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.
Thank You for this wise article. I have also been diagnosed with BPD. For years I resented it, thinking it was like wearing a scarlett letter pasted to my forhead. I didn’t really believe it either. I felt normal. It was just my life that continueed to fall apart.(sorry, can’t spell either.) Any way, I proceeded down the primrose (psycho) path, one after another, and with each doomed relationship became more and more damaged. I am currently two years out of my last, with absolutely no motivation to begin another any time soon. I wanted to commet how helpful it is to understand the dynamics of the relationships between
bPDs and these sick others. I have found a couple of articles enlightening on other web-sites by entering “relationships of narcisists and bpds. Very interesting. I personally don’t feel that I have a deficit in emotions. If anthing I have too much. And yes the fear of abandonment reigns supreme, leading me into that fog you all write about. It seems that even as the relationship gets more and more tortuious, I become more and more mired in it. More and more helpless to extricate myself. Oh, and I really liked the comment that P’s are like the tin-man, but they think they are the wizard. can’t remember who said it, but great! Thanks for letting me share.
Dear Kim,
Thank you for sharing. If it is any comfort, sometimes people who are victims “behave” almost like BPDs because of previous abuse and the coping mechanisims that they learn in childhood which are beneficial in childhood, but not in adulthood. It is possible your diagnosis might be somewhat in error. A series of psychopathic relationships makes many people “crazy” or act like BPDs.
You are obviously somewhat self aware and that is a good thing for ANYONE to be. About both our own feelings and about the consequences of our behavior.
I hope you continue to read and to learn, about both psychopaths and about yourself. Many of us come here to LF to learn about “them” but end up staying to learn about OURSELVES and how we can heal and grow from the hard lessons we have learned in dysfunctional relationships.
Even if your diagnosis of BPD is correct, it doesn’t mean that you are a “bad” person, it simply means that you, like the rest of the human race, have some work to do. Unfortunately, with the psychopaths, they deny there is anything wrong with them and keep on doing the same evil things to others.
You have made a great step forward. Again, welcome.
Perhaps the key word is ‘choice’. A person must first recognize, accept and then choose to make a change. My BPD daughter is engaged with a sociopath. One feeds off the other. My daughter cannot choose at this moment because she is isolated in their little world. I suspect that it will take a mighty blow for her to recognize what she has gotten into.
Well, this speaks directly to me since I am afflicted with BPD which is a nuerological disorder of the limbic system having seizures during stress.
Dr. Heller (look him up) says BPD can be treated and cured with a system of medications (best prozac and tegratol) or some combination of SSRI and nueroleptic in addition to retraining the brain much like someone who has had a stroke.
The difference, in my opinion, between BPD and Sociopath is the BPD feels everything TOO much and the Sociopath feels nearly nothing.
BPD’s are more empaths than destructive of others. Instead of destroying the “other” we destroy ourselves whether that is through not eating right, self-mutilation and cutting or dating the wrong guy.
I love TOO deeply TOO quickly. I want to ease suffering not cause it, but somehow I always end up hurt and then flipping to wanting to make the other person feel how much they hurt me.
So I will threaten, but never carry out whereas the sociopath would just carry out whatever evil thought they have.
The threats are designed to make the other person “feel” the pain they have caused me, but then comes the anguish of the guilt.
As BPDs we FEEL everything A LOT. So the pain, the anguish, and the guilt are all amplified.
The guilt manifests itself in some form of self punishment.
In extreme depression we can become psychotic and not know reality from imagination and become paranoid as we try to piece together the puzzle as to why the “other” person did this to us.
The black and white all good all bad thinking is irrational, but at times of emotional distress, we can’t help it. The other person is all bad for hurting us and seeming to not care, while at other times we try to rationalize by empathizing with the person’s problems saying they must be suffering too and then we see them as a good person who is just suffering, and we want to ease the pain they are experiencing or that we ourselves have caused.
It is a miserable exitence, but I think we hook up with sociopaths on some level because they actually don’t care, and are hurting us – so at least we know we are not paranoid.
Most of my BFs have said they are afraid of me at one time or another. I guess making someone afraid means they won’t hurt you. But BPDs hate being abandoned and alone, and so in making the “other” afraid, we push ourselves further into the aloneness.
It is nothing short of a living hell because I feel I can love, but will never be loved as I want to or perhaps be loved but not be able to truly “feel loved.” Which is horrible for the “other” because no matter how much they truly love us, we never actually “believe” it.
I live the same nightmare over and over again with every guy. They all end up saying the same words and I end up crying for weeks and wanting to die because each time it happens it is compounded with the past hurts.
If you are not borderline … imagine the loss of someone you love – most of us have felt this grief… imagine feeling like that every single day except the person is not dead, they just fear you and don’t trust you and therefore cannot love you.
To live without love is hell… nothing less.
Its terrible sitting by watching my only “real” son get sicker and sicker as the girlfriend P vampire drains his life from him.
Dear Hole hearted,
You sound very aware of your feelings, which I think is the first step any of us can make toward healing. If we don’t understand where we are coming from, all of the understanding of the “other” won’t help us to have successful relationships.
I wish you well in your journey, as I wish the best for us all here at LF. thank you for sharing your feelings and your insight into them so candidly.
Thanks for all of your comments. Sometimes it can be confusing. Reading that the P tends to blame his victims gives me a perfect out for my emotional outbreaks. But, the truth is that I now believe that I am a bpd. I don’t know if there are degrees of impairment, I don’t feel that I am at the high end of the scale’ but I do fit the profile. As with any problem you have to admit you have one in order to get better.
For me it is a matter of recognizing those things in myself that make me liklely prey to the p/n/s. wanting someone to love me so much that I accept the unacceptble (sorry again’ still can’t spell.) Denial of the truth, cutting myself off from any support system I might have, living in that isolated world, these things are all key.
I have always wanted, more than any other thing in my life to have a happy love relationship. At twenty, it was possible. At thirty, it was possible. At fifty, I don’t think it’s possible. I’m not neccisarily upset about this. It might be time to explore other options. I sure as hell don’t want another like I’ve had in the past. I espec I feel emathy to a faultially appreciate you response Oxdrover,Very kind and welcoming. I identify with you, wholehearted, thanks. I may have a personality disorder, but I am definatly not a psychopath. I feel empathy to a fault, and feel remorse about everything. thanks again for letting me share.
for me it is a matter of recognizing those weaknesses in myself that make me likely prey to
justabouthealed said:
“The sociopath is the tin man without a heart”.but he thinks he’s the wizard.”
That is one of the most brilliant things I’ve read on this website, and I’ve read a lot of tremendously good posts. Thank you! It is EXACTLY what I needed to see and be reminded of tonight.
They are so creeeeepy, so very creepy. I just want to endorse “No Contact” for anyone out there who is doubting or who is in pain. It really works. It is really healing. It gives you back your life.
We all deserve to be at the center of our own lives rather than revolving around a person who is inauthentic and dismissive in a hopeless orbit while s/he exploits our resources, our love, our good nature, and endangers our well being.
Peace to all.
Thank you, I’m glad it helped! Well, wasn’t it alohatraveler who put up the link to the Wizard of OZ clip? We inspire each other! Agree with NO CONTACT. I’m trying to get to NC in my thoughts too…..totally! How funny….I just wrote myself a note earlier tonight to reread to remind myself of things and I titled it THE CREEP. They ARE creepy!
I was 17 when I first met my P. He was 28. We would fight a lot and then he would apologize and say, “I’m sorry, I’m a creep.” I still have one of his apology cards in a photo album. He signed it, “The Creep.”
God how I wish I had known what he meant.