Obligatory Disclaimer Things
1) I am one person with borderline personality disorder! I am not the expert! This is just what it feels like to me, given my background, coping mechanisms, etc. Also I have comorbid generalized anxiety disorder and social phobia; someone else who has different comorbid Brain Issues (or, like, no comorbid issues at all? which is apparently a thing for some people) will have a different experience. You should not assume that all borderlines have the same psychology I do. People with BPD who have different experiences than me are welcome to share in the comments.
2) Please note that I have borderline personality disorder, and I will be reading the comments. So if you say that people with BPD are empathyless abusers who are incapable of love, you are saying that to me. I will delete your comment and then I will probably go cry because Jesus, people.
3) While this should not be super-triggery, I do go into some detail about the mental processes of a person with borderline personality disorder and mention suicide and self-harm.
To me, borderline personality disorder feels like it has three different aspects: fear of abandonment, lack of a self-image, and really really wild mood swings.
The fear of abandonment part is probably the part that ends up hurting other people the most. I literally have panic attacks at the thought of not having any friends; I am desperate to keep everyone from hating me or being upset at me because if they do they will leave me and then– well, it’s kind of hard, as a borderline, to complete that sentence, because the only answer my brain tosses up is “and then everything will be awful and hurt forever and you will probably stop existing.”
Every conversation I have feels like a tightrope walk where if I say the wrong thing then I will be abandoned forever. I’m manipulative, sometimes, like a lot of borderlines. I need attention and validation; if I’m not reassured often that someone likes me, I’ll tend to conclude that they hate me. I get very clingy and needy and then run away because oh god I’m too clingy they will hate me now. I test people a lot. Do you say hi to me if I don’t say hi first? Do you notice if I look sad and ask if something’s wrong?
There are a couple of things I do when I think someone hates me. The first is to frantically propitiate them: to be kind enough and smart enough and sexy enough and do everything they want and never ask for anything that might inconvenience them and then maybe– even if they don’t like me– they’ll just put up with me. The second is to hurt myself (if I’m hurting they will pay attention to me!) or the person who hates me (if they stay with me even if I’m hurting them they must really like me!). The third is to decide that I don’t like them and so I am not upset that they want to leave me. I am really good at that. I don’t even have anyone I’m currently in contact with whom I’ve known for more than two years.
Like a lot of borderlines, I’m bad at the concept that people still exist when they’re not in contact with me. I forget people when they’re not around. If I have things that belong to someone, I can remember them, which is why I tend to collect presents that people I love have given me. I’m also bad at the concept that people can be things other than “perfect paragons whose feet I should kiss” and “scum of the earth.” You’re perfect if you love me, and you’re scum if you might leave.
Another big thing in borderline personality disorder is… well, the DSM calls it “affective instability,” and your more poetical psychologist-types call it “having no emotional skin.” I feel everything more intensely than a neurotypical person does. A cute picture of a sloth can leave me so happy I’m incapable of forming words. A C on a test can make me suicidal. (Lots of borderline people get into really intense rages; I don’t. In fact, I can count the number of times I felt anger not at myself on one hand. You see, anger is a bad emotion and it will make people mad at you and then they will leave.)
Like a lot of borderline people, I’m impulsive as hell. In the moment, the feelings are so intense that you can’t imagine not wanting to destroy all your possessions to punish yourself for being such a bad person. The idea of waiting a few minutes to see if it still sounds like a good idea is ludicrous. After all, the feeling is so big, surely I’ll feel it for the rest of forever. (This, despite the fact that my emotions rarely last ten minutes.)
Since little emotions are incredibly intense, big emotions are even more fucking intense. I dissociate under stress, which means that everything stops feeling real to me; I’m lucky, because at least I don’t have severe paranoia or psychosis. On the other hand, when nothing is happening to make me feel anything, it all feels kind of sad and empty compared to the big feelings that I normally have. That’s another reason I get impulsive: anything to feel.
