Gloria Trillo, who was Tony Soprano’s mistress that worked as a car saleswoman was also considered to have BPD as I recall. Of course, when you’re a mob boss, it’s easy to make a clean break. Spoilered due to mild profanity.
I thought about her too, and you’re right, but decided to stick with The Office. Tony Soprano, Michael Scott: If you’re BD, don’t let guys like this put their dick into you.
It’s more commonly diagnosed among women than men, but there is good evidence that men who fit the diagnosis are often diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder instead. The view that it is predominantly a woman’s disease is apparently self-reinforcing.
The view that BPD can’t be treated and is somehow a death knell for relationships is also somewhat archaic with the advent of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, however, that is not to minimize how truly difficult it is to manage. As for it being a learned behavior, depression, anxiety, and many other mental illnesses are learned behaviors as well. BPD is not special in this regard nor are people who suffer from it especially worthy of blame and derision.
One thing I don’t think anyone has mentioned here yet is the high incidence of severe childhood trauma among those who are diagnosed. (Oh, Stranger did mention PTSD, because he knows his shit.) A large percentage of people with the disorder have a history of sexual abuse and usually a highly invalidating family of origin. They are treated as crazy for reacting rationally to an abusive situation and it messes with their sense of identity and self-perception big-time. It seems these behaviors were essentially survival coping mechanisms to get them through childhood, not working so well in adulthood.
Every person is a special snowflake and not every person with BPD is beyond hope, but growing up with a mother with Borderline Personality Disorder was a special kind of hell for me. My childhood highlights:
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A constant revolving door of men, including four marriages by the time I was ten… and she just remarried for a fifth time. Two of them were alcoholics and two of them were sexually abusive to me.
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Sudden, insane rages, from slamming doors and breaking dishes to destroying our sofa with a butcher knife. Threatening to shoot me with a shotgun, driving her car into my stepfather’s office building in a fit of rage, attempting suicide, calling all the family members to say ‘‘goodbye’’ and then getting pissed off when they called the police. Threatening to jump out of the car going 70mph when she had an argument with my stepfather.
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Egregious emotional abuse. I was stupid, lazy, irresponsible, selfish. I am making her sick to her stomach. I am going to listen to her scream about what a horrible child I am for hours and I am going to cry and then she is going to mock me for crying. She is going to call people on the phone and loudly talk about how horrible I am. Then she is going to give me the silent treatment for days.
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Throw me out of the house, why not? Call a lawyer to see if she can legally throw me out of the house when I was sixteen, and have me live with my grandparents for weeks and telling me I can only come home if I never talk back to her again. She once grounded me for a year from one of the only extra-curriculars keeping me sane… because I dropped a goddamn stapler and didn’t pick it up fast enough. (Offical reason: talking back. Whatever.)
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Pretty much looking the other way when I was molested, and when the truth came out, deciding I was probably psychotic and staying married to my abuser for six years while pressuring me to have a relationship with him. Trying to get goddamn power of attorney over me when I was a college student so she could make medical decisions for me because I was so obviously delusional and mentally ill I couldn’t handle my shit. :mad:
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Threatening to sue me and my family members so many times I cannot count. Usually for harassment, which constitutes any sort of contact with her when she’s pissed off at you. When I first told her about my abuse, she threatened to sue me for harassment if I ever spoke to her again.
You may not see the theme here other than ‘‘crazy behavior,’’ but it’s absolutely there. It’s a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships. Her brain is wired to see the smallest things as evidence of disloyalty, as betrayal, as disrespect. Fundamentally, she cannot trust that people love her, so she alienates the fuck out of us. It is the saddest thing to witness someone who desires love and acceptance drive the people who most want to love and accept her out of her life.
It ended, last year, badly. I am still incredibly fucked up about it. In fact, this week I’ve been particularly upset about it, so this is a timely thread.
I am bitter, yes. In fact my rage is a thing we’re dealing with now, therapeutically. But it’s also a tragedy. Because I love her so much it hurts. You are probably asking, how could you love a person who does these things? But in truth, I could list a bunch of wonderful things she did and was, just as easily as the bad things. And our relationship is over because she can’t be a mother. She tried, with all her heart, but she is not capable of that kind of love. Not because she chose not to care, but because she can’t. She doesn’t have the emotional capacity. And it’s freakin’ sad.
I’m done. It hurts, but I’m done.
Humor is a way that human beings cope with pain. Lighten up, Francis.
Ambi, I just discovered this message board for people healing from and/or loving persons with BPD… I like it. BPDfamily.com. There are resources for romantic partnerships with people who have BPD as well. The site recognizes that some people can recover and have healthy relationships, and some people cannot, and that is a personal choice for the loved ones involved.
Thanks. This is the part of the OP I was most interested in. It does seem like a strange name for what it is.
I’d assumed it had to do with always being on the border between emotions, ready to jump one way or another. Or being on the the border of idealization and devaluation.
In a way, borderlines are about as far from “the border” of pretty much any emotion. That is the characteristic (one of them anyway) of the disorder: life is lived at the extremes, emotionally.
