Memory of childhood trauma before and after long-term psychological treatment of borderline personality disorder

The present study investigated the consistency of self-reports of childhood traumatic events in a sample of 50 patients with a borderline personality disorder (BPD) before and after 27 months of intensive treatment with schema focused therapy or transference focused psychotherapy. The mean number of reported sexual, physical and emotional traumatic events did not change following treatment. Test–retest correlations of the trauma-interview also indicated high stability of the total number of sexual, physical and emotional events reported. The majority of the patients, however, did no longer report at least one of the 33 listed events after psychotherapy, and the majority reported at least one event that they had not mentioned before the start of treatment. These findings were not related to type of treatment or changes in suppression, intrusions, avoidance of intrusions, dissociative symptoms, depressive symptoms, and borderline symptoms.