The third thing is unstable self-image, which I developed a really good coping mechanism for, so I don’t experience it as much as a lot of other borderline people do. Most people… kind of know who they are. They have a sense of self. Borderlines don’t. Some of them end up clinging on other people for a sense of self, or rapidly changing everything about themselves. Me, I have labels. People have told me that I’m a geek and a skeptic and a feminist and kind and loyal and tough and smart and poly and queer and genderqueer and forgetful and flaky and shy and obsessive and so I have all these words and they kind of pin down who I am.
I said “people have told me” deliberately. I don’t know how to know things about myself, other than people telling me. I tend to stare at personality questionnaires going ??? and then having to ask if the answer fits me because I have no idea who I am. I also get very distressed when people contradict each other about my personality traits because how will I know who I am if people disagree about it?
Thing of Things 
Thanks, Ozy. If it helps, I find you interesting, smart, and admirable.
(PS. I’m Jos, but I can’t figure out how to get a 3 letter name out of wordpress).
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Seconded! 😀
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Whoa, lots a Joses here.
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Are other people really able to tell what traits they have without asking others or analyzing their past behavior? I usually get answers to personality tests through three procedures:
1) Asking someone who’s known me for a long time (“Hey Mom, am I assertive?”)
2) Deduction from memories (“The last three times I was at a social occasion, I spent the whole time on my phone. I must be shy or socially avoidant or something.”)
3) Wishful thinking (“Creativity is good; I am probably a creative person”)
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I get the impression a lot of it is (3) — people believe they are who they want to be. Personally, I like to avoid describing myself abstractly except with things I’m very certain of, to avoid verbal overshadowing or needlessly constraining myself…
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There’s also anticipating how you’d react to a situation, which is similar to 2.
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This has lost me jobs. Being asked about myself rather than my knowledge or skills is a game over for me. When someone says, “Tell me about yourself” I don’t have an answer. “Who are you?” I wish I fucking knew.
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Yeah, this is hard to do. One thing I tend to do is grab fictional characters who act like me, because it’s often easier to imagine Simon Tam in a hypothetical situation than to imagine myself, and I will pretty reliably do the same thing as he does.
But I think not using (3) is more a reluctance to admit that I might have the positive qualities I value than actual lack of those qualities. For the most part, what people aspire to is -imperfectly – reflective of their identity.
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I am new at borderline personality, I just got diagnosed, although I’ve been this way my whole life…. Finding out what is wrong with me has made me so guilty that I moved out of my husband’s home and now live by myself because I feel like isolation will help me not to hurt anyone else.
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Discovering Ozy has been rather therapeutic for me. I’ve gone through two phases since first seeing mention of zir BPD on SSC.
1. Get repeatedly triggered, because the most salient assocation of borderline for me was something like “emotionally unstable sociopath,” and “radioactive” (in the sense that a Pact!demon is radioactive, leaving a wake of misery and disutility wherever it goes), like the one I was trapped in an abusive marriage with for many years.
2. Conclude that there are people with BPD who are not only not monsters,* but are actually rather wonderful people, like Ozy. This has the benefit of freeing me from any lingering reluctance to blame my ex-wife for the horrible things that she did to me, since blaming the mentally ill for being mentally ill is unhelpful. But clearly the evil is somewhat independent of the BPD.
Lest I be accused of generalizing from one example, I must point out that books like this exist.
So, thanks, Ozy.
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I think I’m kinda loosely seconding this, but I’m not really sure, because trying to process this post is kinda weird for me. The following is rambly, might be triggery, I’m not really sure.
The only person with diagnosed BPD (that I am aware of) that has touched my life prior to my happening upon this blog is one of one of my ex-girlfriends’ ex-boyfriends. He was abusive, in various ways, and left her with some major damage that I think had a major detrimental effect on our relationship*. And so it’s instructive and positive to see someone who has BPD and isn’t like that. And yet . . .
And yet an awful lot the symptoms described in the OP sound like the same exact dynamics that were present in a lot of that abuse. Not the behaviors, but more than just the same motivations. The ideational and behavioral patterns, maybe. Specifically:
And it’s not at all that I think that all borderlines are abusers, or that ozymandias specifically is! I am not saying that at all!