Coming back to this after finishing the second series of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the lead character Rebecca Bunch is pretty much the textbook example of Borderline Personality Disorder with histrionic features and dissociative episodes (e.g. the musical numbers which, as the show goes on, becomes apparent aren’t just narrative devices but are actual hallucinations that Bunch experiences in her imagination). Note that the main character is intelligent, competent, and capable of being charming and seeming to care, but often lacks empathy and forethought of how her actions affect others, rapidly cycles through emotions, has little control over response to disappointment or success, and often engages in behaviors that as a lawyer she should know may have very serious legal consequences. She also sucks in her coterie of new friends and acquaintances into her drama, often leveraging off of their own insecurities or needs.
Somewhat ironically, the two most emotionally grounded people are the slacker student with no aims in life and the gay fitness trainer whose biggest anxiety seems to be being put back in the closet; “I didn’t come out until I was 12. Those were some tough years.”), both of whom serve to offset the insanity surrounding Bunch’s increasingly unhinged behavior with critical observations about how the others are allowing themselves to be drawn along against their better judgment. It basically takes all the tropes of romantic comedy and lays them out into a tapestry of often disturbing mental illness…set to often hilarious musical parodies.
Anyway, if you want to get some sense of what Borderline Personality Disorder is, the show gives one manifestation of it (largely without violent or willfully destructive behaviors, although the both of those are implied as possible in the extreme). But as previously noted the disorder covers a wide range of different behaviors and responses with greater or lesser destructiveness (self and others) than the Bunch character demonstrates.
Stranger
Citing this one because it was late and short, but one thing I’m getting from this and other threads is that BPD seems to be “when drama queens go overboard”. If you are a drama queen but know when to cut down on the caffeine, you’re still in the “normal” spectrum; if you simply don’t, then it qualifies as a disorder.
A lot of the stuff seems to fit my Idiot Aunt, who I know has been diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar. She doesn’t like you: she loves you to death. She doesn’t dislike you: you’re the worst person ever. And she can jump from one to the other because a mosquito farted in another room.
I have to wonder about the “beginning in early adulthood” part, since one person whom I know to have a BPD diagnosis was markedly unstable and impulsive from childhood, and another who strikes me as very probably BPD was also a very unstable child.
The same is true for narcissists and sociopaths. Some people hypothesize they’re not aware they have a disorder. This isn’t true for the most part. A narcissist knows he’s a narcissist. But he sees nothing wrong with it.
I’d think by the time he receives his 4th or 5th beating for being a self-centered asshole,
he’d get an inkling that “it’s all about ME” isn’t something that works.
Some situations change enough during adolescence / early adulthood that they happen to get different labels depending on age. It’s not just a matter of using a different label for classification purposes, either: it’s because not every unstable kid ends up as a BPD adult, and not every BPD adult was particularly volatile as a child, so the labels need to be different depending on age. Sort of like the same physical symptoms can correspond to different illnesses depending on what causes them, or the same bug can cause different illnesses, when it comes to mental situations one of the factors that needs to be used for differentiation happens to be age of the patient.
True. One of the consequences of aggressively policing schoolyard violence is that fewer jerks get “peer counseling” than used to. OTOH, fewer nerdly types get bullied.
So it’s a “*win some; lose some *” situation for society as a whole. 
Or maybe he learns how to be charming and manipulate people into doing what he wants. When you have absolutely no compunction about lying, feel you deserve everything you get, and mostly see other people in terms of what they can do for you, it’s not that hard to talk people into doing things for you. Abusive people usually don’t abuse everyone in their life, just particular targets, and are nice outside of that circle.
People who have a pathological personality disorder don’t have volition about changing it by definition. It is, again, not “being a self-centered asshole” but literally not knowing how to regulate their emotional responses. Viewing pathological narcissism or borderline behaviors as being voluntary is like telling someone with depression to “snap out of it”; it doesn’t work or even recognize the nature of problem.
Stranger
No. Feelings are involuntary, how you react to your feelings and especially how you treat people close to you as a result of your feelings is a choice. Telling someone with any condition to just ‘snap out of it’ or ‘walk it off’ is absurd, but arguing that someone who acts like a “self-centered asshole” gets a pass on the behavior because of some condition is equally disconnected from reality. If you manipulate and abuse people around you, it’s because you choose to manipulate and abuse people around you, not because of a mental condition that you have.
If there really is no choice involved, then how do you explain the fact that abusive people with Axis II personality disorders manage to do things like hold down jobs and maintain more distant friendships? If the behavior was really uncontrolled, then they’d be as likely to punch a boss or a big strong guy out in broad daylight as they are to punch someone under their spell in private, but that’s very rarely the case. And if someone really can’t control their actions, they need to be institutionalized for the safety of them and everyone else around them.
