Editor’s note: This article was submitted by Steve Becker, LCSW, CH.T, who has a private psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and clinical consulting practice in New Jersey, USA. For more information, visit his website, powercommunicating.com.
It is not unusual in my clinical experience to see, sometimes, some quite chilling sociopathic activity from my “borderline personality-disordered” clients. When someone has a “borderline personality,” it’s quite likely, among other things, that he or she will present with a history of emotional instability; a pattern of chaotic interpersonal relationships; and poor coping skills under stress, reflected in self-destructive/ destructive acting-out and a tendency to suicidal behaving.
These unstable trends are not explained by a core psychotic orientation, although individuals with borderline personality can sometimes lapse into psychotic thinking when feeling hurt and rejected enough. Borderline personalities tend to see others in “black and white,” as either all-good or all-bad; they struggle to retain more flexible, ambivalent views of others. Others are either idealized, or devalued; these swings of perceptions can be sudden, volatile, and complete.
Perceptions and/or experiences of abandonment often elicit the borderline’s dysfunctional responses and psychological deterioration. In his or her more stable state, the borderline personality can sometimes function well and seem to be well-adjusted. But more intimate involvement with him or her, over time, will expose an underlying, poorly disturbed sense of self and incapacity for mature relating.
A question I’ve found myself considering is: When the borderline personality is acting, and looking, like a sociopath, is it the case that he or she, in these states, effectively is a sociopath?
It should be noted that behaviors per se are never sociopathic, only the individuals perpetrating them. Sociopathy is a mentality from which antisocial, exploitative behaviors gestate and emanate with a destructive, historical chronicity. But one can infer the presence of the sociopathic mentality from a telling pattern of behaviors.
Clearly there are fundamental differences between borderline personalities and sociopaths, differences which I appreciate. At the same time, when the borderline personality’s rage or desperation is evoked, one sees (and not rarely) responses that can closely correspond to the sociopath’s calculating, destructive mentality.
Once inside this mentality, I’m suggesting that borderline personality-disordered individuals can lapse into a kind of transient sociopathy. Commonly, victims of the “borderline’s” aberrant, vicious behaviors will sometimes react along the lines of, “What is wrong with you? Are you some freaking psychopath?” They will say this from the experience of someone who really has just been exploited as if by a psychopath.
Because this isn’t the borderline personality’s default mentality (it is the sociopath’s), several psychological phenomena must occur, I think, to enable his temporary descent into sociopathy. He or she must regress in some way; dissociate in some fashion; and experience a form of self-fragmentation, for instance in response to a perceived threat—say, of abandonment.
These preconditions, I suggest, seed the borderline personality’s collapse into the primitive, altered states of self that can explain, among other phenomena, his or her chilling (and necessary) suspension of empathy. This gross suspension of empathy supports his or her “evening the score” against the “victimizer” with the sociopath’s remorseless sense of entitlement.
Case example
I worked not long ago with a male, 24, who slit his ex-girlfriend’s tires in the parking lot of the restaurant in which she tended bar. He’d suspected her of cheating with her manager. Notably, they were still together at the time of his act. Although his girlfriend surmised his guilt, he wouldn’t admit it, suggesting foolishly that the perpetrator was probably the manager. While his suspicions of her infidelity had some basis, the important point is that they activated an inner-self crisis and desperation characteristic of borderline personality structures.
Specifically, he feared losing her—a prospect so traumatic that rage was summoned to help mobilize his fragmenting self. His rage was experienced as cold, not volatile. He regressed into paranoia, as one who had been betrayed and, cruelly, left helpless. His failure to soberly examine the circumstances and his inflammatory reactions represented a form of mild dissociation/detachment from reality that enabled the paranoid experience, and processing, of his fear; his detachment (and regression) enabled him to formulate and execute his revenge with his empathy (and guilt) conveniently iced. In other words, he could perpetrate his vengeance with the detached calm of someone who has experienced a trauma, as in a state of depersonalization.
