Borderline Personality Disorder: Who's the Real Victim Here?

Most people do not even know what BPD is. My good friend Cheryl didn’t know until she met her husband’s ex-wife, Donna. Two years previously, after holding on to a 17-year marriage for the sake of two children, her husband Al had separated from a wife who was “mentally unstable,” in his words. He had not heard of BPD either. But he had lived with its ravages for all the years that he knew Donna. A very abbreviated description of this disorder would best be given by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV), a diagnostic manual used in psychology. As defined by Psy.com, “Individuals with Personality Disorders have more difficulty in every aspect of their lives. Their individual personality traits reflect ingrained, inflexible, and maladaptive patterns of behaviors that cause discomfort, distress and impair the individual’s ability to function in the daily activities of living.” To specifically fit the parameters of BPD, an individual must possess 5 of 9 traits specified in the DSM – IV (diagnostic manual). BPD, as quoted by borderlinepersonalitytoday.com, is described as a “pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
1. frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5.
2. a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
3. identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
4. impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). Note: Do not include suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5.
5. recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior
6. affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).
7. chronic feelings of emptiness
8. inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)
9. transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms”

One might ask, “How could a person get caught in a marriage to such a person?” BP’s are frequently very impressive and quite charismatic on a superficial basis. And, as it goes in a number of relationships, Al dated her for two months, she got pregnant, and he was a true gentleman, and a loving father. Donna’s behavior increased in rage, anger and verbal abuse so that by the time she was six months pregnant, he couldn’t believe how much she had changed. He says he would have divorced her within the first year of marriage if it hadn’t been for the child. Back then, Al explained it to himself saying that the pregnancy hormones were making her act this way, and things would get back to normal once she had the baby. Things only got worse… and worse. As he describes it, he became “the lightning rod for her to discharge her anger and rage.” When the first child, Althea, was six, a second child, Natalie, was born. Understanding the extent of his loyalty to his child, Donna had “lost” her birth control pills for several months. This way she would hold on to him longer. And, so the story went over the 17 years of marriage, 2 years of separation, and the years that have followed the divorce – rage, dissociative incidents, several brief psychiatric hospitalizations, impulsive spending, eating, driving recklessly (in one instance, over 100 mph on a mountain road with Natalie in the car, and in another instance, running into the median barrier on the freeway scraping off the side of the car while having an argument with Natalie (this,and more, related by Natalie to Al and his new wife, Cheryl), vengeful acts, extraordinary attempts (and successes) at parental alienation (as well as intense alienation of Natalie towards Al’s wife Cheryl), sometimes as many as 15 angry, belligerent, and manipulative phone calls/voicemail messages and many, angry, manipulative emails per day to Al and Cheryl, devisive stunts to embarrass Al at work, angry threatening messages placed under Al's windshield wipers at 2 in the morning, fights with neighbors and coworkers, inability to hold a job, verbal abuse -- and, after the divorce, physical abuse of her daughters, extraordinary attempts to avoid abandonment, suicidal behavior and threats, instability of mood, frantic attempts to manipulate and control, and always, ALWAYS, portraying herself as the victim. It was Al’s fault, not Donna’s exorbitant post-divorce spending, that caused her to have to sell the house that she had received as part of the divorce settlement. It was Al’s fault and not the endless credit card balances that propelled her into bankruptcy after the divorce, and not too long after she had received $50,000 from the sale of the house. (She frittered away the fifty grand in less than three months.) Talk to anyone married to, or divorced from, a sufferer of BPD; it’s pretty much the same for all of them. Because the BP is so impressive on the surface, and because they rarely have consistent health insurance, due to frequently losing their jobs, many BP’s are never diagnosed with BPD. And, even if they are diagnosed, because of job instability and frequent changes in health insurance, many do not receive consistent help. Some sources say that it’s best not to put the BPD diagnosis in the file, because many therapists will shy away from taking on the BPD as a patient. BPD’s frequently make very difficult patients, prone to projection and transference, becoming very aggressive and defensive toward the therapist.