It’s just that I feel like this post has moved my feelings on BPD roughly from “BPD makes a person who has it suffer a lot, and also makes them a terrible person*” to “BPD makes a person suffer a lot, and also pushes them really hard to be a terrible person, but that pushing is not always successful, and people who experience it can and should fight it.” And I’m not sure whether that’s where really my feelings should be, or only partial progress.
(It also doesn’t help that a lot of the things that hurt me that the same ex-girlfriend*** did fit the above too, along with affective instability. I don’t think of that relationship as abusive, or even a negative experience overall, but a lot of it was rough, and some parts were extremely painful, for both of us.
I do notice that my feelings about things she did out of pain are very different from my feelings about things that her ex did out pain. I’m not sure how much of that is a reasonable assessment of their comparative characters and motives, and how much is halo effect—what her ex did to her was a lot worse, and parts of it were pretty clearly just selfish rather than pain-driven, so I judge even the parts that were comparable worse because his overall character was much worse. Like . . . I’m still friends with her, and wish her the best; if she’d treated me like her ex treated her, I might well have killed her in self defense, and I certainly would wish she was dead.
I dunno, maybe this whole ramble is stupid and emotionally destructive, to ozymandias, to my ex-girlfriend if she somehow finds it****, or to others. Maybe it should be deleted. I don’t know.)
*It also might have caused it, insofar as we may have been incompatible anyway, and it’s quite plausible that in the absence of that damage, she/we would have figured that out from the start. I really don’t know.
**I am, to a large extent, compatibilist, so “person X is a terrible person, and could not have been otherwise” is a perfectly coherent statement from my perspective.
***Whom I don’t think has BPD. Like, looking at the diagnostic criteria, I can get five, but only if I really stretch on several of them, probably well beyond what they were intended to cover. I don’t think she has a weak sense of self, and the characteristics she does have seem a lot weaker than (I think) is typical. But regression, history of invalidating family environment, and thought suppression (really, really nasty, self-destructive thought suppression) all fit. So I don’t know. She’s also gotten substantially (although not totally) better, with some therapy, but without DBT.
****This is actually a thing I am sort of paranoidly worrying about. She doesn’t know this handle, and she wouldn’t go looking, but weird coincidences happen, and I’m pretty sure that the framing, plus my distinctive writing style, plus various unusual views of mine, would give my identity away. Which, I’m not worried about being stalked or anything. I just know worry that some of what I say would hurt her.
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People with borderline personality disorder are more likely to abuse people than people without borderline personality disorder are. This doesn’t make us evil or someone that everyone ought to avoid, and it doesn’t mean committing abuse is okay. It does mean we have to be careful and prioritize learning how not to abuse people. (Full disclosure: while I haven’t abused people AFAIK, I have e.g. threatened suicide to get something I wanted. My partners confronted me about it and I stopped, which I think is the important thing.)
But also… a lot of borderline problems are skills deficits. For instance, the famous “borderline manipulation” (although vastly overplayed by people who don’t quite grasp that just because you feel manipulated doesn’t mean I’m manipulating you) is mostly a product of borderlines not knowing how to ask for what we want; if we learn, we stop manipulating people. I think (although I have no evidence) that probably gives us a better prognosis than the more conventional abuser, whose problem is not just in their skills but in their values.
It also doesn’t help that people insist on diagnosing their terrible/abusive female exes with BPD whether said exes have it or not. I am not entirely sure how I feel about this– it’s hard enough for male survivors to articulate their experiences that I’m inclined to support anything that makes it easier for them– but it certainly makes *my* life more difficult.
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Well, in my case, both I and a relative (who would be professionally qualified to make such a diagnosis if not a relative) independently came to the BPD diagnosis, and my children’s psychologist also agrees that it is a likely diagnosis based on what they have heard. So while she isn’t formally diagnosed, the evidence is a lot stronger than “male survivor has a hunch.”
I’m not really comfortable going into more details on the Internet, but suffice it to say that the manipulativeness was worse than occasionally threatening suicide to get what she wanted.
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i think the manipulation comes not from the strategies used, but from the extreme emotions. “do this or I will be extremely unhappy” is just as dangerous whether it is a lie or the most sincere truth. Good thing emotionally resistant partners exist, but for the weak like me, or for kids just growing up… it can become a heavy responsibility.