Upon emerging from this state, it would be as if emerging from a sort of dream, or seizure. The rationalization would kick in: what I do in those states really isn’t me, so I don’t really have to take full responsibility for it later on. It’s as if the borderline individual surfaces from his dip into sociopathy once again a borderline (and no longer a sociopath).
Motives that drive patterns of problematic behaviors frequently illuminate and distinguish the personality disorders. In this case, what seems to have driven my client was his crumbling sense of self in the form of an inarticulate terror of being abandoned. For this reason (among others), I can confidently say that he wasn’t a sociopath. But when he was in that regressed, dissociated, fragmented state—for as long as it lasted—I suggest he was.
Interesting post. Having been involved with a BPD for five years, before my five years with the sociopath, and spending the last four years trying to sort it all out, I recommend Stephen M. Johnson’s work (“Characterological Transformation: The Hard Work Miracle” and “Humanizing the Narcissistic Style”) for some great models on the continuums of personality disorders and their historical causes.
I didn’t know I was involved with a BPD. My partner started to disintegrate, when I developed a friendship outside the relationship. Up to that point, I felt pretty lucky to be involved with someone who was so caring, so interested in anticipating my needs, so concerned about my personal development, etc., etc. It wasn’t until later that I realized that I was being “paid off” (in the currency that meant the most to me) to stay 100-percent focussed on the relationship. And that my partner viewed me as a kind of non-negotiable “emotional home” that was fixing early abandonment issues. I was the anchor. Or there was no anchor.
When I say disintegration, I mean it was wild. After seven years of sobriety, there were drunken car crashes, destructive machinations at the business we co-owned, arrests for disorderly conduct, and on and on. Through all of it, it was made clear to me that I could stop this at any time, by returning to being the totally involved partner I had been before.
When I broke it off, my partner went into a lockdown psychiatric ward and was in and out of lockdown and addiction treatment centers for years afterwards. I got re-involved periodically out of guilt, and then dis-involved myself when the emotional tentacles started wrapping around me again. I should have dis-involved myself because of the lying that went along with the addictions that escalated from booze to drugs. Or the way I was used in other ways for things that probably could have put me in jail. But I felt guilty and responsible for the mess.
It wasn’t until I went through the recovery process of dealing with the sociopath — who was actually a lot more straightforward in his exploitation than the BPD — that I realized how ruthlessly I’d been used. And with a BPD, it’s easy to overlook this, because their emotional needs are a lot more attractive than the sociopath’s emotional needs. The BPD needs emotional security, and is willing to pay almost anything to get it. As an incest-survivor, I had my own emotional security issues and arguably was a dependent type, so we got along pretty well for quite a while. Though there were a lot of serious peripheral issues, like the way my adolescent son was regarded as a competitor for my attention.
But in retrospect, after the experience of having a sociopath systematically work at dismantling my identity and values for his own profit, I’ve gotten a little more cynical about the BPD, who still calls me occasionally to see if there’s an opening for worming back into my life. There’s an illusion of caring deeply about me. But it’s just an illusion. What is really wanted is someone who will hold still so the BPD can get firmly attached and use my life to make up for the missing parts in the BPD’s life. And in this, the BPD is not very different than the sociopath. They both lie about what’s really going on. They both are experts at emotional manipulation.
But to characterize one as being as bad as the other misses the point. I think that one is the flip side of the other. The yin and yang. My sociopath was as desperately needy as the BPD, but it was the shadow side. The BPD was a ruthless and ultimately uncaring about what was right for me as the sociopath, but that was the background of the personality.
These two types represent the extremes of the continuum of personality disorders. They seem to have chosen extremely different strategies. The sociopath needing nothing but victory, the BPD needing nothing but connection. But it’s not different from the dark side of codependency, where all the “softness” of enabling and acquiescence is, in my mind at least, a front for “hard” expectations that these services will be rewarded with love and security.
