The Benefits of Plant and Animal Caretaking for People with BPD

By Dr. William Anixter with Courtney Kelly

You’ve helped a loved one with borderline personality disorder (BPD) enroll in talk therapy. Now, you’re wondering if there’s anything they can do outside of those 50-minute sessions to boost their mental health progress.

Our evidence-based recommendation? Plant or animal caretaking. Whether your loved one adopts a pet, takes up gardening, or volunteers with a local farm, this practice will supplement and enhance the work they do in therapy, in these key ways.

1. By giving them a sense of purpose.

Beneath the symptoms of BPD—impulsivity, emotional lability, distress intolerance, difficulties trusting others, and profound insecurity—is an unstable sense of self. This is why talk therapy for individuals with this condition centers around helping them gain clarity about who they are and what they value. Plant and animal caretaking can support these efforts by giving your loved one a durable sense of purpose.

“People with BPD often make the mistake of identifying with their emotions, which are constantly shifting, out of their control, and can often be quite negative,” explains Carrie Hanson, clinical director at CooperRiis Healing Community. “Having a pet or tending to a garden can help them to identify instead with a role, one that is meaningful both to themselves and to other living things.” When they begin to view themselves as caretakers, those who have BPD practice grounding their identities in the work they do to help others, which reinforces the agency they have in their lives.

2. By teaching them interpersonal skills.

By shifting their focus from their internal worlds—their thoughts and feelings—to their external worlds—their interactions and work—plant and animal caretaking also helps individuals with BPD develop the skills they need to build healthy relationships. One of the reasons that folks with this condition struggle to maintain friendships, partnerships, etc. is because they tend to behave in a very self-involved manner. This isn’t because they don’t want to care about anyone else; in fact, it’s often because they hold a deep-seated belief that other people do not have their best interests in mind.

But vegetables, peonies, chickens, cats—their basic needs can’t be put on hold. If your loved one is responsible for another living thing, they’ve got to fulfill that responsibility regardless of how they’re feeling or what they’d rather be doing with their time.

The more practice they get putting the needs of the plants or animals in their care first, the more considerate your loved one will likely become of others' needs generally. This will help them establish the foundation they'll need to cultivate reciprocal, rather than one-sided relationships.

Within reciprocal relationships, healthy boundaries are critical. They’re also very difficult for individuals with BPD to set, maintain, and respect. Folks with this condition often go to extreme lengths to validate interpersonal attachment, bending over backward for someone else’s affection or demanding that others do the same. Working with animals teaches them why this isn’t sustainable.

Like humans, animals learn which behaviors are appropriate and which aren’t by testing limits. Puppies will chew up anything they can sink their teeth into. Horses will invade your personal space. And they’ll keep at it until someone indicates that chewing and pushing around isn’t OK. When that’s communicated—sometimes it has to be repeatedly—animals don’t get offended. They simply adjust their behavior.

Witnessing this firsthand helps individuals suffering from BPD realize that setting boundaries won’t drive those they care about away. It also teaches them not to run when others enforce boundaries of their own. “When a dog, goat, or horse signals they don’t like something you did, it’s not because they don’t like you," Hanson says. "Once you stop doing whatever set them off, they'll go right back to being relaxed and affectionate.” The more experienced your loved one gets responding to feedback from animals, the more receptive they’ll become to feedback from humans, too.

3. By teaching them problem-solving skills.

This will not only help your loved one with boundaries, but it will also help them with conflict resolution. It’s very common for people who have this BPD to cut ties with others at the first sign of a disagreement. Rather than viewing discord as natural and resolvable, they often interpret it as a personal affront. Plant and animal caretaking deconditions this behavior by teaching the importance of leaning in when things get hard.

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“We once had a resident with BPD put herself in charge of our chickens because she thought it would be an easy job. Then, our hens stopped laying eggs. Rather than allow her to switch work crews like she wanted, we reminded her of the commitment she’d made and encouraged her to troubleshoot. When she did so successfully, she gained confidence in her ability to confront other problems in her life, too,” recalls Hanson.

As this story illustrates, plant and animal caretaking isn’t always a walk in the park (or stroll through a garden). Issues arise, and when they do, they require grit. It’s not always readily apparent why your vegetables aren’t growing or your goats are feeling sick. The only way to root out the underlying problem is through trial and error. If you give your plants more water or your goats different food and nothing changes, you have no choice but to take another approach. Eventually, one intervention or another will work—the key is not to give up.

In addition to teaching the importance of persistence, this aspect of plant and animal caretaking helps people with BPD develop new relationships with setbacks. They learn that failure is neither permanent nor a reflection of their character; it’s simply an indication that adaptation is in order. When they operationalize this mindset to successfully address problems, they start to build trust in themselves and their capacity to overcome hardship. In other words, they become more resilient.

4. By improving their tolerance of nuance and imperfection.

A core component of resilience is cognitive flexibility, which enables individuals to adapt to shifting or complex circumstances. Rather than falling apart when things don’t go as planned, resilient individuals acknowledge challenge without being derailed by it. If your loved one struggles to stay the course when it gets bumpy or takes unexpected turns, know that’s not unusual for someone who has BPD. It's a result of the tendency that folks with this condition have to see the world in black and white.

One of the most important things plants and animals can teach your loved one, then, is to hold space for the gray. Neither does the presence of weeds in their garden mean they’re a bad gardener, nor does a puppy's behavioral relapse mean they're a poor dog trainer. The more exposure your loved one gets to healthy plants looking asymmetrical and happy pets acting out, the more comfortable they’ll get with the fact that things don’t have to be perfect to be good. In addition to improving their tolerance for nuance, this will help them treat themselves with more grace.

“Messing up is not only an inevitable part of life, it’s also an important part of the recovery journey,” explains Hanson. “Plant and animal caretaking teaches our residents that mistakes are learning opportunities, not signs that they’re bad people.” This mindset shift helps individuals with BPD have patience with the process of forging new behavior patterns. Just as plants take time to grow and animals take time to train, self-improvement doesn't happen overnight. It's a practice in commitment and consistency, in intentional effort sustained over the long haul.