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@qwertyne: I think it’s not just the extreme emotions, but (where relevant) the extreme threatened/probable behavior. “Do this or I will be extremely unhappy” is crappy, if the other person cares, but is on a whole different level from “do this or I’ll kill myself,” or its more oblique cousin “Clearly you don’t love me, if you won’t do this little thing for me. I shouldn’t be surprised, since no one ever loves me. I should probably just kill myself now.” The former threatens transient badness, the latter, permanent.
But I do agree that lie or truth is largely irrelevant to the harm caused. I am quite convinced that the woman who has said shit like the oblique form above to me really was having those thoughts when she verbalized them. That . . . actually was a bad thing! If I’d been confident she was lying to manipulate me, I’d’ve called bullshit and hung up.
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I’m out of a loop here and Google has failed me (or I’ve failed at it); what is a Pact!demon?
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I think it’s just the “genie who will make a good-sounding deal that will inevitably screw you over later” trope. Right?
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Pact is a serial written by the same dude who wrote Worm. Demons in it have the property of “everything they touch goes horribly wrong, and anything touched by something that they’ve previously touched also goes horribly wrong.” More or less.
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Does the emotional instability habituate? That is, could you just look at pictures of cute animals all day and never come down from the high?
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In practice, that would lead to poor self-care or feeling bad because I have not done anything Productive.
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Now there’s a dynamic I can relate to!
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Can you match yourself to definitions? Like, I know I’ve dated men and women, so clearly I’m bisexual. I date multiple people, and don’t seem to mind it, so I must be polyamorous. But I don’t have a nice, factual test for whether I’m “loyal” or “tough”.
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Hmm Loyal,
have i defended a friend against something even if that might have harmed me (maybe even without her/him knowing)(or espescially without her/him knowing)?
tough is a bit hard since it is allways in comparison to something like
steel is tough but the tensile strength of a spiderweb is considerable higher (e.g. tougher) so the question might be:
have i withstood bad situations better than someone whom i consider strong or stable (please paste your notion of strength here)?
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I think the distinction I was looking for was binary vs spectrum categories: Polyamorous and Bisexual can be reduced to a binary “yes/no” pretty easily.
Loyalty can’t be simplified to a simple yes/no test. It has degrees: sure I defended Tim on Monday, but I wasn’t there for Wendy on Tuesday. Does that net me a total of a 0? Or is it okay that I was out of spoons from helping Tim, and so I’m still up a point? And different people will give me different answers…
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This is a something I’ve been curious about. In your bad moments, do you literally come to believe that your loved ones are horrible people, or is it more like being incredibly upset and lashing out, saying/thinking things you don’t necessarily mean? (I do realize that it might be a bit of both.)
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Also, thanks for this post. I can relate to some parts, like the fear of being disliked, being bad at keeping in touch and mood swings, but not so much to others, like the fear of abandonment. That is, it’s not that I don’t care if I lose someone. I would be sad. But it would also be OK, somehow.
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I tend to fluctuate much, much less than most borderlines do: I idealize someone, then I hate them, then I leave and never speak to them again. 😛 That said, yeah, I do find myself hating people I used to love sometimes.
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Hmm, that doesn’t seem too different from the hordes of supposedly mentally healthy people with stories of their horrible, horrible exes 😛
(I mean, obviously at least some of these exes must have been objectively bad partners… but I suspect some of it is emotional.)
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I’m trying to match that up with this:
Or is that more “I usually love them but hate them sometimes” than “I love most of my exes but I really hate some of them”? Or you believed something different when you wrote that quote about exes?
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Have you had any help from blogging in creating a stable self-image? I pretty much started blogging just to try and get some more lasting emotions and it has helped more than I can even express. Being able to read my thoughts on a subject long after my emotions have subsided really dampens my mood swings.
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You’ve mentioned mindfulness meditation before. How much of this have you done? How do you think the buddhist concept of ego loss, which people usually experience as extremely positive, relates to your own lack of self image? I think there’s a subtle difference in what’s meant by ‘self’, in these instances.
I also find a lot of people’s talk about ‘self image’ and ‘the self’ difficult. To me, my self is just the traits I have that allow me to get what I want from other people and my environment. I don’t really care if I’m pretty or not, say, so long as people want to have sex with me.
