In response to my blog last week a reader commented:
I am a (borderline personality) BPD in love with a sociopath, I want to share the depth of sadness and emptiness that occurs in my soul knowing, I will never know the love and security that regular people have, Imagine how long life would be knowing you are not equipped with the same emotion’s as everyone else.
I have never understood why there is no compassion for those of us who were abused when we should’ve bonded. I did not ask to be this way and every day watch and listen to what others do in their relationships so I can do it too ( not that I have been successful , but I try).
It is not that I can’t love, it’s the opposite actually, that I am so consumed by not being loved that pushes me to that bored space that propagates my self destruction. I just feel that most socio/bpd’s wish that they had the same emotions as others, it is exhausting pretending and I wish I could go back and be my own mother and love me in a way that created a secure human not a scared , detached one like me. Bless”¦
PS , I pray every night for healing of my heart and my emotions”¦ still I am who I am.
I debated on whether to respond as a comment but the above is so well written and so touching that it deserves more visibility.
The scientific literature has documented that it is common for women with borderline personality and psychopathic personality traits to hook-up with males who are more pathological than they are. These hook-ups drag already vulnerable women down a path of terror and destruction. In speaking with many victims, I too have noted that a subset have borderline personality disorder.
To make matters worse, relationships between women with BPD and sociopathic men typically begin when the women are in their late teens and result in early pregnancy. The pair is unprepared emotionally and financially to be a couple and to care for their children, who are also then exposed to domestic violence and the sociopath’s “friends.”
Please consider that treating borderline personality in young women will reduce/prevent sociopathy in the next generation for two reasons. Treatment will reduce partnering with sociopaths and also improve parenting ability.
Why do women with BPD and sociopathy have such a high rate of partnering with sociopaths? I think the answer lies in their anxiety and in dominance motives. Sociopaths portray dominance and so are sought after as a source of security. Men who have lower levels of dominance and anxiety themselves are a turn off for insecure women. However, it is those more normal men who have the best chance at helping a borderline woman recover.
Also many women with BPD have a high level of power/dominance motivation themselves, so if they do get into a relationship with a less pathological male, they quickly make mince meat out of him. A dominant woman with BPD has the ability to destroy a normal man psychologically, just like a sociopath can.
If I had no hope I wouldn’t bring any of this up, because what is the point of spreading gloom and doom about human nature. I write this week because I don’t believe these scenarios have to play out in this way. As humans, we not only have the primitive brain with its unconscious motives of fear and dominance, we also have a “wise mind.”
If you have borderline personality (or sociopathy for that matter), your life challenge is to find your wise mind and work to connect with it. Your wise mind should dictate your actions not your primitive brain.
To discover your wise mind, you have to learn techniques of anxiety management. Anxiety interferes with the functioning of the wise mind.
Having a wise mind means deciding on values based on facts, not how I feel in the moment. For example, as I raise my son I am teaching him to have a wise mind. He knows that if left to his own devices at the age of 6 he would eat unhealthy food, not get enough sleep and entertain himself in a way that harmed him.
My son says, “I want to be the boss of myself!” Well to the extent that our primitive pleasure/fear brains choose our actions, whatever feeling of being the boss of ourselves we have is an illusion. It is only when we use our wise minds to make thoughtful decisions that we are really the boss.
Disordered parents are unable to impart the wise mind to their kids. This failure to teach impulse control is just as bad as a failure to teach love. In fact as you see by this writing, poor impulse control leads directly to an inability to love.
That gets me to the pleasure balance. In order to experience pleasure we have to be relatively free from anxiety. Thankfully, there are also medications for that.
So starting from a relatively low anxiety state, we have social and non-social pleasures. People with borderline and antisocial personality disorder also have trouble with non-social pleasures. They never learned to manage their entertainment/recreational needs. Most turn to substances for this purpose.
The wise mind knows that exercise, playing music, doing art, having hobbies and intellectual interests are important for personal growth, mental and physical health. The wise mind can choose to do these things.
