Associations Between Dissociation and Childhood Trauma in Borderline Personality Disorder and Affective Disorders: A...

Dissociation and childhood trauma are strongly associated with borderline personality disorder (BPD), yet it remains unclear whether this reflects disorder-specific mechanisms or differences in symptom severity within a shared transdiagnostic structure.

Using network analysis, we examined whether the conditional dependency architecture linking childhood trauma, dissociation, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and general psychological distress differs between individuals diagnosed with BPD and affective disorders (AD).

Participants were drawn from a large outpatient clinical sample and matched on age, gender, and global symptom severity (BSI-GSI). Networks were estimated using regularized partial correlation models including CTQ subscales, DES subscales, PTSD symptom clusters, and overall distress. Network Comparison Tests assessed structural invariance and global strength differences between diagnostic groups.

As expected, individuals with BPD reported significantly higher levels of childhood trauma and dissociation than those with AD. However, despite these marked differences in severity, the overall network structure did not significantly differ between groups, and global connectivity was comparable. Bridge centrality analyses indicated similar patterns of interconnection across trauma, dissociation, and PTSD domains in both diagnoses.

These findings suggest that BPD is characterized by elevated severity within a largely shared trauma-dissociation architecture, rather than by a qualitatively distinct network configuration. The results support a transdiagnostic model in which childhood trauma and dissociative processes are embedded within a common psychopathological structure, with diagnostic distinctions reflecting differences in magnitude rather than rewiring of interrelations. This severity-versus-architecture distinction has implications for understanding mechanisms of vulnerability and for targeting shared pathways across diagnostic categories.