[content warning for discussion of abuse, self-injury and suicidality]
There is a problem with advice for the loved ones of people with borderline personality disorder.
If you google, you’ll find websites like BPD Family and Out of the FOG. On Reddit, there’s bpdlovedones; on Amazon, one finds books like Stop Walking on Eggshells.
The problem is this: imagine describing the behavior of someone with borderline personality disorder from the perspective of her partner. You might come up with a description like this:
My partner has absurdly huge negative reactions to relatively small triggers. Sometimes it feels like I can’t do anything right; whatever I do, she gets upset. Sometimes she even threatens to kill herself! She’s tremendously afraid that I will leave her, and sometimes that makes her want to kill herself. Half the time she puts me on a pedestal and acts like I don’t have any flaws, while at other times she seems to despise me. When my partner fucks up, she apologizes so much– and, of course, wants to kill herself– that I feel guilty for criticizing her. She has these fits of negative emotions where she seems completely out of control. When it’s good, it’s really really good– she’s tremendously sweet and loving, the most romantic person I’ve ever dated, and great in bed– but I’m not sure if I can put up with the bad times anymore.
You know what that’s also a description of?
An abusive relationship.
Of course, most borderlines are not abusive. But the things that make a relationship not abusive… well, we sort of take them for granted. They’re part of the minimum basic expectation for any relationship. And so you don’t mention “my partner was legitimately horrified when she found out that apologizing so much made me not want to say when something’s bothering me, and while she still apologizes waaaaaay too much I can tell she’s trying”. Or “my partner cares about my feelings and preferences; even when she’s having a bad day, she wants me to be happy”. Or “while disagreeing with my partner involves a lot of giant meltdowns, and that’s a pain in the ass, eventually we come to a compromise that satisfies both of us”. Or “my partner encourages and reassures me when I’m upset.” Or “my partner understands that I have boundaries and would never invade my privacy.”
And so when someone who has an abusive partner reads those descriptions, quite naturally, they conclude their partner has borderline personality disorder. And this is particularly true for people who are being abused by a woman, because the majority of borderlines are female, and our culture still has no concept that a woman can be abusive.
However, a borderline and an abuser are two completely different things. As Lundy Bancroft writes in Why Does He Do That?:
Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically “normal.” Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners—and children—thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology.
A borderline may have mood swings, or psychotic episodes, or dissociation issues. A borderline may have truly awful relationship skills: I know I’ve more than once attempted the Telepathy Method of setting boundaries. A borderline may be seen as manipulative: for instance, if she gets so distressed that she cuts, and her partner presumes that this is an attempt on her part to manipulate them into preventing her distress. A borderline may even be manipulative: if the only way a borderline knows to ask for attention is to cut, of course she’s going to cut.
But there is a step you do not cross unless you also have fucked-up values: unless you believe, in your heart of hearts, that you are entitled to certain things, that you deserve to be able to control your partner, that it’s okay to disrespect your partner, that abuse is a good way of expressing love. You might have overwhelming emotions, but you don’t decide that it’s your partner’s job to handle your emotions and keep you from ever feeling bad unless you have a fucked-up value system. You might have poor relationship skills, but that doesn’t mean you have contempt for your partner, that you think of them like they’re dirt. There is an important difference between someone who cuts because they don’t know how else to tell people they’re upset and who wishes they had some other strategy but who doesn’t, and someone who cuts because they’ve figured out it’s a great way to keep their partner from ever sticking a toe out of line.
(This is not to say, of course, that abusive borderlines do not exist. Of course they do.)
I think conflating the two is terrible for abuse survivors, for borderlines, and for the partners of nonabusive borderlines.
The harm it causes to abuse survivors is obvious. Most people feel pretty bad about leaving a partner who’s mentally ill; it feels like abandoning her, like not being supportive. They might also be optimistic about their partner getting better. The rate of recovery for people with borderline personality disorder is quite good: about fifty percent of borderlines recover within ten years, and the rate is higher for people who are in DBT. Unfortunately, while DBT is very good at helping people regulate their emotions, it’s absolute shit at getting people to fix their value systems. If you put an abusive borderline through DBT, you wind up with someone who can tolerate distress, regulate their emotions, and stay mindful– and still believes that she is entitled to you preventing her from ever feeling upset.