The wise mind can also choose to do work to earn a living.
Social pleasures come in three forms, sex, power/dominance and affection. To the extent that sex is tied to affection and a healthy relationship, that pleasure can be fulfilling. Dominance/power that robs another person of autonomy never brings fulfillment. Love is the only real healthy social pleasure.
Our pleasure balance is not fixed and can be modified with time and practice. So my friend you can “go back and be my own mother and love me in a way that created a secure human not a scared , detached one like me.”
To start you have to use your wise mind to understand your own pleasure balance. Begin by developing healthy non-social pleasures. Every person needs a healthy diet, exercise and meaningful hobbies. Stop using recreational drugs. These things will not feel good to you when you first start them, but over time as you apply yourself you will feel better.
Then really look at your social behavior, not how you feel. Most sociopaths and people with BPD think they do feel “love.” If you dominate and control others, no matter what your reason for this is, you have to stop. As long as your relationships center around dominance you will never experience love.
To learn more about the wise mind, enter a DBT treatment program. If anyone has used a good self-help DBT book, please give us the title.
“Men who have lower levels of dominance and anxiety themselves are a turn off for insecure women.”
I think this “answers” the lament, “Why do good girls like bad boys?”
Lightbulb just went off…it wasn’t the excitement factor (he scared the bejeezus out of me sometimes), it was the confidence he portrayed that hooked me. I realize now that it’s easy to have all the answers when you just make them up. lol. I could do THAT but I have issues with truth and accuracy 🙂 Probably sounds like a “duh” moment…but I’m going to be bouncing that around in my head for awhile. I’ve been looking for the key to what I did then and what I hope NOT to do again in the future- I think you showed me the way to it. Thanks Dr Leedom.
Liane,
Thank you for this article. I have been struggling for a long time with my own road block of my recovery. For as long as I can remember, I have sought constant approval from others, & base my self worth on what others think of me. I have tried to think back to my up bringing to discover what was lacking there to make me the way I am. Every time I try to look there, it is like my mind says, you don’t want to look in there, & shuts it out. I think I had a normal up bringing, our family was like everyone else’s on the block, but something must be wrong somewhere. I just don’t know what it is.
Dear Liane,
Very good article. While I DO believe that the tendencies to personality disorders ARE genetic to a great extent, I also believe that all humans with an intellectually functional brain have CHOICES and CAN make wise or unwise choices. I do NOT think a person such as my P-son had NO choice but to act the way he did.
He chose to steal though he had no NEED (i.e. he was neither naked nor hungry) to, but for the excitement he got from doing it.
I do think, though, that through years and years of this kind of behavior his choices for manipulation etc to get what HE perceives as his “due” are now hard set, hard wired, and will never change because HE DOESN’T WANT THEM TO. He has not learned to visualize himself as less than entitled, or even as a failure as he sits in his prison cell. Even in his prison cell he sees himself as a successful person.
He has no concept that he could have had everything he ever wanted, money, power, control and to “be his own boss” simply by using his high intellegence to work for a living—he would still have been high in psychopathic traits, but at least he could have been a rich and powerful one—yet, he chose the path he went down which resulted in him in prison, hopefully for his natural life!
I have also made unwise decisions based primarily on “feelings” rather than logic and am working diligently to make more logical and wiser choices based on FACTS and TRUTH and GOOD SENSE rather than on “feelings.”
Clinically, and in the community, I have also seen many instances of what I call ‘gasoline and fire” relationships between two disordered people in which they alternately play the victim and abuser. I have also observed other relationships where one is the abuser and one the enabler/victim or where the victim is trauma bonded to the abuser.
The problem is that there are so many of the 2-disordered people relationships that it has given the role of “victim” a “bad name” and some cops and others as well as the courts seem to think that ALL victims are also “at fault” or “to blame” because some “victims” are CO-ABUSERS. This is a big problem, I think, in our society.
I agree with you about the children of these disordered relationships, they get the DOUBLE WHAMMY, poor genetics and poor environment so the problems proliferate exponentially in our society.
