conditions?
This magazine sits with that possibility.
I didn't come to this work from the outside looking in. I came in through the back — through a locked psychiatric ward that smelled of antiseptic and contained no art. Through fluorescent waiting rooms where I learned to make myself smaller. Through crisis helplines at 3am where the hold music played like a long, indifferent apology.
I have lived with bipolar disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, ADHD, and complex PTSD for most of my adult life. I know the ways a diagnosis can save you — give shape to what felt formless, crack open a door to something called treatment. And I know the ways it can wound: the way a word in a file becomes the lens through which every person after reads you.
This magazine grew from a group I facilitated called Stories That Hold Us. Fourteen people — queer, neurodivergent, Indian, young, surviving — came together online over five weeks. They wrote. They witnessed each other. They said things nobody had ever asked them to say. Not to be fixed. Not to be assessed. But to be heard differently. The change in the room when the question shifted was tectonic.
The title belongs to one of them. Said mid-session: I don't think I'm unstable. I think I feel things in HD. That sentence sat in my chest for days. Because it named exactly what the clinical system had been calling a disorder — and reframed it as a quality. A form of perception so precise and wide-ranging that most frameworks are not built to hold it.
One practical note: this is not a replacement for therapy or crisis care. If something surfaces that you cannot hold alone, please reach out. Crisis resources are at the top of every page and collected at the back. We built it that way. We are all, still, building ourselves out of what the world tried to make us.
This magazine is part of that work.
With love and mad hope —
Meghna Prakash (she/they)
Co-founder, Soft Spaces Therapy
· Neuroqueer · Mad Liberation Psychologist
Before the symptoms, before the label — what is actually being described? And what does the naming leave out?
Ask Yourself →
If someone described BPD to you before this magazine — what did they say? Was it accurate? Whose story did it centre?
BPD is one of the most stigmatised diagnoses in psychiatry. It is also one of the most treatable — which almost nobody mentions. Zanarini et al. (2003) followed patients for six years and found 74% achieved remission. That number should be in every intake room, every crisis service, every clinical note. It rarely is. What gets passed around instead is the reputation: volatile, untreatable, manipulative. That reputation is a clinical failure, not a clinical fact.
| What the criteria name | What they rarely acknowledge |
|---|---|
| Frantic efforts to avoid abandonment | A nervous system calibrated by actual abandonment, repeatedly, over years |
| Unstable, intense relationships | An extraordinary capacity for connection and loyalty — when safety exists |
| Identity disturbance | What happens when you had to become whoever the room needed before you developed yourself |
| Self-damaging impulsivity | Attempts to regulate a system that developed without the right tools |
| Emotional instability and reactivity | High-resolution emotional perception — the feeling was accurate; the environment made it unmanageable |
| Intense, often inappropriate anger | Often: appropriate anger, with nowhere safe to put it |
| Chronic feelings of emptiness | What remains when dissociation and performance took the place of selfhood |
Key Statistics
74% achieve remission within 6 years (Zanarini et al., 2003)
Up to 70% report childhood trauma (Herman, 1992)
Higher rates in queer & gender-nonconforming populations (Rodriguez-Seijas et al., 2020)
Systematically misdiagnosed in women and trauma survivors
BPD in the Indian Context
For many in our group, the path to diagnosis involved years of misattribution — character flaws, drama, "too sensitive." Joint family structures, caste dynamics, gendered silences, and psychiatric stigma all shape how BPD is experienced — and whether it is ever named at all. This is the context the clinical literature rarely reaches.
Your feelings were never the problem. Your feelings were the most accurate thing you had.
Most descriptions of BPD focus on symptoms. This section focuses on experience — what it feels like in the body, in relationships, and in ordinary moments.
Some of this may feel uncomfortable to read. That's okay. You can take breaks. This is not a race.
BPD is often described from the outside — as a list of behaviours, a pattern of instability, a diagnostic category. What that description rarely captures is the texture of living inside it. The way ordinary moments can shift without warning. The way a slight change in someone's tone can feel like the floor dropping out. The way you can feel so much at once that naming any single feeling is impossible.