A lot of websites provide advice about how to deal with people with borderline personality disorder. Providing advice for dealing with abusive partners is good– not everyone is ready to leave their abusive partners, and harm reduction is important. But by presenting this advice as a cureall, survivors may believe that if they just validate their partner’s emotions enough, if they just set the right boundaries, if they just do everything right, their partner will stop being abusive. And that’s simply not how it works.
The partners of nonabusive borderlines are also harmed. Many people are interested in learning how to better support their partner with borderline personality disorder. However, all of the advice for dealing with people with borderline personality disorder is this cockamamie combination of advice for supporting a borderline and advice for coping with an abuser. In a shocking turn of events, these aren’t actually the same problem, and the same advice doesn’t work for both– meaning that partners of borderlines are left figuring out what works by trial and error.
Furthermore, a lot of the advice aimed at partners of people with borderline personality disorder begins and ends with “leave”. Partners are warned of the dire fate that will happen if they stay with their borderline: physical violence, false accusations of abuse, gaslighting, and on and on.
I want to be clear. Dating a person with borderline personality disorder is not for everyone. In fact, it probably isn’t for most people. The most essential skill for having a healthy relationship with a borderline is the ability to say “I understand that me going to a party tonight makes you want to kill yourself; however, I’m still going to the party, because I want to and it would make me happy.” If you can’t do that, your relationship with a borderline is going to be short and miserable. It is totally okay to decide that you, personally, do not want to date borderlines.
However, some people are okay with that. Some people can feel compassion for their partner’s pain while simultaneously caring about their own needs; some people don’t mind endlessly reassuring their partner “yes, I do still love you”; some people love their borderline partner very much and are willing to do whatever it takes to keep them. And that’s okay.
Finally, this situation is pretty shit for borderlines. First, because no one likes having a bunch of websites devoted to how they are totally awful and all their relationships are abusive. The participants in such websites often conclude that borderlines who get upset are “having rages” and “splitting”, despite the obvious fact that most people get insulted when you say they are inherently abusive. And I worry about the effects such websites have on people I disclose my disorder to– will people conclude that I’m an abuser?
The “just leave!” advice is pretty bad for borderlines as well. If you advise everyone in a close relationship with a borderline to leave, you’re essentially saying that people should not have close relationships with borderlines– which means that you’re saying we should not have a basic human need fulfilled. Humans need socialization, intimacy, and love. There’s a reason solitary confinement is literally torture.
This is different from “leave an abusive relationship!” If you’re in an abusive relationship, you’re being hurt, by definition. If you’re in a relationship with a borderline, you may or may not be hurt. Abusers are capable of being perfectly pleasant to people they don’t feel like they own; borderlines are borderline at everyone. If everyone left abusive relationships, abusers would never date and probably sulk on incel forums a lot; if everyone refused to befriend borderlines, we would be alone for the rest of our lives.
And yet most of the people who give this advice don’t want us to be dead– they often add “be sure to call the hospital if they’re suicidal!” Ought we to struggle through recovery with no support besides our therapists (if, that is, we can afford one– borderlines have sky-high unemployment rates)? You know what the odds are against figuring out how to cope with your mental disorder without any intimate relationships? It’s a setup for disaster.
I suppose in theory borderlines could just be friends with other borderlines– but that kind of screws us over too. While of course borderline/borderline relationships can be healthy, in my experience relationships for borderlines work best with someone calm and low-neuroticism, so you don’t wind up triggering each other or trapped in the delightful “when I’m avoidant you’re anxious, when you’re anxious I’m avoidant” struggle.
And then you add in that most borderlines are not abusive. We do not hit, we do not rape, we do not gaslight, we do not isolate our partners from their friends, we do not threaten. Dating us is stressful, certainly. But if someone decides they want to shoulder the burden of that stress– of their own free will, without anyone pressuring or manipulating them– that’s okay.
In conclusion: abusiveness and borderline personality disorder are two different things. While borderlines are more likely to abuse (and to be abused, something that is always lost in this sort of conversation), most borderlines are not abusive and most abusers are not borderline. And while people have a right to refuse to date people for any reason or no reason– and borderline personality disorder is a particularly good reason– the idea that no one should be in a relationship with borderlines is wrong and evil.
entirelyuseless said:
I doubt there is a black and white division between abusiveness and borderline personality disorder as you seem to be proposing. It is likely that people exist in intermediate states on all the measures that you can find, and it is likely that at least a few of the basic causes are the same.