As I stated above, understanding that a pathological disorder is not about “get[ting] a pass” but understanding the root of the behavior, which is nowhere near as black and white is you seem to want it to be. In the case of personality disorders, many of the resulting behaviors are maladaptations that are essentially defensive strategies to cope with either other aspects of that disorder and/or comorbidities, or because of external stressors such as childhood abuse or neglect by a parent or sibling, and the adaptation makes sense in the context of that relationship but is problematic in other relationships.
It is a mistake to believe that just because someone has volition in the general sense that they understand the nature of their behaviors or have the necessary tools to alter them. In fact, most people most of the time have no idea why they do the things they do, and the fact that normal, average, otherwise healthy people struggle with changing simple habits in diet and exercise even with support, encouragement, and readily available knowledge speaks to how difficult it is to make basic changes in habits, much less fundamental changes in personality. For someone who is narcissistic or histrionic, changing their behavior means stepping back from an emotionally charged situation, looking at their behavior with detachment, and recognizing when they are behaving in an unreasonable manner. That is a hard thing for anyone to do in a situation when they have an emotional investment, much less someone whose ingrained response is to amplify their emotional state by outward display. Breaking that cycle–even if a patient wants to–means both training new responses that have likely been developing since childhood and giving up a certain sense of identity. (Histrionics in particular have an ingrained sense of, “I have an excitable personality, you just have to deal with it!”)
Yes, people who manipulate others around them and then excuse it as being an artifact of some disorder are reprehensible, and if you encounter someone like that you should not tolerate it insofar as you are able (which may not be feasible if they are in a position of authority over you or have something you need from them, in which case you have to figure out coping strategies that keep you as best emotionally and legally protected from their behavior). But recognize that these behaviors tend to have detrimental effects on the people demonstrating them, including social isolation, lack of deep emotional attachments, anxiety, depression, and often (but not always) difficulty in maintaining employment and other basic life skills. You can have pity for such people for their plight without excusing or giving pass to their behavior.
Stranger
Spot on, Stranger.
As angry as I get with my mother, I finally understand that she can’t – not won’t – can’t – give me what I need as her daughter. I did end the relationship to protect myself, because it’s the only way to avoid getting hurt by her. But it gives me some comfort knowing I don’t have to take her behavior personally. It’s not because I didn’t love her enough, and it’s not because she hates me. It’s because she’s sick. I’m angry because I deserved better, but if I’m really honest with myself, she was never capable of giving me better. I saw her really try, and it wasn’t enough.
That sounds about right.
It’s a very simple yes/no question: Is this person acting like a self-centered asshole, or not? The fact that they ‘really’ aren’t a self-centered asshole but just act like one to you because of a condition or past trauma is really irrelevant and often counter productive to the question of whether the behavior is OK and how to deal with it. Trying to make bad (especially abusive) behavior into a ‘shades of grey’ situation by looking at alleged deeper reasons is a good way to get yourself hurt worse, while looking simply at whether particular treatment is acceptable or not makes it easier to do what’s necessary when there is a toxic person in your life.
The fact that it’s hard for some people to not act like a self-centered asshole doesn’t alter the fact that they are acting like a self-centered asshole. If someone is acting like a self-centered asshole, then you need to respond to them as though they are what they are acting like, not try to construct a mental model that says ‘well, they’re not REALLY a self-centered asshole, they have a problem’. That’s my fundamental disagreement with what you’re saying, I dispute that the alleged difficulty of changing behavior is relevant to how you deal with them when they come into your life.
I understand that you want to frame it as “a very simple yes/no question”, but the reality of human behavior and purported morality is quite different. In fact, setting aside the issue of pathological behavior versus volition for the moment, most of the decisions that you and everyone else makes of a supposed moral nature–such as whether to help an elderly person up the stairs, or whether to steal when you could do so without consequences–are not from any conscious volition or contemplation but are the result of social conditioning and identity; in other words, you don’t steal not because you think you’ll be looked down upon by God or Fate or whatever, but because you view yourself as a person who does not steal. If you actually had to sit and make decisions based upon morality all day you’d be paralyzed because there are plenty of ways in which even the most upstanding person does things that can or may be ultimately harmful.
As to your continued insistence that recognizing a pathological disorder as being beyond simple volition is, in your words, “getting a pass” for the affected I’m not sure what else to say other than to reiterate that the point of such recognition is to address the core problem from a diagnostic and treatment standpoint. It does not mean that if you are exposed to someone with a personality disorder that you should be responsible for or accommodating of their behavior, which is a point I’ve made repeatedly. Nor does it mean that that person should not be held accountable for the results of their actions; to the contrary, the entire point of understanding that they do not have the tools or experience to alter their behavior on their own is a step toward dealing with the fundamental issue. Certainly, many affected people will rationalize a diagnosis as an excuse to continue behaving that way untreated, but that is just part of an ongoing strategy of deflection and denial of responsibility, not some new liberty that has been granted to them, and it ultimately isn’t going to resolve any of their internal conflicts or anxieties. If you are acquainted with someone suffering from a pathological disorder, your first priority should be for your own safety and health, just as your first act in rescuing a drowning person should be to take care for your safety first.
Stranger
Hi I’ve BPD any questions?