Many articles, books, and websites depict the BP as a “sufferer,” or a “victim” of the disorder. I do not mean in any way, to belittle the sheer hell BP’s must go through with this disorder. But there are other characters in this plot that are frequently neglected. The story doesn’t end with the divorce for Al’s two daughters or for Al and his new wife. All these people become collateral damage in this BP’s disaster of a life. When Natalie turned 18, the $1500 per month child support that Donna received came to an end. Donna now has no hold on Al, but her effect on her daughters continues. Donna’s efforts to brainwash the daughters are ongoing. Nowadays, Althea makes minimal efforts to maintain a strained relationship with Al and Cheryl. Althea now lives a distance from Donna, yet she still remains in contact with her, telling her what a wonderful mother she is, in order to hold her rage at bay. Although their father and his new wife hold postgraduate degrees, and are successful in their careers, and have encouraged and offered both daughters a college education, Al’s heart aches that his daughters barely survive working in call center and minimum wage jobs, with no plans of attending college or bettering themselves. The older daughter, Althea, did start college, but was put on academic probation after her first semester in college, and then dropped out two weeks into the next semester. Every year she makes empty promises that she will be starting “classes” the next semester, thinking that this will appease her father. She tells people that she has "two years of college." She herself suffers from ADD, and continues filling her life with strings of fantasy lies. (“My boss just gave me a raise that doubled my income. I’m going to make $60,000 a year now.” -- She was working as a receptionist. On another occasion, “My boss told me I am going to be hired as a supervisor of the school where I’m working.” Later, when asked how the interview went, “I’m so upset. They didn’t tell me I needed a Master’s in Social Work.”) She was married and divorced twice before she was twenty three, and conceived a child out of wedlock in between. The younger daughter talked of college to appease her father, but never even started the first semester after she graduated from high school. At twenty-two, her body is covered with pierces and tattoos. She cuts herself (the older sister self-mutilated at 14), drinks heavily, parties constantly, is infamous with her friends for the quantity of alcohol she can consume at a party, and works a dead-end entry level job. Both daughters are experts at telling lies. They are “drawn like a moth to a candle,” in Al’s words, when he speaks of their obsessively close relationship with their mentally unstable mother. The daughters know just how to stroke Donna’s ego, to benefit from favors. Althea is minimally communicative with Al and Cheryl and Natalie is now completely estranged, complaining about her father with the identical words and expressions that her mother had used all the years of marriage, and after. She is in constant contact with her mother, telling her what a perfectly wonderful “mommy” she is, because her mommy “gives her money and things even when she doesn’t have any money to give.” She has an extremely distorted concept of the world of money and how one should acquire it – after watching all the money her mother received from her father in child support and watching her spend it foolishly, Natalie feels that people who love her should pour money on her, and if they don’t want to do this – “f**k them.” She has expressed this to her father as well as publicly on her website. Natalie’s complaints of her father are like listening to a tape recording of the mentally unstable mother’s complaints – in many cases, even the words used are verbatim. Althea walks a tightrope, barely keeping in contact with her father and Cheryl, while stroking her mother’s ego. During rare phone calls, she has expressed the seriousness of the brainwashing that is going on with Natalie. She has expressed the concern that Natalie appears to have a kind of amnesia, is unable to recall the real events of her childhood. Althea says that Natalie is only able to recall the “re-recorded” version that her mother has repeated to her over and over. These two young ladies are the collateral damage of a BP. Both were taken to psychologists for therapy, but by this time, the damage had been done. Althea was diagnosed at 14 with post traumatic stress disorder, and as the psychologist who treated the younger daughter a few years ago, said, “She’s sixteen. It’s too late now. If I had been able to work with her ten years ago when she was six, perhaps I could have made a difference.” At this time, the psychologist confided in Al that Donna was calling him, relentlessly, to maintain complete control of the therapy sessions, and had to be asked to stop calling, as well as to leave the office when she kept appearing to be present in the sessions with Natalie. Al and Cheryl still hold on to the hope that, with time, there may be some reconciliation between them and Al’s daughters, but he accepts the fact that it may not be happening soon.