That said, I completely agree with you that it is ok for people to have a relationship with borderline people if they want.
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ozymandias said:
In this post, I mentioned the existence of abusive borderlines as well as the fact that borderlines are more likely to be abusive than the general population.
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TMK said:
There is no clear cut division between abusive relationships and non-abusive relationships, either.
Also, i thought the gender split on BPD is roughly equal…
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ozymandias said:
The majority of borderlines are female.
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TMK said:
Hm, a quick search ends with both answers… oh well. If you are interested, here is one going against your statement, that i saw on this page:
http://www.treatingbpd.ca/BPD-Epidemiology-Prevalence.php
And said that:
The first-ever large-scale community study of personality disorders suggests a higher prevalence of BPD than previously thought. This study had several methodological improvements over previous efforts, including a substantially larger sample of over 34,000 adults, as well as interviews to evaluate BPD among participants. The lifetime prevalence of BPD was found to be 5.9%, with no significant difference in prevalence between males and females (Grant, B. F., Chou, S. P., Goldstein, R. B., et al., 2008).
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TMK said:
Hahaha, i love wikipedia. There is a quote that says female:male ration of BPD is 3:1. One of the citations leads to a paper that says something else entirely:
DSM-IV-TR states that borderline personality disorder (BPD) is “diagnosed predominantly (about 75%) in females.” A 3:1 female to male gender ratio is quite pronounced for a mental disorder and, consequently, has led to speculation about its cause and to some empirical research. The essential question is whether the higher rate of BPD observed in women is a result of a sampling or diagnostic bias, or is it a reflection of biological or sociocultural differences between women and men? Data to address these issues are reviewed. The differential gender prevalence of BPD in clinical settings appears to be largely a function of sampling bias. True prevalence by gender is unknown. The modest empirical support for diagnostic biases of various kinds would not account for a wide difference in prevalence between the genders. Biological and sociocultural factors provide potentially illuminating hypotheses, should the true prevalence of BPD differ by gender.
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nissetje said:
Thank you so much for this.
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Orphan said:
The biggest issue is that the sort of person who can’t say “I understand that me going to a party tonight makes you want to kill yourself; however, I’m still going to the party, because I want to and it would make me happy” has a strong, even overwhelming overlap with the sort of person who can’t say “I understand that me leaving you makes you want to kill yourself, however, I’m still leaving you, because I can’t handle this relationship.”
That is, the relationship, and behaviors, are inherently abusive for some subset of people – and children, who don’t have the exit option, nor the emotional maturity to deal with a borderline parent. I was such a child. I dealt with it by killing my emotions. Compassion, empathy, guilt, and regret, particularly; these were extremely maladaptive in that environment.
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ozymandias said:
I am sorry for what happened to you. However, this post is about adult/adult relationships, not adult/child relationships. Parenting advice and relationship advice are two very different animals: for instance, it’s perfectly normal to expect comfort for losing your job from your adult partner, and bad parenting to expect comfort for losing your job from your four-year-old. (Indeed, you’re probably going to have to comfort your four-year-old.) The fact that partners of borderlines should have the ability to ignore their partner’s suicidality when necessary does not mean that children of borderlines should have that skill, just like we expect adults to not throw tantrums in the grocery store and don’t expect this of toddlers.
Also, borderlines can be good parents, particularly if they’re in recovery. While your borderline mother was abusive, this does not mean that all borderline mothers are abusive.
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Orphan said:
Adult/adult relationships can lead to adult/child relationships; indeed, for some people, that’s an important component of adult/adult relationships.
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ozymandias said:
Can you explain your point more clearly? I’m afraid I don’t understand.
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rash92 said:
they’re saying adult/ adult relationships can lead to having kids, which will result in an adult/child relationship. not sure of the relevance but yeah.
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Orphan said:
You (the generic you, not you specifically) are considering whether or not to continue an adult/adult relationship. You (and/or your partner) want children in the future. The nature of the potential adult/child relationships which may arise as a direct result of your adult/adult relationship should matter with respect to your decision to continue the adult/adult relationship.
And as far as children go, non-abusive relationships can turn abusive, particularly once an exit option is gone, and children to a significant extent end the exit option for the parents as much as they lack one themselves. Not all people get better, and not all people who have gotten better keep getting better; many people get worse.