In the Body
Emotions arrive physically — in the chest, the stomach, the throat. Intensity can feel like heat, pressure, or static. When something shifts relationally, the body often registers it before the mind has caught up. This is not metaphor. It is how a nervous system shaped by chronic stress actually functions.
In Relationships
Closeness and fear often arrive together. You can love someone deeply and simultaneously brace for them to leave. This is not contradiction — it is the logic of attachment formed in environments where love and loss were entangled. Research confirms that many people with BPD report early experiences of relational instability, abuse, or neglect (Herman, 1992; Zanarini et al., 2003).
In Ordinary Moments
A cancelled plan can feel like proof of abandonment. A compliment can feel suspicious. An unanswered message can take up more space than the rest of the day. These responses are not irrational — they are learned. They developed because attention to small signals was once necessary to stay safe.
In the Good Moments Too
Feeling things intensely is not only about pain. It also means beauty lands harder. Loyalty runs deeper. Joy, when it arrives, is not diluted. The same nervous system that makes distress overwhelming makes aliveness vivid. This is the thing most clinical descriptions miss entirely.
Research shows that up to 70–80% of people diagnosed with BPD report histories of trauma or abuse (Herman, 1992; Zanarini et al., 2003). Long-term studies show that many people with BPD see significant improvement over time, especially with relational support — 74% achieve remission within six years (Zanarini et al., 2003).
In India, access to trauma-informed care is limited, especially for queer, disabled, and lower-caste communities. What psychiatry calls 'dysregulation' is often the nervous system doing its best to survive. Strong emotions are not random. They often come from histories of harm, neglect, or control.
Composite portraits drawn from group experience. Names are fictional. The rest is not.
Ask Yourself →
These are composite portraits — drawn from the group's shared experience, not any one individual. If you recognise yourself here, that's the point.
Mumbai · Creative Professional · Queer · Self-diagnosed, later confirmed
Zara first learned the word "borderline" from a Tumblr post at 22. She laughed. Then cried for an hour. Not because it was devastating — because it was accurate. She had been describing herself as "too much" for so long that seeing a clinical framework name it felt, briefly, like relief. Until she told her family.
"They said 'that explains a lot.' Like every fight we'd ever had now had a cause, and the cause was me." She spent two years navigating the gap between what the label named and what it missed: the way she could feel beauty so acutely it made her chest ache. The loyalty that made her hold on past the point of reason. The creativity that came directly from her capacity to feel at full volume.
"I don't want to not feel this much. I want a world that can hold it."
Composite portrait. Names and identifying details are fictional.
Bengaluru · Software Engineer · First-generation urban professional · Diagnosed at 27
Rohan describes his childhood as "perpetually on alert." His father's moods were unpredictable. His mother's love was conditional on performance. By school, he had a gift: he could read a room before he entered it. Know what was needed. Become it. "Everyone thought I was easy to be around. Because I'd already become whoever they needed before I walked in."
At work, the same intelligence that kept him safe at home became a liability. He absorbed every microexpression, every Slack tone, every meeting silence as data. He burned out twice before he understood what was happening.
"The hypervigilance kept me alive at home. Nobody told me it would follow me everywhere."
Composite portrait. Names and identifying details are fictional.
Delhi · Postgraduate student · Survivor · Living with BPD, ADHD, and Complex PTSD
Maheep was 16 when she first tried to explain to a school counsellor what was happening at home. The counsellor told her she was being dramatic. She was 20 when a psychiatrist gave her a diagnosis and handed her a pamphlet about DBT. "Nobody asked about my home. They just wanted to manage my reactions to it."
She carries three diagnoses that regularly interact: BPD's relational hypersensitivity, ADHD's rejection sensitivity, and the layered hyperarousal of C-PTSD. She has become her own expert in her own experience — because she had no choice.