Some professional journal articles speak of a statistical probability as high as 50% that, a child with ADD that has a BPD mother will develop BPD. However, from the looks of it, Althea may have less characteristics of BPD then Natalie does. Natalie presently exhibits 8 out of 9 characteristics. Psychologists decline to diagnose teenage BPD, since it has been shown that some mental instability may mimic BPD traits but may merely be part of a difficult adolescence, and the traits may actually disappear by the time an individual reaches 19 or 20. Natalie will soon be 22. Her blog spews hatred, anger and resentment. She continues to self-medicate, and to cut herself, blaming it all on her father and her father’s wife. (Natalie lived with Al and Cheryl for a year when she was 13, but could not stand the normal structure of a curfew, accountability for her whereabouts, and requirement to participate in one or two family chores, and was seduced by the total “freedom” (read: total lack of supervision) her mother offered her at the age of 14.” Natalie blames Cheryl, for “all the pain of her whole life.” She blames her father, for abandoning her mother.)

“The sins of the father….” in this case should read, “The sins of the mother….” The adults in this story can fend for themselves. Cheryl and Al managed to stay married in spite of the myriad problems they had from Donna. The daily “damage” that Donna did to the lives of Al and his new wife was eventually controlled with a sequence of protection orders, but the damage that Donna did to her two daughters will live on in the damaged psyches, instability, obliviousness to boundaries, lack of self-discipline, and poor self esteem that Althea and Natalie will have to work on the rest of their lives. At present Natalie does not speak to Al or Cheryl. Donna has convinced Natalie that her father is a hateful bastard, a horrible father, and that he abandoned her mother and dragged her and the children to another state where Donna is still unable to get a decent job. (Donna has a Master’s degree in a technical field, but due to her unstable work relationships, subsequent frequent layoffs and recent inability to get jobs in her field, has not kept up with her field.) Donna has convinced Natalie that Al is responsible for this and all the problems in Donna’s as well as Althea’s and Natalie’s life. Natalie believes her mother. This is brainwashing honed to a fine art, lavishly dealt out over the years. What Natalie seems to have forgotten is her painful childhood when she never knew which mommy was coming around the corner – the nice one or the mean one, when her mother lavished gifts upon her or made her give away her favorite toy as a sadistic way to punish her, or the mother who bought her candy at the store one minute and the next moment, threatened a ten-year-old Natalie that she was not going to see Mommy anymore because Mommy was going to commit suicide. She forgot the outlandish behavior of her mother that to a small child looked creative and fun, but which set her mother up as an outrageous, uncontrollable child in the family, and not the parent figure, it modeled behavior which decimated all boundaries. Natalie has forgotten the times when , with seemingly no provocation, her mother would turn into the mean mommy and rage in screaming fits in which an impressionable teenage Natalie was called “a pathetic loser,” bitch,” and many other names a mother should never, ever call her daughter. Natalie seems to have forgotten the scenes with her mother “bitch slapping” her, as well as slamming her head into the passenger window of the car. She seems to have forgotten all the times the police were called to break up a violent fight between Natalie and her mother. On Al’s side – if Natalie could only remember the real truth, she would remember how her father tried to keep the sky from falling, she would remember that neither he nor Cheryl ever spoke poorly of Donna in Natalie’s or Althea’s presence. She would remember that Al and Cheryl never used demeaning words towards Natalie or Althea as Donna had, that Al and Cheryl encouraged Natalie and Althea to develop healthy friendships, value education and live productively. Natalie forgets that her mother used these attempts of Al and Cheryl to bring normalcy to Natalie’s life, to make it look like they were denying her freedom. Even if Natalie could remember it, she most likely would not admit it. And if Natalie has memory of even one of those incidents, she would still tell you today that her mother is a different person today, that she has changed. Althea would disagree. Natalie does not live with Donna anymore, and Donna has been able to fool Natalie, just as she was able to fool Al, maintaining the thin veneer of mental stability. When Natalie leaves, she does not know that Donna lights into Althea with the same vengeance as before. Althea is Donna’s lightning rod.