While I was involved with the sociopath, I had a friend who was struggling with her own emotional problems. She was constantly outraged by the fact the I was so loving, understanding and generous to the sociopath, and he was none of those things to me. “He’s not playing by the rules,” she said.
I felt that way myself, but whenever I heard her say in her histrionic way (naturally, my best friend has histrionic personality disorder), I got a little squeamish. What rules were we talking about? I could try to be holier-than-thou, and say that he wasn’t “conforming to the social contract,” whatever that is. But the truth, and I knew it, was that I was trying to minutely catalog his every need and buy my way into his heart in exactly the same way my BPD partner had done with me. Beyond that, my unmet need for emotional security — because there was NONE in this relationship — had me so distressed that I was in full-blown BDP mode for the first time in my life. Including not giving the tiniest damn about what he wanted as long as I got what I wanted.
Whew.
One of the points that Johnson makes in his books — and I think it’s a common understanding — is that personality disorders are basically the over-reliance on a single strategy for getting our needs met. My histrionic friend makes a great deal of noise about her emotional states. My sociopath is determined to triumph at everything. My BPD gives and gives and gives. And me, I have a history of doing whatever I have to do to see approval in other people’s eyes.
In “Strategy of the Dolphin,” one of my favorite books, the authors break the world down into sharks and carps. Sharks are addicted to winning. Carps are addicted to being loved. This is a rough approximation of the yin and yang I’m talking about. Sharks are loners. Carps are social. In interactions between sharks and carps, the carps become food. Sound familiar?
In these relationships in my life, I look at me and the BPD, and who was the shark? I’m not sure. I actually did very well out of it, though it cost me and continues to cost me financially and emotionally. With the sociopath, I think I was the carp, and he took advantage of my feelings for money, sex and something he wanted even more, a huge leap in professional and social status. But if you asked him, he would list all the ways he gave up the life he really wanted and the compromises he made in order to get my help.
You may wonder about the shark and the carp, and if there is any way out of that dichotomy. The reason the book is called “Strategy of the Dolphin” is because there is a third type, which was based on Eli Lilly’s discovery that dolphins adapt to changing circumstances and, if their usual strategies don’t work, they’ll experiment with new strategies.
Dolphins can look like sharks to carps, and like carps to sharks, because they adapt to the circumstances. They’re not stuck in one strategy. One of my favorite parts of the book is the description of what a dolphin will do when a shark comes in for an exploratory nip. They do “tit for tat,” doing an equivalent nip right back. It’s not mean to escalate, just to communicate in clear terms that the shark has picked the wrong victim, and the shark would be better off moving on.
That works with sociopaths too. Unfortunately, the only thing I know of that works with BPDs is just to keep saying no. It’s very hard and very sad, especially when you’ve known the person well and profited from the relationship. But it’s a boundary, and I think that all of this is about boundaries. Understanding our own, and not playing any game that involves us breaching our boundaries or anyone else’s.
khatalyst,
You post is swingingme back to BPD for the Bad Man.. all except for one thing you said about the giving. He wasn’t a big giver but I loved what you said about being emotionally “paid off.” That’s another way of looking at setting the hook.
:o)
I am dealing with a few cluster bs.
I need help today. I am feeling very, very angry knowing the smear campaign that orchestrated behind my back.
I have to go on a trip with a histrionic and a psycho soon. No way around it– I don’t speak to either now, but the looks GRATE on my nerves. I want to tell them to F–k Off something I never did.
What to do? How do I cope?I am so angry and hurt. An dthis trip is supposed to be a “once in a lifetime” sort.
Holywatersalt,
Is the “trip” WORTH IT?
It sounds to me that you would like to make this trip but at the same time I think the “price” you will have to pay for it may make it a HIGHER PRICED TRIP than you really want to pay.
It is, I think, sort of like taking a “loan” from someone who wants to control you, it will COST you more in the end than doing without the loan will.
I would think about it before I went because if you are starting to fret about it now, think how you will feel when you are WITH them.
