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.
Skylar….I was 15. So was he. How I wish someone had told me that the way he dumped me was NOT normal, even for a teen boy, that *I* was not deficient in anyway, he was! I doubt that I could have really understood it at the time, however. Not because of deficienncies in my understanding, but just when you grow up with a N, and are still living with them and still a child, it is hard to get your thinking straightened out.
When I was 17, I dated a guy 27. I trustingly went to his apartment with him toward the end of one date! Something got to him, I’m not sure what, and he said all he could hear in his head was the song “Young Girl get out of my life” (or whatever it is called) and he told me that was wrong of him to date someone so much younger and that he was taking me home and to stay out of guy’s apartments.
He was not a creep.
PS Get rid of that card! About two years ago I threw out stuff from the CREEP that I had kept for 40+ years! Felt great!
Dear Kim,
I’m not sure if you have therapy available to you, but I would suggest if possible that you get some. As well as stay here on LF and keep reading the archived old articles from the past, there are hundreds of them, and I suggest to new people that they read ALL the articles (save the comments on them for later as there are SO many of them, some with 400+ comments)
Self diagnosing anything is a difficult thing to do, but we can get INSIGHTS into what our own thinking is.
To answer your question, yes, there are “levels” of BPD just as there are levels of sociiopathy or narcissism. The difference between the disorders is that there is some hope for a BPD to learn and grow, and take responsibility for their ACTIONS, the psychopath will never do that. They will not grow emotionally or learn much about controllignn their predatory behaviors.
A person with some “borderline” tendencies, the feelings of intense emotions, all the way UP or all the way DOWN can also be a symptom of bi-polar. Then if you factor in the problems caused by being raised in a dysfunctional home, or learning coping skills as a child that don’t work as an adult, there are all kinds of things that can be IMPROVED in your life, in your choices, your ability to control your emotions and to take charge of your behavior too.
NO ONE OF US IS PERFECT—and even the “best and smartest” of us here have MADE SOME BAD CHOICES, SOME DECISIONS THAT WE SHOULDN’T HAVE and for my own part I can say, have done some things that were purely STOO-PID!
The purpose of LF is to support us whiile we GROW and LEARN about them, at first, and later, ABOUT OURSELVES.
If we stop learning at just learning about them, we do not fully heal or grow. I started out commpletely trying to learn about them, but then realized I had some learning about ME and why I did the things, thought the things, etc. that I did.
Now, I am more focused on ME than on them, focused on my healing, my growth, my learning—AND i HAVE COME SO MUCH FURTHER ON THE HEALING ROAD THAN EVER BEFORE.
I feel safer from entanglements with “new” psychopaths because I no longer GIVE AWAY trust to people, I insist that they earn it over an extended period of time. My expectations are reasonable and realistic and I am holding myself in HIGH ESTEEM, my own value of myself is not a narcissistic trait, but I am starting to give myself a value TO MYSELF and putting my safety and sanity before any one else’s and assuming responsibility for myself. It is a liberating feeling to not be dependent on others for your happiness, I think. It works for ME anyway.
kim,
I don’t think you are borderline just because you feel everything intensly. I do to. I always have, I remember since I was 4. and I refuse to be categorized as having a personality disorder just because I have human feelings.
It is too much to go into all my thoughts on the subject, but I can tell you that the old saying, “thin skinned” describes me both figuratively and literally – you can see right through my skin to all the veins and muscles. I know that excess cortisol thins your skin. Cortisol is a stress hormone. I have felt massive stress since I was being scapegoated by my narcissist parents since I was born. I remember that I always had nightmares, and never any good dreams. How do I know that? Because at age 4, I remember that my brother told me he had a dream about santa claus. I was astounded and very envious. I had never had a good dream, only nightmares, so the next day I woke up and lied to him. I told him that I had also had a dream about santa claus.
So, whatever happened to the narcissist/sociopath that turned him into the evil slime that he is, well it also happened to me, but I didn’t turn evil. I also felt strong emotion, but I didn’t block out empathy. I need love because I’m human, but that doesn’t mean I lash out at others. I’m reading books about the mind/brain and I’m going to use my cognitive powers to nurture my emotions. I’m no longer going to suppress my intuition. I’m going to learn how to integrate my two halves so that they serve each other.