Al felt that it was important for a child to never hear a negative message about her mother from the divorced father. Therein lies the irony. Doesn’t it skew a child’s sense of reality when no one ever admits that Donna’s behavior was and is crazy and angry, and vengeful, and manipulative? Al just kept frantically running in circles, trying to catch the pieces of the sky as they fell, trying to keep as normal an environment as possible, pretending that everything was okay, for the sake of the children. At 22, Natalie now believes her mother is not mentally unstable, but rather that her mother is a “victim” in a vicious plot to ruin her life, and she’s become quite belligerent to Althea if anything different is mentioned. If there’s an elephant in the room while your child is growing up, but you pretend for long enough that the elephant is not in the room, there is a danger the child may believe she’s never seen an elephant, may be unable to identify future elephants, rendering all elephants virtually invisible to that child. If you admit the elephant is in the room, however, you would be accused of bad parenting for badtalking the mother. Al stayed with Donna all those years because he feared for the safety of his daughters. Donna can put on the act of mental stability when necessary and was able to fool the judge. Al finally left Donna because the marriage therapist took him aside, privately, and told him Donna would never get well, and that what he was doing was killing him, would kill him -- and Al would be no good dead, to his daughters. That got through to Al.

One apple, one irreparably rotten apple, one sly and manipulative apple was able to spoil the lives of all the other apples in the barrel. But, of all the victim apples, the ones that deserved their own chance at life, were the two little girl apples. Whether you speak of elephants or apples, the story turns out the same. There are national campaigns to help eradicate many diseases, there are programs to evacuate people from the path of a hurricane, programs to help survivors of disasters, but there are no national campaigns to educate the populace about BPD, to identify BPD parents, and to get their children help before it’s too late. Most BPD’s do not remain married for long, but you can bet that upon the couple’s divorce, the children most likely go with the mother. Besides, most people have never heard of BPD, much less are able to identify its symptoms.

So, how do we go about reinventing the world, as far as personality disorders go? When I last spoke with Al and Cheryl, they had some opinions and suggestions for everyone to consider. First, everyone should be informed about personality disorders. More often than not, if confronted with a situation like this, you will have to make an initial “diagnosis” or evaluation of the individual before you ever consult with a professional therapist. For this, you must know the symptoms. As Al said, “people don’t come with a certificate or stamp on their forehead that says, ‘Not BPD,’ or ‘Personality-Disorder-Free,’ or alternatively, ‘Beware: BPD!’ Second, if you are already in a relationship with someone, follow good-ole-common sense and take it slow, and take the responsibility for birth control. Give the relationship enough time, to be able to identify any of these traits BEFORE you get married. If you find out you’re dating a BP -- unless you’re a glutton for punishment for the rest of your married life (and after the divorce, too), Al says, “Get Out, now!” If you are not sure, get a neutral Third Party, such as a therapist to help you decide. Remember, as Al’s marriage counselor had said, “What are you waiting for? If you’re waiting for her to get better, it’s not going to happen. There will be days like this, and worse days, but never better.” Al suggests that if you identify these traits in a potential partner that you think long and hard about the long term, and what you might be getting into. Third, If you don’t end the relationship, and you choose to remain in the relationship, Al suggests that you take the responsibility to make sure that no child is born into this relationship. (He wanted to make it clear that he loves his two daughters very much, and if he could have, he would have had them with a different mother who could have brought stability to the family relationship, instead of a continual maelstrom of dysfunction and confusion. Fourth, If there is already a child, you owe the child the following: 1) serve the best interest of the child and end the marriage, 2) relentlessly, do everything you legally can to bring the child with you, if you can, and, 3)no matter what – get continual counseling for the child. Make sure that the counselor specializes in pediatric and family counseling and is an expert in BPD. It is vital that you find a counselor who is trained and experienced in this specific field. Fifth, bring this problem to the forefront. Speak the words to the lawyer, the judge, the court officials, and the counselor. Sixth, if you are an adult child of a BP, get yourself into counseling to start undoing the damage that was done to you. Finally, seventh, if you recognize the symptoms of BPD in yourself, don’t hide or make excuses for your symptoms. Listen to your intellect and not your emotions – get your children help, and get yourself help. Some sources say that, although BPD is a lifelong struggle, and most admit it cannot be “cured,” many agree that if the patient is forthright and willing to work on it through sessions for a consistent and lengthy period of time, BPD can be controlled, and the BP can have a better life.

In a way, BPD is like heart disease, a silent killer. BP’s are not the most seriously victimized – their children are. Borderline Personality Disorder silently kills the futures of little children.