Let me put it like this. Before all the chaos went down, my mother (not knowing my financial status) kept offering to give me money if I needed it. I didn’t need it, but IF I HAD DESPERATELY NEEDED IT, I would NOT have taken it, I would have rather lived in a tent and eaten out of McDonald’s dumpster because it would have been easier and nicer than taking money from someone who wants CONTROL.
Everything we do or have in this world COSTS something. Time, energy, money, etc. So look at the “cost vs. benefit” ratio. The cost to going on this trip is to be around these people, is the trip worth it? If so, go, if not, don’t. Either way, be satisfied with ourself that you made the DECISION that was best.
I made the decision LONG ago not to ever take a “favor” from my mother. Therefore she had no “dependent hold” on me. In the Scots-Irish community in rural Arkansas where I grew up, there is sort of a “social rule” that you don’t TAKE favors from anyone you don’t fully trust…you may GIVE favors, but not TAKE except from a close blood relative or CLOSE friend.
This is so that you are not “obligated” to someone, or as we would say “beholden” to them. If someone does you a favor and you can’t avoid it, you must either offer to pay them, or repay them in some way so that you are “even” and not in their debt. I can’t even remember when I became AWARE of this custom, but when some people from “up north” moved here and we became friends, I had to literally TEACH them this custom so that they could “fit into” the community. My husband, coming from rural Kentucky originally, already knew this custom and had no problem when he moved here.
Back when I was married to a man whose father was a P, they used to do us all kinds of favors, and then make us pay by letting them CONTROL us. I realized back then that I did not want FAVORS from anyone and that those “gifts” were actually “business deals” on control.
So I learned to calculate the cost of anything by what I had to PAY FOR IT. Sometimes it was in money/time, like “those shoes cost X amount of $, and I have to work 10 hours (time) to earn that much money. Are they worth 10 hours of my time?
Or, if I interact with jane for the afternoon, I know she will go into her “drama” act and ask for my opinion and when I give it to her honestly she will get mad at me. Do I really want to invest 4 hours today with being around her?
Look at your trip’s “worth” vs “cost” in terms of emotional turmoil and make your decision. Simple: cost” vs. “benefit”
It’s a lot more complictaed. 10,000 investment
and there’s quite a few people going, a lot, so we will be separated, and I see them every week already.
I just am feeling angry about the injustice of it all. The stories I could tell. One, the hsitronic, lied to protect her married lover from TRUE chrgaes of child sexual abuse. THAT”S JUST ONE issue– and then portrayed me as the bad guy. I need to vent, or I will hyperventilate.
HWS
HWS–
I still don’t see it as “more complicated”–it boils down to Will you enjoy it enough to have to be around these people? Even just causally (I assume they are going on the trip)?
It sounds like they still have some power just by their presence to upset you by what they have done in the past. I definitely can understand that part. Just ask yourself, will being around them at ALL spoil your trip?
I can’t even imagine going on the “trip of a lifetime” even if it was FREE with my X-DIL along on the same trip, even if I didn’t have to eat dinner with her, just having her there would ruin it for me. Not after she tried to kill my son.
I would just suggest that you think clearly about how you really feel about being in their presence and pray about it and then make your decision. We can’t see the future, unfortunately, and if they are that toxic they might possibly try to “get’ya” on the trip with a “whispering” campaign.
Good luck. and VENT AWAY!
I guess, unless I give up a lot – I will never, unless they leave, be done with them.
I am OK each week- I do not acknowledge them etc. but I have feelings and I am hurt.
I also have some very good people going with me so they will make it fun.
I have been bullied most of my life- I am kind of used to it- I guess I am just having a time of extreme irritation. I wish I would have told them off- I wish so many things were different.
We are being separated for the most part so that’s good and the person organizing knows whats up. I just feel this sense of injustice. I’ll be alright- I find there are jerks of one flavor or another everywhere. I did learn a lot from the P experience….namely personality disorders exist and are dangerous. I just steered away from a potential friend b/c I recognized the signs right away.