That, plus the problem in One-abuser/one-vulnerable-victim relationships is that the REAL victim sometimes has been “driven so crazy” that they appear to be the disordered one, while the real abuser, the psychopath, appears cool, calm and collected.
I think it is important that we (as victims) examine ourselves and our own anxiety, our own unwise decisions, and to accept responsibility for them. That is NOT to “blame the victim” but to help us make WISER DECISIONS based on what we know is FACT, TRUTH, and LOGIC.
WE are responsible for ourselves, and though being abused causes us some severe trauma in many ways, WE are still the ones who must (with all our resources and those we can muster) pull ourselves out of the abyss by our own boot straps. Some people never seem to manage to do this and remain in chronic victim mode for life, (like your article about the “helpless mouse”) or go on into another victim situation with another abusive partner/relationship because they continue to make and remake the same anxiety-driven unwise choices. I can put myself into that catagory until recently, as I repeated the procedures over and over during decades of my life….not just with a man, but with many others who would take advantage of me and keep me in the FOG (Fear, Obligation, Guilt).
Coming out of that FOG finally, and seeing clearly now that I am responsible for me, and all others are responsible for themselves has been a liberating experience for me.
While I continue to be a caring and giving person, I also see that giving to others out of a kind and good heart can be counter productive for both myself and for the ones to whom I give and give and give. I also recognize that there are some situations and some relationships that there is no “fixing.” Accepting this as a fact, a truth, and wisdom was very difficult at first because I had the MAGICAL FEELING that if I gave enough I could “fix anything.” In truth, the only think I can fix is my self. By accepting the truth, accepting responsibility for myself, and no others.
Dr. Leedom,
Excellent Article!
“To start you have to use your wise mind to understand your own pleasure balance. Begin by developing healthy non-social pleasures. Every person needs a healthy diet, exercise and meaningful hobbies.”
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I think when one does not learn to be alone and enjoy time and hobbies alone, getting to really know oneself, but instead looks outside for others to make it all better, this can lead to a sense of “desperation” that sets us up for another “bad” relationship.
I think the single best advice I got after the relationship with my ex, was given to me by Sandra Brown, when she advised me NOT to even attempt dating for TWO FULL YEARS. Seemed like a heckuva long time to me (even though I wasn’t interested in dating anyhow at the time)….but I have developed lots of hobbies and have LOST that feeling I used to always have of “I must have a relationship.” I have loads of hobbies, many more friendships, and have learned much better to relate to men without that undercurrent of whether they are available or not, whether there is “interest” or not, whether they find me attractive, intelligent, like my clothes, hair, dress, approve of me etc.
Also, although at first I was very lacking in compassion for socios or psychopaths (thought they SUCKED), the more I have read about them and the genetic component, the more I have developed compassion for them. (still don’t want one in my life though!) I read an article by some psychologist who was treating a teenager who was a psychopath and whose Mother was patiently trying to teach him the difference between right and wrong, and the teacher agers explanation of how hard it was because he had to be “reminded” or to “remember” something was wrong because he didn’t “feel” it like other people. After reading that I really began to think how difficult it must be for some of them (and I do think some of them try alot of the time not to “hurt” but sometimes just can’t help their impulses. (and of course some of them thrive on deliberately hurting others). And like the poster above I think some of them know they are screwed up and have some moments of wishing to be like others. If I can find the article I will post the link here because I think it gave an interesting perspective on it.
Well maybe I have BPD, I can’t remembere what it’s all about, I’ll have to look it up, but I could have written the letter from the BPD. I have traits Liane writes about, I have anxiety, I like dominant men, am I being dominant when I think I can “help” them, “fix” them, be “the one that can do it all and he’ll love me” ??? Is that my power trip? I have practically only had relationshits with N/S’s. I have never had a wise mind. I also could have written sstiles54’s post. I thought our family was like everyone elses, I’ve asked my sister what our childhood was like and she thinks it was fairly normal, I think about my mother now, and I think she was depressed. I’m missing something too, and I don’t know what it is. I’m feeling like I am just coping with life. I work, but other than that I have nothing to do. How pathetic is this? I have had a blessed life. I’m crap.
