The mystery of Borderline Personality Disorder, the damage it causes, and the difficulty of treating it continues to be one of the greatest challenges to psychiatric medicine.
In the first place, it is next to impossible to convince a personality disorder that they have a problem. Second, if you can catch them in a rare moment of admission, you will never convince them to go to therapy.
They may look you in the eye and promise, but that is only to gain control of the interaction, to soften you, rebuild their alliance with you, and then “forget” all about it. They have no intention of going and never did. If you dare to bring it up again, hellfire and brimstone will rain down upon you.
If, by some miracle, a Borderline goes to treatment, they will probably hook the therapist onto helping them solve a superficial problem that serves as a diversion from the real story.
Over half of people with Borderline Personality Disorder have co-existing mental health disorders, like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Addiction, Anxiety, Depression, and somatic dysfunctions, like fibromyalgia, neuropathy, insomnia, and chronic fatigue.
These are all perfect diversions for the Borderline to present themselves as forthcoming and committed to working on their issues. They do not know that resistance is a normal part of therapy, and give themselves away by being overeager to engage their problems.
Total compliance is how they control the therapeutic environment and avoid questions that dig into their intolerable pain. Experienced therapists can sometimes take months to realize that they are dealing with a Borderline. Meanwhile, the patient goes home and continues terrorizing their family under the moral protection of having agreed to attend therapy.
Borderline Personality Disorder is a real-life nightmare. It is one of the most prevalent and psychologically destructive disorders in existence. It emotionally eviscerates partners who sacrifice their friends, family, and self-respect to make every available excuse for their controlling and abusive behavior.
Borderlines prey on soft codependents more than anyone because they require a target that is easy to manipulate. A natural people-pleaser. Their psychic wounds and permanent state of vulnerability won’t allow anything else. Soft codependents are also the only types capable of putting up with what a Borderline is capable of dishing out.
Borderline Personality Disorder is one of the most well-known abandonment survival strategies. The hardest imaginable codependent. They call it “Borderline” because a person is thought to be always teetering on the edge between appropriate sociability and psychosis.
They are capable of saying the most insidious things to a loved one, threatening them, hitting them, or berating them for some small infraction, and then pick up the phone for a calm, pleasant conversation with whoever is calling.
When their abandonment fears are provoked, the response never goes unnoticed. It won’t matter if it happens at home, in a restaurant full of people, or in the middle of a church sermon; they need to feel safe now. They devolve into a pure reaction with no organization to their emotions or thoughts whatsoever.
Borderlines have all hit rock bottom at some point, because of a horrendous trauma or abandonment, and restructured their entire personality around avoiding or preventing abandonment at all costs.
Truth and authenticity have no value as long as the Borderline can protect their fear of ever being alone and unloved. That typically manifests in an individual creating a character entirely around deceit. They will tell you anything to make you like or accept them. If someone likes and accepts them enough, the Borderline believes they will never be abandoned because they have behaved in such a likable way.
It is not surprising that Borderlines are often the children of other Borderlines. They may have had a parent whose unpredictable and alarming behavior left the child feeling unwanted, unaccepted, or unloved. The pain they carry is so deep that it often persists for their entire life, and so can the fake personality that they built around protecting it.
The reason Borderline Personality Disorder is so treatment-resistant is that any attention drawn to the cracks in the myth of perfectionism that they tell themselves results in biblical emotional eruptions.
These disruptions are so severe on the Borderline that they aren’t likely to remember them. Their emotions are running so high that they shut down the cognitive functions responsible for creating new memories.
Imagine cursing out the waiter at a crowded restaurant, stopping every conversation inside, police presence, humiliated husband and children, and then having no real recollection that anything unusual or inappropriate had happened by the evening.
When abused children grow up and confront their former caretakers about their toxic behavior and the effect that it had on them, the Borderline will most likely deny that any wrongdoing ever took place, cut off contact with the abuse survivor, and no longer consider them family.
No death notifications when other family members die, no invitation to weddings, no inclusion in the will. They have just inflicted upon their own children what might be the final act of abandonment and betrayal that creates another Borderline generation, or at least a deeply affected codependent.
If any of this sounds familiar, don’t lose your color. You are probably not a Borderline. A Borderline would read these words and ascribe them to someone they know.
If they ever have their epiphany, it will be the single most devastating realization of their lives, and they will require a lot of support. If this sounds like someone you know, or a caretaker from your past, pick up a copy of Christine Ann Lawson’s book Understanding the Borderline Mother as soon as possible. Whatever it was, it wasn’t you.
In my opinion, Borderline Personality Disorder is more persistent and destructive than any drug or alcohol addiction, because you can take a substance away from someone and watch them change within a few days. With a Borderline, however, you literally have to take away their whole personality.
They will react like a finger just got stuck into their most sensitive nerve, and that reaction, to their credit, will be an honest one.
————TREATMENT————
Many psychiatrists believe that Borderline Personality Disorder is not treatable, but they may be persuaded by recent literature:
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy has been shown to create new neural connections in the brain associated with emotional inhibition control, and the results last beyond the completion of treatment.
It is a process by which a Borderline, after recognizing that they have a problem and an honest desire to change, will talk about and accept their feelings, and train themselves not to be hijacked by them in the future.
Through it, they address their inner child, their emotional zero point (rock bottom), and begin raising their emotional awareness into adulthood. It centers largely around mindfulness exercises that are focused on emotional acceptance.
Mindfulness has been shown to effectively lower symptoms of BPD in some cases. This is usually the beginning of a long road exposing the things the mask is supposed to cover up. Paying attention to the here-and-now, without distraction, without fantasy, can be excruciating.
The good thing is that it is easy. If you are trying to be mindful, then you are doing it wrong. There is no trying, only allowing yourself to feel and observe honestly.
One case study provided a weekly dose of the hallucinogen LSD to a patient diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder for several weeks. The drug had no observable intoxicating effects, but the symptoms of her diagnosis improved significantly.