Is “Never have children with a borderline person” a wrong and evil idea? No idea. I disagree with the notion, however, that any but the weakest cases of borderline people can make for reliably good parents, short an actual cure. It doesn’t take abuse to burn out a child’s compassion, empathy, or guilt, because these emotions aren’t limited to what the child experiences, but, by their nature, reach out to other people’s experiences. The degree to which this happens will vary by child – but children do not pick their parents.
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Anonymous said:
I strongly disagree with this. My wife is borderline, she is a wonderful mother and our son suffers from no lack of empathy or similar problem. I am truly sorry for what happened to you but I don’t want borderlines to read that and decide they have no chance of being good parents.
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multiheaded said:
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davidmikesimon said:
A?
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MugaSofer said:
Totally clicked on this thinking it was going to be about political borders.
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ninecarpals said:
As someone who’s had several partners with severe mental illness I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. The pressure to be a flawless support machine was overwhelming, but on top of wrecking me, it did at least one of my partners no favors because she never learned to cope with her depression on her own. (Not that she learned once I was out of the picture – she just dived face-first into a victim mentality where nothing was her fault and her suffering was entirely outside of her control.) At the moment I’m so terrified at the thought of being with someone else with a severe mental illness (neither of my partners disclosed what they were going through right away so I was already attached when I learned about it) that I’m staying away from dating altogether, but maybe that will change. It’s too late to fix how my prior relationships went, but articles like this help me shed some of my guilt by giving me the perspectives my partners were never able to articulate.
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code16 said:
So for the past few… some span of time I’ve been trying to figure out how to think about abuse (amusingly it was another post of yours that at least partially inspired this), and wow this was just super useful and super helpful and thank you.
(Also, as someone who, while the situation is not this bad, also has a mental illness where the advice given to close people is often awful (for completely different reasons, but it is) I appreciate this so much. Both in a ‘validation that really commonly given advice can still be awful’ and a kind of like ‘look, it /is possible to make progress in internalized bad things’.)
Also I’m really sorry that’s something you have to deal with and that sucks, but glad that here you are. (er, are those OK things to say…?)
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libertyrisk said:
I recently left a partner that I suspect has BPD (displays 8.5/9 symptoms). It was helpful for me to read this and reconcile it with my experience. I finally left in the end because she became violent towards me (hitting/scratching, breaking furniture, kicking the wall until there is a crack in it, etc.) and started making very disturbing verbal threats (e.g. if you keep making me feel this upset for another year I’m going to give you sleeping pills and cut off your genitals).
For a long time I was trying to view her behavior as a result of a mental health issue and support her and get her the help she needed. I’ve been reading a lot about BPD since I left and I’ve started to think that a lot of the times I thought i was helping her I was probably just enabling her and making it worse (and if definitely did get progressively worse). I would try to set boundaries, she would break them, I would relax the boundaries and set new ones.
In the end I just didn’t feel safe, and any attempts to talk to her about mental health issues just led to a rage episode where she told me I was an emotional abusive psychopath and I’m the one that needs help because her behavior is only due to the way I make her feel… so just stop making her feel that way and everything will be better.
Since I left she’s started acting completely differently, saying she recognizes she has mental health issues and she’s setting up visits with a councilor, that she realizes she was out of line with the violence and will never do it again and that she’ll do anything to get me back etc.
Most of what I read tells me that all that is just a manipulation and the bad behavior/abuse will start up again if I go back. I’m curious to get your take on that.
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ozymandias said:
From the outside, it seems to me to be very likely to be the honeymoon period of an abusive relationship. She wants you to come home, she’s figured out what she needs to do to get you to come home, and she’s doing it. When you *do* return, she’s achieved her goal, so there’s no reason for her to continue going to therapy– or, for that matter, to stop hitting you. nd so far most therapy has shown essentially no effect on reducing abusive behavior.
You deserve to be in a relationship with someone who does not threaten you or hit you. Regardless of whether it’s a product of a mental health issue or not, it is completely unacceptable to do violence to your partner; mental health issues are not a Get Out Of Ethics Free Card.
Good luck.
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rash92 said:
this reminds me of my gf sending me a bunch of links about ’emotional vampires’ because they all seem to say that they’re horrible people and you should cut them out of your life, and then go on to mention a bunch of symptoms of depression among other things. made her feel horrible and made me seriously pissed off.
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Daniel said:
Hmm, I wonder if I might be a little bit borderline, if that type of thing occurs.
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