"I am not difficult. I am complex. There's a difference, and it matters."
Composite portrait. Names and identifying details are fictional.
What got labelled disorder was, in many cases, also clarity. The anger that had been pathologised was frequently appropriate to genuine injustice. The grief called instability was real grief. The hypervigilance was a reasonable response to environments that were genuinely dangerous.
The intensity was information. The problem was never the feelings — it was the rooms they were carried into.
Almost everyone in the group described profound connection — and profound isolation, simultaneously. The fear of abandonment does not always produce clinging. Sometimes it produces pre-emptive withdrawal: leave before you can be left. The loneliness, for most, was not about being alone. It was about being present and still not felt.
Every person in the group had at least one story of a clinician who treated the diagnosis as a summary of character. "Attention-seeking." "Manipulative." "Non-compliant." These words cause lasting harm. Lewis and Appleby (1988) documented the systematic negative attitudes of psychiatrists toward BPD patients four decades ago. The attitudes have been slower to shift.
"I was told I was being dramatic. By a clinician. In a psychiatric unit. About my own inner life."
Group Participant
BPD is diagnosed in women at rates three times higher than men. Research consistently finds higher rates in queer populations (Rodriguez-Seijas et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2024). The question the group asked, repeatedly: not do we have more pathology? but what is the diagnosis actually measuring?
✦ Take This With You
These poems are published with each writer's permission, exactly as written. Nothing has been corrected. The clinical language belongs to the writers — their diagnosis, their vocabulary, their right to use or refuse.
This section is for the partner, the parent, the friend who wants to understand and doesn't always know how.
The internet is full of content about BPD that will make you afraid of the person you love. Much of it is written by people who experienced harm in relationships and attributed it to a diagnosis. Reddit threads. YouTube videos titled "How to survive a relationship with a borderline." Forums that frame people with BPD as abusers by nature. That content will not help you understand your person. It will give you a vocabulary for suspicion instead of a language for connection.
Start here instead. And when you are ready for more, go to sources that centre the person with the diagnosis — not the fear of them.
Ask Yourself →
Before you read on: which of these myths have you heard? Which have you believed?
| The Myth | The Reality |
|---|---|
| People with BPD are manipulative | Most behaviours that look manipulative are desperate attempts to manage unbearable emotional pain. Manipulation requires premeditation and emotional distance. BPD produces neither. |
| BPD is untreatable | This is demonstrably false. 74% of people achieve remission within six years (Zanarini et al., 2003). DBT, MBT, and narrative approaches have strong evidence bases. |
| BPD is just attention-seeking | This framing pathologises a fundamental human need — to be seen, to be heard, to matter. Everyone seeks attention. People with BPD are doing so in contexts where they have learned that needs go unmet. |
| You have to walk on eggshells | Clarity, consistency, and direct communication are more useful than constant caution. People with BPD generally respond better to honesty than to managed distance. |
| BPD is caused by bad parenting | BPD emerges from a complex interaction of biology, temperament, and environment. Blame is not a useful clinical frame — and it does not help the person in front of you. |
What people with BPD most consistently say they need from loved ones
Consistency, not perfection. A nervous system calibrated to abandonment is looking for evidence that staying is possible. Give it that evidence, reliably, over time.
Direct, clear communication. "I need an hour, then I'm coming back" is different from disappearing. Say what you mean. Ambiguity activates the alarm.
Do not weaponise the diagnosis. "You're being borderline again" shuts down communication and shames. It doesn't help.
Ask what they need. "What would help right now?" beats trying to fix the feeling. Often what's needed is not a solution — it's presence.
Your needs matter too. Modelling that your needs are legitimate actually helps — it demonstrates that relationships can hold more than one person at once.
Patterns that escalate rather than connect
→ Threatening to leave during conflict — this activates the deepest fear and makes de-escalation significantly harder
→ Arguing about how they should feel rather than engaging with how they do feel
→ Making important decisions in the heat of an argument
→ Treating the diagnosis as a summary of the person rather than one part of their story
Not every silence means rejection. People can care about me and still need space. Conflict does not always mean abandonment.