I am confused. I thought personality disorders are not treatable, just some of the concomitant problems, such as depression, etc. Or is that what you are talking about? Learning to cope better with the disorder, though it cannot be cured?
I looked up DBT and see it is a kind of treatment. Does that address primarily suicide urges?
I agree that people are RESPONSIBLE for their behavior, in that they are the one doing it. BLAME is a different issue.
Looking back, I can see times when the P/S/N made choices to cause extra harm or less harm….based on the impact on him of course, not the impact on me. So in that way I can assign some BLAME for those choice on him. But to change the root problem…..his inability to love, experience intimacy, empathize, or let go of his dominance/control total orientation toward life….I can’t blame him personally for that, unless we later find out it is in part due to choices he made at about age one or so…But I can hold him responsible for the damage he does, nonetheless. Meaning I can get a restraining order or whatever is needed to stop him, because he is the one doing the bad stuff!
But for him to change that whole core way of looking at the world (I must win, what is in it for me) I would think would be as difficult as it would be for me to STOP having empathy for others. I can do it briefly, especially if I’m stressed, under attack, ill, etc….but almost immediately I self-correct and remember the other person’s feelings.
For awhile I was fooled by the fact that he is very intelligent. But intelligence apparently has nothing to do with how we are oriented in this very basic way. And intelligence can’t change it. It can help with some self-awareness and perhaps some mitigating treatments. Maybe what they need is classes where they memorize what is wrong and what is right, because they have no internal compass. I think some high achieving sociopaths have done just that…enough to get by and better con people, like Madoff, until he finally was unmasked. That is the problem. They use what they learn but still operate under the “how can I use this to benefit me?” umbrella.
I also think it would be as difficult for the p/s/n I knew to START having true emotions as it would be for me to shut off emotions…probably harder. I can shut off an emotional reaction in the here and now (plenty of training as a child to survive!) BUT three or four days later, wham….there are the emotions that I suppressed.
For him to become normal would be like un-retarding a retarded child.
And realizing that, I have, quite against my emotional will, forgiven him.
At least with a retarded child, while mourning the person they can never be, you can still take joy in who they are. Especially if you release your fixation on their physical age, and enjoy them for the little child they are. Most are very delightful, though the sexuality can be a problem.
But with a sociopath, you not only have to mourn the person they might have been, you have to protect yourself and society (to the extent that you can) from the person they are.
THERE IS NO DEBATE that the sociopaths ARE the problem, not the victim. HOWEVER, the good news for victims I think is that we are learning that there are tools that are very effective against the sociopaths. And vulnerabilities to watch out for.
I feel much more confident about fighting off a physical rapist now….knowing I have to to be willing to inflict great harm very quickly like a wild animal. I’ve learned self-defense moves, etc.but at the end of the day, your best bet is simply to ram a nose into the brain, rip out an eye, and NEVER give up, even if you are blacked out for awhile. Once I was attacked while taking a shower, all alone, and guess what? I didn’t get raped. Because I’m willing to defend myself, no matter what I have to do.
And the same is true for encountering a sociopath now. OF COURSE victims can be successfully targeted. But if you are aware of the dangers, aware enough that you will do whatever is necessary to defend yourself, it is much more difficult for them to succeed. Strong boundaries, strong integrity, strong demands for being treated with respect and kindness and decency help. Strong boundaries means trusting slowly, gradually. It means giving up romantic nonsense. It means the strength to resist the pull of sexual hormones and brain chemicals that reach out to addict you. At the first sign of your own willingness to do something very atypical and against your values, you must have the inner strength to say no to that addictive pull. Or the addictive pull of past relationship patterns.