For the past 25 years, my intuition was screaming at me that I was in danger, but I just would not acknowledge it, because my logic couldn’t make sense of it. My body developed chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, low thyroid, food allergies and insomnia. Basically I had post traumatic stress syndrome. But didn’t know it. Actually I knew that too. You know how I rationalized it? I thought: must be past life issues, I must have been a soldier in vietnam. Boy could I come up with excuses for my miserable existance. Anything but the truth.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8227951.stm
sorry, this is off topic, but right now, I am all up for ‘branding’ people with a background of child abuse. this story in the news of Jaycee, has really hit me hard, I think the level of ‘duped’ the authorities were, and the neighbors and this animal’s wife( the controlled robot?)… is a lesson to us all… we HAVE to, as a society wake up to our gut feelings, and what is going on around us and not be afraid to say when we feel that something is wrong. I am not surprised(yet also appalled) that this was going on under everyone’s noses for years… it is the nature of ‘the beast’… we are all too polite to ‘make a fuss’, too easy to give the benefit of the doubt… shy away from the truth because it is too nasty. Sigh. this story has upset me a lot. then with the whole ‘I found god” crap and everyone coming out of the woodwork saying ‘I knew he was weird’ … jeese, whats wrong with us that we can , as a species allow these creatures to operate like they do.:) I am going to take my pills now;)xx sorry guys.xxx
blueskies, This story cannot possibly be offtopic anywhere on this blog. I too, felt a sickness when I read about it. It’s almost unbearable for us to read because we have a good idea of what happened and why. The other reason is because we know that there are many who cannot understand why she didn’t/couldn’t leave him. Just like WE couldn’t relate even while WE were in the clutches of our P’s.
I think that what must be happening is some kind of survival mechanism that saves our lives by making us meek and docile when in the presence of the predators. That mechanism buys us time until the escape is possible. It would have to pervade and override any other instinct to fight or flight.
I have voice recordings of conversations with my P and when I hear it, I can’t even believe my voice. It is so calm and soothing, so meek, like a little girl’s. It’s not what I feel like or think I look like, but my voice and behavior looks sooooo non-threatening, like a child’s demeanor. I have often been shocked when I see it. This is only in his presence, not on videos or recordings away from him.
BTW, can you send me some of your pills?
When I posted the statement above, I was just typing the words as they came into my head. But now my own words are haunting me. Today I spent the day listening to those recordings. Then I listened to the news about Jaycee. So when I posted it was coming straight from my gut without censoring by my brain. now the whiplash is coming around and I sense the truth in what I said.
I was living 2 lives simultaneously. The life of reason was what I experienced in my day to day activities. The subconscous was living a life of sheer terror. All I could do was suppress it. Now I’m reliving the emotions that I had suppressed for 25 years. The primal response to living in danger was not acknowledged for 25 years and now it’s having it’s say. And it’s not happy.
Dear Skylar,
Your posts make so much sense and there is so much wisdom trying to get out there, and doing so….you are having an “ah ha” moment—I’ve had then over and over again, each is a little step where we SEE soemthing that has been right before our eyes the whole time and we looked at it, felt it, but still didn’t SEE it.
Healing, I think, is a 1000 of these little “ah ha” moments when we grasp a thought, a vision, and it makes us realize something about ourselves.
Healing is like EATING AN ELEPHANT—you do it ONE BITE AT A TIME!
About the news story, I did not go to the link, after reading what you both wrote, I don’t need the stress right now.
I am sorry I brought this up:( I hope it doesnt/hasnt upset anyone:(x
Dear Blueskies,
No, I was NOT upset, sweetie, it is just that our whole society is overloaded with horror stories of abuse, horrible abuse, children killed and threatened, etc. That woman who was kidnapped at age 11 andheld for 18 years as a sex slave, living in a tent in the back hard of her abusers (a man and his wife) she was forced to have kids by this man. three years ago a neighbor complained that there were people living in teh back yard in tents and the cops went there and NEVER WENT INTO THE BACK YARD—she could have been rescued 3 years earlier if the cops had done their jobs, but they got conned too.
There are stories like that or worse all across the world, and if I read too many of them or hear them I get to feeling depressed about man’s inhumanity to man. About the futility in eliminating these monsters, so I limit the amount of horror stories that I read—because there is nothing I can do about these things, so I try to limit myself to things I CAN do something about.
I am volunteering at a DV shelter near here…that helps. I am educating the court appointed special advocates for foster kids —that helps. they wanted me to be a special advocate but I declined because I know it would take more energy and emotional strength than I have right now, so I am being GOOD to myself FIRST and taking care of MYSELF FIRST.
Each of us have a finite amount of energy that we can spend, just like it takes a certain amount of money to keep your rent paid, your car running, food, etc. and anything over that amount is discressionary spending. Well, energy is finite too, it takes a certain amount of energy to take care ofyour own basic needs, and if you “spend more” than you have as additional energy, you end up NOT taking care of yourself at all. (((hugs)))