✦ Before You Go
This is not a gentle critique. It is an accurate one. It comes from someone who has been on both sides.
Jamila Pithawala — she/her
Therapist, writer, neurodivergent person. Outsider Witness, Stories That Hold Us.
substack.com/@jamila03It is worth pausing to ask what else those symptoms might be responding to.
It is not incidental that BPD is disproportionately diagnosed in women, queer people, and others who live at the intersections of marginalisation. Research consistently shows higher rates in sexual minority populations — a pattern that invites deeper examination of what the diagnosis is actually measuring (Rodriguez-Seijas et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2024).
Many of these individuals navigate repeated experiences of invalidation across multiple systems. When distress is shaped by layered oppression — in families, healthcare, education — it appears chaotic within clinical frameworks that prioritise regulation and conformity. The distress is not disordered. The context that produced it is.
"Unstable relationships are often framed as pathology. Yet relationships are rarely stable when safety, financial security, and acceptance are inconsistent or absent. For people living on the margins, relational instability may reflect context — not character."
Jamila Pithawala
Identity disturbance is another commonly cited feature. But in environments where exploration is discouraged and social scripts are rigid, a stable sense of self is difficult to cultivate. When safety is conditional, authenticity becomes risky. What is called identity disturbance may also be understood as the absence of spaces that allowed someone to discover who they are without consequence.
Intense anger is frequently labelled inappropriate. And yet anger can be a response to chronic injustice, silencing, and systemic violence. When boundaries are repeatedly crossed and protests are ignored, anger is the correct response. The problem is not the anger. The problem is the system that created the conditions for it — and then penalised the person for having it.
What we are calling Borderline Personality Disorder may, in many cases, be the most accurate response available to a person navigating genuinely unsafe circumstances — with an emotional system that was never given the conditions to develop any other tools. That is not disorder. That is survival. And survival deserves respect, not a diagnostic label that follows you forever.
First: thank you for being here. The fact that you are reading a liberation-oriented magazine about BPD suggests you are not the problem. But you work inside systems that often are, and this letter is about that.
The most harmful thing you can do is read the diagnosis before you read the person. We walk into your room carrying a word that has been used against us, often by people who were supposed to help us. We are watching — instantly — for whether you are going to do the same. Your first job is not assessment. It is safety.
The second thing: ask about our lives. What happened. Not just what we do when we're distressed, but what produced the distress. Many of us have been treated for the symptoms of trauma without anyone asking about the trauma. That is not treatment. It is management.
When we "resist" or "split" or become difficult in the room — that is information. We are showing you something live. It is an opportunity, not a problem to manage. Your countertransference is data. Use it. Take it to supervision.
Finally: believe us about our pain. Not conditionally. Not "I believe you feel pain, but let's look at whether your perception is accurate." Believe us. We have been disbelieved for so long that we have stopped trusting our own perception. You can help with that, or you can deepen it. The choice is yours.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
Linehan (1993). Strongest evidence base. Skills training in distress tolerance, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and mindfulness. The group skill-building format is often as important as the individual therapy component.
Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT)
Bateman & Fonagy (2004). Focuses on improving the capacity to understand mental states in oneself and others. Works with the relational patterns BPD produces in the therapeutic relationship itself, rather than treating these as obstacles.
Narrative Therapy
White & Epston (1990). Externalises the problem from the person. Asks: whose voice named this as a disorder? What alternative stories exist? Particularly powerful for reframing the diagnostic narrative and building identity outside of clinical language.
Somatic & Body-Based Approaches
Trauma is stored somatically. Talking therapies alone often cannot reach what was encoded before language, before conscious memory. Body-based approaches — including Somatic Experiencing and EMDR — address this directly.
✦ Practitioner Checklist — Before your next session
These are composite statements drawn from group participants. They carry more clinical weight than any checklist because they come from inside the experience. Read them slowly.