I used to brag about how quickly my husband and I fell in love and got married. Now I’m rather ashamed of it and realize I was VERY lucky he was a decent man, not a sociopath, and he also was lucky. It was a dumb and stupid thing to have done, and we were both clearly “under the influence” of love/sex chemicals, etc.
Man, it has taken a couple of years of working on my understanding and reading etc….a part time job, literally…..to get this level of clarity. Some days I still slip in my thinking. Coming to LF helps.
There is still much work for me to do. I need to get my anxiety level back to normal. I need to start exercising again. I need to work at more joy in my life. But I feel I am making real progress.
What the letter writer said in this post sounds so much like what my S said to me when he dumped me.
Letter writer:”I just feel that most socio/bpd’s wish that they had the same emotions as others, it is exhausting pretending ”
My S: ” I don’t love you. I tried to love you because I know you love me. I just don’t have any more to give you.”
As hurtful as that was and still is, it is also so sad. Being able to recognize love , but knowing that, no ,matter what, you will never feel those feelings. So going from woman to woman solves the boredom Ss always feel, but also is done in hopes (vain hope) that they will eventually find and feel love. I even remember saying to him, ” Are you going around looking for love?” (After I asked, he said he loves the woman he left me for. But actually, I guess he was saying that because it sounded better an saying, “I’m a sociopath and this is what I do.”)
And to Shabbychic:
I have to respond to say to you- don’t down yourself. Although I do the same thing , I know it is not constructive. I also, have many blessings- sometimes it is hard to see. I do see a therapist and take anti-depressants, but I know it is very hard to fight those feelings at times. Take solace in knowing that you have the capacity to love and be loved.
Chic – there were of course elements in this that struck a chord with how I feel or have felt… I think a lot of these traits are present in a wide spectrum of people at one point or another… feelings of being unlovable, feeling anxious… and what ever it stems from, a true brain or personality mis-wiring, or a neglected traumatic upbringing or BOTH… I think Oxy’s point is bang on,
‘I think it is important that we (as victims) examine ourselves and our own anxiety, our own unwise decisions, and to accept responsibility for them. That is NOT to “blame the victim” but to help us make WISER DECISIONS based on what we know is FACT, TRUTH, and LOGIC.’
It’s important to examine ourselves reflect, be calm and objective, take resposibility for what is ours, and be honest about it (especially to ourselves), place the responsiblity of other’s actions with them and move on from it… well TRY anyway… I am 6 months into a life long course here!
I know, that whatever these people who have hurt me throw at me (or continue to. *tired sigh*) if I keep practising to REALLY be happy with myself, and be calm, life will go the way I steer it, I dont have to KEEP the hurt hurting me (like the hurt is bouncing around like an echo trapped in a cave). It’s something I think I will have to really fight hard at every day…
I think its difficult for anyone when you recognise that there might be something ‘wrong’ with you ( I hate that expression)…. because it feels like an ‘attack'( even if it’s your own conclusion) or that you are worth less than ‘NORMAL’ people. It’s not true. To understand your own bad habit or malfunctions is a step in the way of change and recovery. Dont use the realisation that something you are doing is NOT healthy as (in my case another) way of beating yourself up. Its like a warning light on your car to say the oil needs changing, doesnt mean the cars crap.
Anyway, who knows what Kind of crazy we all are here ( Jenn and I like to howl at the full moon;) that we are trying to get to some place better for ourselves and the people and planet around us is the thing.
Jen2008…it was a blog by Steve Becker.
P.S – I dont think you sound BPD, and I dont think I am either…
I desperately wanted to be loved by my parents and I feel like I will always be missing something which is ridiculous because one is a Dead Narcissist and the other is a live one, why I deperately cleave for the attention of people who are crap has been a problem, but it doesnt have to always be.
someone said that the greatest gift we can give our children is roots and wings… so no roots… no wings….
I grow my own!
and I know (really, when I stop with the pity party already) I AM loved, by certain friends, by my child (not sure about one of them right now lol!) and I have to nurture those relationships and the one with myself.
Right! I have waffled on here enough now!
xxxxxx