I am angry because rotten people are mucking my life up. And I don’t feel believed. It’s that– ironically it’s me and the disordered who know the truth.
This essay is so interesting to me in light of the various behaviors and attitudes of the multitude of psychopathic mentalities around me—especially with my enabling mother, who has been during all this crisis, displaying “psychopath-by-proxy” behaviors, in defending the psychopathic grandson from me (his mother).
Looking back over my mother’s life, and her behaviors, probable motivations, etc. and her enabling behaviors for the Ps in the family, most of which commenced when her enabling mother died, and she assumed that “role” (which was almost a 180 degree switch from her previous personality of “not taking any crap” off the Ps).
I also realize that there is probably some “abandonment” issues involved with my mother’s motivation for her enabling, her feeling (not thinking, FEELING) that because I had started to set limits on her demands for my time, that I had “abandoned” her and she was frantic to find another source of “support” and turned to the Ps by luring them with money, and projecting the “greed” upon me instead, which of course they (the Ps) fostered as it met their own goals for money from my mother. Isolated her from me, reassured her that they would “take care of her” in her declining years and health. Of course, saddling themselves with an increasingly decrepit old woman as 24/7 companions and caregivers was not their long term goal.
So many of the Professional-crook Ps seem to prey on the insecurities of the elderly, the lonely, with malice-a-fore-thougth, even hooking the elderly into their own victimization and fighting like cats-and-dogs the very people who would “protect them” from the Ps themselves.
The one thing about people who suffer from Borderline personality disorder is that they at times show real and honest empathy (emotions) toward the ones they love, for a BPD wants relationships, needs them as we all do. But people, who suffer as a sociopath can only mimic these same emotions (empathy) via acting, displaying love, concern for love ones. BPD shows (sometimes very dramatically) their love and affections for their desired target. Again, other personality disorder like a Narcissistic Personality Disorder (i.e. sociopath) can only act the part. We feel that something is missing, when they display their affection to others. Also I have found that treating (psychotherapy) a person with BPD is possible because they want to change and at times will accept responsibility for their actions. Not so with people who suffer from other kinds of PD again like an NPD. Yes, I agree that BPD sufferers will show and had showed sociopath traits, but are short lived unlike the sociopath themselves. I too had a very hard time understanding (pin pointing) what kind of personality disorder my ex had. Until I learned about clusters i.e. A, B, C. that in fact PD’s do in fact share traits as in dependent personality disorder, anti-social personality disorders and obsession/compulsive personality disorder, etc. Which is why we need to research this as much as we can. Example would be Dr. Hare work as in his Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV). Confusing people who suffer from BPD with a person who is a sociopath will not assist those in helping them (psychiatrist) to understand their mental/emotional illness with those who suffer from continuities sociopath traits. More research must be done to help those that want the help then those that don’t and feel no need to change. As the old saying goes, “you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink it”.
Hi…I have been struggling to understand my ex’s behaviors- I think this will help me move on…James talks about BPDs actually showing real and honest empathy. Sometimes I think this was the case with my ex. But how do we know that they were in fact honest and real? I do think that when I would no longer tolerate his behavior and he felt I was going to abandon him, he abandoned me (even after tearfully asking for forgiveness and acknowledging he needed counseling). He then turned to his enabling Narcissist father because he knew HE would never abandon him…But my ex’s lack of empathy when he told us all to leave, his newborn included, seems sociopathic…Part of me feels that he has suffered on a certain level and others have observed him say he doesn’t seem ‘well’…
What I do know, however, is that whatever it is, why he discarded us, was terribly wrong…a sin…
I wonder if there is a difference in socio or psychopaths and a person with BPD as far as any internal suffering goes. Part of me thinks that perhaps a person with BPD suffers internally because of their behavior where I don’t think the sociopath or psychopath does. Not sure….