Accommodations That Help (Self-Advocacy)
Written communication preferences — reduces ambiguity and the anxiety it produces
Advance notice of changes to schedules, tasks, or team structure
Clear, specific feedback — not vague or delayed
Flexible working hours or remote options during high-stress periods
A named point of contact for clarification when things feel unclear
The right to step away briefly during emotionally intense situations
What Managers and Employers Can Do
Communicate changes proactively and clearly
Deliver feedback in writing as well as verbally
Avoid last-minute changes where possible
Create explicit escalation pathways for conflict — so ambiguity doesn't do the damage
Recognise that high performance and high sensitivity often coexist
Treat emotional responses as information, not something to shut down
Priya works in content strategy at a mid-sized tech firm. She disclosed her BPD to HR after a panic episode during a town hall. Her manager now sends written meeting summaries within 24 hours, gives feedback in scheduled 1:1s rather than Slack, and agreed to a flexible start time on days after therapy. Priya carries three diagnoses. She is also among the highest performers on her team. These two facts coexist.
The writing prompts in this resource are powerful clinical tools. And they assume a particular mode of engagement. For clients who find writing difficult — due to motor disability, literacy barriers, or dissociative states that make sustained writing hard — these prompts can also be spoken into a voice recorder, drawn, answered in conversation, or responded to through any other expressive form the person finds accessible. The medium is theirs to choose. The narrative therapy principle holds: the person's preferred mode of expression leads.
We chose these from work rooted in lived experience, community care, and resistance. How something is said matters as much as what is said.
Lived Experience 📖 🎧
The Buddha and the Borderline — Kiera Van Gelder (2010)
A raw, honest memoir of living with BPD through DBT, Buddhism, and all the unexpected places healing arrives. One of the few books that centres the person's voice throughout.
Feminist Framework 📖
Trauma and Recovery — Judith Herman (1992)
The foundational text on complex trauma. Herman's argument that BPD is a trauma disorder, not a personality disorder, remains one of the most important challenges to the diagnostic paradigm.
Lived Experience 📖 🆓
Welcome to Me — Elyn Saks (2007)
A memoir by a law professor navigating severe mental illness in a world that expects silence. Quietly radical in how it insists on a full life alongside diagnosis.
Liberation Psychology 📖
Crip Kinship — Shayda Kafai (2021)
Explores disability justice, mad pride, and the radical possibilities of community care. Draws from queer of colour critique to ask what healing looks like when the system itself is the source of harm.
Liberation Psychology 📖
The Protest Psychosis — Jonathan Metzl (2010)
Documents how psychiatric diagnoses have been used to pathologise political dissent. Essential context for understanding what diagnostic labels do and who they harm.
Creative Nonfiction 📖 🎧
In the Dream House — Carmen Maria Machado (2019)
A memoir in the second person about psychological abuse within a queer relationship. The form enacts the disorientation of the experience. Vital for complex trauma.
Podcast 🎧 🆓
Therapists in the Wild — BPD episodes
Clinicians discussing BPD from a humanised, non-pathologising framework. Useful for both practitioners and people with lived experience.
Podcast 🎧 🆓
The Lived Experience Educator Podcast
People with lived mental health experience discussing their advocacy and what they know that professionals don't. Consistently reframes the power dynamics of care.
Podcast 🎧 🆓
Therapy Chat — Trauma Episodes
Covers trauma, dissociation, and body-based approaches with accessible rigour. Useful for both clients and practitioners.
If you want to self-explore using narrative therapy prompts, this is your safe space.
These prompts were designed for a group but work alone. Use them when you're ready — and pause if something surfaces that you cannot hold alone. Crisis resources are at the top of every page.
Note: These prompts can also be spoken into a voice recorder, drawn, or answered in conversation with someone you trust. The medium is yours to choose.
1
Write about yourself before any clinical language arrived. What you loved, what you built, what you played. Then: describe one coping strategy using a nature metaphor. What creature are you, in the wild?