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I don’t do much mindfulness meditation because it hurts.
I think you are confused about what I mean by “self.” For instance, do you understand that if you, say, move across the country you will continue to be the same person you were before? When people make inaccurate statements about you (for instance, saying you’re outgoing when they’ve only seen you around people you’re comfortable with), do you wind up believing them? Do you ever find your preferences, beliefs, and personality changing to whatever will make people the least angry about you? Have you ever become deeply upset because if one of your labels stops applying to you you might stop existing? If you are like “no, I do not do those things,” congrats, you have a stable sense of self and, judging by your comment, it has not ever occurred to you that other people don’t.
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Mindfulness meditation hurts – that’s interesting. Could you expand on that?
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Is it insensitive of me to say that your blogging about your mental state is fascinating and bizarre to me?
Like, _after_ reading this I can’t conceive of not having a stable sense of self. I tend to quote the end of the Discworld novel “Witches Abroad.” (Spoilers follow. Also maybe triggering for people with unstable sense of self? I’m not sure I could really tell). At the end of the novel, the hero and the villain are trapped in an endless magical hall of mirrors. And someone comes to the villain and tells her that she’ll be trapped there until she can identify the “real” version of her, and she runs, endlessly, screaming.
And then the hero gets the same message. And she says, “oh, that’s easy. I’m the real one.” And she’s free.
My answer to “who am I” is usually “I’m me, and why do I need anything more than that?” Which I think is sort of the opposite extreme of the same scale.
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We’re all unstable, compared to Granny Weatherwax!
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I guess you’re right, I hadn’t. Thanks for opening up about yourself. I know someone with borderline, and this has been enlightening.
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Have you tried other forms of meditation? I’ve done some meditation classes where we try out various types–mindfulness, guided imagery, loving-kindness, etc.–and I find some of them hurt, some of them hurt but in a good sort of way (loving-kindness), and some of them are just pleasantly soothing and helpful (guided imagery). What works for me may not be what works for you, of course.
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How do you think the buddhist concept of ego loss, which people usually experience as extremely positive, relates to your own lack of self image?
Um . . . citation needed? Because meditation-induced depersonalization is a thing, and is AFAICT the same thing as “ego loss” but experienced with horror instead of a sense of spiritual attainment.
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Is this an accurate description, or hyperbole? If accurate, it’s way outside of my experience! (Which just means: TIL.)
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Accurate. (Wouldn’t put hyperbole in the post, because people might not understand I’m exaggerating.)
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Well, it’s pretty shocking. It also puts to bed any question of the form “was my ex BPD?”
(I saw your tumblr notes about how accusing your ex of being BPD is one of the only socially acceptable ways a man can say “I was abused,” but that it totally terrible for actual BPD sufferers. Please have all my “ouch, that must suck”s.)
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Huh. I find most of this resonates quite strongly with me, especially the fear of abandonment and the unstable sense of self. I used to be very afraid of losing my identity completely, and indeed reading about Buddhism, and its concept of ego loss as a good thing, would practically send me into panic attacks. I guess I’ve coped with it the same way you have, by finding labels to latch onto; I still struggle if asked to describe myself without reference to those labels. Sometimes I just define myself as a contrarian–I identify what everyone else is doing and then go the opposite direction.
I don’t think I experience most of it as intensely as what you describe, though, so maybe I’m borderline Borderline. 🙂
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Thankyou for this post…. It sums me up extremely well- more articulate than I can describe myself….
❤
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Pingback: What It’s Like: Borderline Personality Disorder | We Got So Far To Go
> lack of a self-image
How is this compatible with having a nonbinary gender identity, whatever that means?
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I worked on having a self-image? You might as well ask why lack of self-image is compatible with being a rationalist.
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I’ve been diagnosed with BPD for a few years now. Sometimes I do the worst thing and Google BPD. The medical sites are informative, but occasionally you get the news site articles and BPD bashing websites which make you really question “am I some kind of abusive violent manipulator that everybody should just stay clear of. A person who lacks any empathy and lives a selfish, self indulgent existance at the detriment of all others?” I start to believe it.
