A patient with borderline personality disorder has been making steady progress but one day gets a ...

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Even when a behavior is maladaptive or ineffective, it usually represents our best effort to cope, given the coping skills and resources available to us at that time. For people with personality disorders, coping overall is usually less effective and more rigid than for other persons, but it too represents each person's best efforts to cope with the circumstances at that moment. Recovery from many medical and psychiatric disorders, including personality disorders, can be slow and involve periods of relapse or regression. However, that does not mean that personality disorders do not improve or that these patients are at the mercy of others' actions. Like everyone else, they can learn to cope and be resilient under stress. What looks like improvement is not necessarily manipulation instead.