2
Choose one emotion you experience intensely. Give it a name, a body, a personality. What does it want? What is it protecting? What would it say if it could speak?
3
Think of a time your anxiety or hypervigilance responded to something real. Write the version of the story where the alarm was correct. What did it correctly predict? What was it protecting?
4
Write a letter to your nervous system. Not to fix it — but to acknowledge what it has been carrying. What did it have to do to keep you alive? What does it deserve to know?
5
Write your own definition of what it is to feel things in high definition. Not the clinical definition. Yours. What does it cost? What does it make possible?
These emerged from the group's collective work. They are not instructions. They are permissions.
Both cohorts of Stories That Hold Us ran in India, in English, with participants who had internet access, could engage in digital group settings, and lived in or near urban areas. That is a significant filter.
The people this resource did not reach — those in rural areas, those without access to English, those who cannot afford therapy, those whose experience of BPD is shaped by caste, class, or displacement in ways this cohort did not fully represent — are not gaps in the data. They are people whose stories deserve to be in rooms like this one.
Future iterations of this work will actively pursue language access, fee-free participation structures, and partnerships that bring narrative group work to the communities that need it most and have been least served by mental health systems. That is the direction this research is moving in. We are documenting it here so we can be held to it.
Soft Spaces Therapy was built for people who have been misunderstood by the very systems meant to help them. We work with those who feel deeply, who have survived complex histories, and who are often told they are "too much" or "too difficult" to treat. Our approach is trauma-informed, liberation-focused, and grounded in research. We do not separate your pain from the world you live in.
We look at how caste, patriarchy, ableism, and capitalism shape what you carry — and how those forces show up in your relationships, your body, and your sense of self. Therapy with us is collaborative and honest. We slow things down. We take your experiences seriously. And we work with you to build something more stable, more connected, and more livable — at your pace.
Website admin@softspacestherapy.in WhatsApp +91 99295 93546 @softspaces_therapyAmerican Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). APA Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596
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Foucault, M. (1994). The birth of the clinic. Vintage Books. (Original work published 1963)
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Rodriguez-Seijas, C., Morgan, T. A., & Zimmerman, M. (2020). Is there a bias in the diagnosis of BPD among lesbian, gay, and bisexual patients? Psychiatric Services, 72(4), 357–363.
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If something here brought up a lot, please reach out. Crisis numbers are at the top of every page. You don't have to carry it by yourself.
T h e p a s s i o n a t e p e o p l e b e h i n d t h e s c e n e s
A neurodivergent queer liberation counselling psychologist, journalist, and poet working at the intersection of lived experience, clinical practice, and social justice. Their work integrates Narrative Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), somatic approaches, and expressive arts. They specialise in complex trauma, Borderline Personality Disorder, and relational work, with a focus on how caste, patriarchy, ableism, and psychiatric systems shape mental health.
Meghna is the author of Trigger Warning (2023), holds an MSc in Counselling Psychology, and is completing a Diploma in Narrative Therapy (Dulwich Centre, Australia; Children First, India).
A clinical psychologist who integrates art therapy and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) in her work with individuals and couples. She focuses on emotional processing, attachment, and relational dynamics, creating grounded spaces to explore shame, disconnection, and unmet needs. She holds an MSc in Clinical Psychology, is certified in Art Therapy, and trained in EFT (ICEEFT, Canada).
A counselling therapist whose work is rooted in an intersectional, reflexive approach to mental health. She examines how family, gender, culture, and power shape distress, and works collaboratively with clients to hold complexity beyond diagnostic labels. substack.com/@jamila03
A counselling psychologist and neurodivergent practitioner specialising in couples and family therapy. Her work is trauma-informed and systems-oriented, with a focus on how power, culture, and relational histories shape emotional experience.
Conception, Design, Editing, Research & Writing — Meghna Prakash
Editorial Team — Saima Khan, Jamila Pithawala, Meghna Prakash, Shreeja Jain