Then I come across a page like this. I read (professionally diagnosed) fellow sufferers account of how they really live and it makes me realise, I’m probably not that monster either. Just like you, I’d never dream of hurting someone else physically and would only ever act violently towards myself, or my belongings. Im a vegetarian, once a vegan, because I cannot bear the thought of anything else in pain. Im recognised by my friends (yes I have them, my oldest ones for 25 years), my family and most people who’ve met me as incredibly kind and empathetic. They often tell me (I find it hard to hold onto compliments, but I’ve heard this often and it has stuck) and I can now recognise that because of my BPD I read facial and body queues and know when someone is upset and needs comfort and help and can empathise because of the sheer depth of emotion I feel in similar circumstances. I try and help people when I can, neighbours, coworkers, writing to elderly relatives because I hate to think of them vulnerable, lonely or in need. I don’t ask for reciprocation, I just have a need to make people happy. It’s no doubt my need to please thanks to the BPD but nevertheless, there is kindness there.
Yes, there are bad sides and yes, all diagnosis’ are different. I was diagnosed by a number of separate psychiatrists and departments in the UK’s NHS. They don’t diagnose lightly. I guess what I want to say, hoping this gets read, is that knowing a person with BPD isn’t all bad. I read somewhere that if you ever suspect a person of having BPD, break off contact immediately. I just wonder, in 50 years time will we be looking back at these terrible statements and being as sickened as we are when we read about the horrific treatments they used to give to mental health patients in the 1900s. I’m hoping attitudes will change as more people with BPD or EUPD are professionally diagnosed and the profile becomes less stigmatised. People will realise the BPDs they know don’t fit that psycho-killer stereotype and then perhaps people will stop labelling any of their abusive friends/family/partners/coworkers simply because they fit the very,very broad criteria and, instead, to the professionals. People with BPD are so incredibly vulnerable, we start believing these stereotypes so please don’t attempt to diagnose someone yourself or even by professional from afar. Even if you know a person conclusively with BPD that’s a total scumbag, we are not (in the majority) all the same.
Thank you for writing this post and reminding me – I’m not an abusive psycho. 🙂
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I have a growing suspicion that my best friend (for the years 2008-2014 or so, now kinda former best friend since I am in Australia and she is in Canada) may suffer from borderline. She was formally diagnosed with bipolar as a preteen, but fits the symptoms less well – I’ve never seen her *manic* and her mood swings happen on the order of minutes to hours. She was actually a pretty good friend for me for several of those years; most of her so-strong-I-can’t-even emotions and manipulative behaviours were aimed at significant others. But we were able to connect on some other level that cancelled out a lot of the drama endemic to the rest of her life. We wrote terrible poetry about how much we meant to each other; we lived together for a year and a half; she gave me pretty good advice during my first real, and very stressful, relationship (although later she continued to give the same advice, which was no longer good advice). We drifted apart, not because she behaved any differently, but more because I started to realize the opportunity cost of my time. Our friendship wasn’t really something I did for *selfish* reasons anymore – I had friends and social validation – and, in EA terms, it was a very poor effort-to-good-in-the-world conversion. (I still feel like a terrible person for thinking of it this way).
I’m wondering if knowing a list of “things that help people who have borderline” would have allowed me to make any more of a difference to her, or whether that was screened out by already knowing all of her thoughts and feelings and struggles.
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I happened to find your post from a Google search. It’s so refreshing to read an honest and accurate description of BPD. I’ve found it far too exhausting to explain BPD to others which inevitably leaves my circle of family/friends very small.
I appreciate your courage and openess. Truly. I can’t wait to read more.
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its like being a praira and being in the lowest hell. we cant make friends, keep loved ones, drive people crazy and contradict ourselves. we cant control our personality behavior we are a embarrassment to our family and they the family gets so tired they think they know how to fix us there not doctors. this hurts us and well makes you abusers. but what happens when society says your abuser the non bpd is not a abuser but pushing the middle ground. sigh
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I base my self worth on what people think about me. I have no friends and feel worthless. I hate myself and I want to die.I’m alone, and no one will ever love me.
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