Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Dealing with Borderline Personality Disorder in Everyday Life
"GOD you are so petty and mean!"
Monday, August 1, 2011
Identifying Borderline Personality Disorder
It's hard to have a person in your life who seems bent on feeling injured, indignant, and enraged. Even when a particular situation that the person is going through seems like something one might legitimately gripe about, the person will inevitably respond with such an explosively disproportionate reaction that they eclipse all hope of getting a positive, sympathetic reaction from those they target. Other times, the person will react with the same displeasure and fury to situations where they have not even been wronged, often acting as though they've been slighted whenever they themself are called out for being in the wrong.
It can help to know that these behaviors aren't simply the personality traits of the difficult person in your life. Most likely, the person consistently exhibiting these behaviors has Borderline Personality Disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder can occur in men, but much like with anorexia, such an overwhelming proportion of the sufferers are women that it is often most useful to discuss BPD in female specific terms. And while each person is, of course, different, most women with BPD had a childhood in which they did not receive sufficient care, affection, or attention from their parents, especially their mothers. Diagnostically, BPD is strongly linked to a woman having suffered various degrees of emotional neglect in her early years, and not having her feelings validated by her caregivers to a sufficient level in order to create in her a balanced and accurate view of her own importance and validity in the thoughts and feelings of others.
People with Borderline Personality Disorder are irrationally defensive and self-righteous. A BPD woman will often react to even the smallest perceived slight with vitriolic and sometimes hysteric pronouncements that she is being mistreated or abused. Ironically, she uses this warped perception to justify treating others in ways that are categorically far more destructive and disrespectful than the way that she herself is being treated. But this is not happenstantial: she is unconsciously engineering circumstances through which to justify her ongoing perception that the world is against her, that everyone has it better than she does, that she is a victim. She is only equipped with the mental and emotional tools to be angry and/or depressed, and in order to rationalize why she identifies so exclusively with feelings of unhappiness, she unconsciously sabotages her every situation in life, from her work, to her romantic relationships, to her family. She usually does this through the fundamental principle described above: by constantly behaving as if others are slighting or victimizing her, she provokes a negative reaction from everyone, which she then, through exclusively circular reasoning, uses to justify her feelings of victimization.
Here is an example: Let's say BPD woman has a friend named Jane. Jane says she will call the BPD woman on Thursday night. But when Thursday night comes, Jane ends up working late, and she forgets to call. The BPD woman, if in the midst of a destructive cycle or episode, may react to this situation by calling Jane the next day, and telling her that her forgetting to call was degrading and abusive, that Jane is mean and unreasonable and she won't stand for it. Jane will most likely respond by telling the BPD woman that she is overreacting, and that by levying such weighty and disproportionate accusations on her, the BPD woman herself is being mean and unreasonable. To the BPD woman, this provokes the reaction she was subconsciously looking for. She has succeeded in getting Jane to react to her with heightened defenses. The BPD woman will then go on to use this incident to justify her feelings that Jane is an angry, abusive person, never acknowledging that her very own actions provoked Jane's defenses, and were, in reality, far more destructive than Jane's.
As illogical as this perception of reality is, it is common for a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder. BPD women are delusionally self righteous. They seldom think that the normal rules and principles of interpersonal behavior apply to them. They see their situation as different from others, even though any objective viewer could see this is not true. They frequently feel that they "deserve" better than what they have, and though these women are frequently tormented by periods of self-hatred and/or deep, inner feelings of inadequacy, they also obfuscate, and shirk responsibility for those feelings, blaming circumstances and people in their life for making them inadequate.
BPD women are no less intelligent across the board, and they are capable of going for periods of time without incident. As with all personality disorders, there are varying levels of severity, and highly symptomatic periods can be associated with "triggers," and/or stressful situations. By and large, however, BPD women have more problems getting along with others over extended periods of time. A common "red flag" associated with Borderline Personality Disorder is when a woman always seems to have trouble with the "people" at any given office or workplace. A woman with BPD might very well have a successful career, and stay at each job she takes for years, and yet still always find, perhaps despite excelling in her individual area of career expertise, that her co-workers are difficult, or that the interpersonal side of each working environment is bad or toxic. The element of this that serves as a "red flag" for friends, co-workers, or family, is that the woman cites the other people as being the problem inherent in each of the places she has worked, despite the fact that she herself is the common denominator.
It can help to know that these behaviors aren't simply the personality traits of the difficult person in your life. Most likely, the person consistently exhibiting these behaviors has Borderline Personality Disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder can occur in men, but much like with anorexia, such an overwhelming proportion of the sufferers are women that it is often most useful to discuss BPD in female specific terms. And while each person is, of course, different, most women with BPD had a childhood in which they did not receive sufficient care, affection, or attention from their parents, especially their mothers. Diagnostically, BPD is strongly linked to a woman having suffered various degrees of emotional neglect in her early years, and not having her feelings validated by her caregivers to a sufficient level in order to create in her a balanced and accurate view of her own importance and validity in the thoughts and feelings of others.
People with Borderline Personality Disorder are irrationally defensive and self-righteous. A BPD woman will often react to even the smallest perceived slight with vitriolic and sometimes hysteric pronouncements that she is being mistreated or abused. Ironically, she uses this warped perception to justify treating others in ways that are categorically far more destructive and disrespectful than the way that she herself is being treated. But this is not happenstantial: she is unconsciously engineering circumstances through which to justify her ongoing perception that the world is against her, that everyone has it better than she does, that she is a victim. She is only equipped with the mental and emotional tools to be angry and/or depressed, and in order to rationalize why she identifies so exclusively with feelings of unhappiness, she unconsciously sabotages her every situation in life, from her work, to her romantic relationships, to her family. She usually does this through the fundamental principle described above: by constantly behaving as if others are slighting or victimizing her, she provokes a negative reaction from everyone, which she then, through exclusively circular reasoning, uses to justify her feelings of victimization.
Here is an example: Let's say BPD woman has a friend named Jane. Jane says she will call the BPD woman on Thursday night. But when Thursday night comes, Jane ends up working late, and she forgets to call. The BPD woman, if in the midst of a destructive cycle or episode, may react to this situation by calling Jane the next day, and telling her that her forgetting to call was degrading and abusive, that Jane is mean and unreasonable and she won't stand for it. Jane will most likely respond by telling the BPD woman that she is overreacting, and that by levying such weighty and disproportionate accusations on her, the BPD woman herself is being mean and unreasonable. To the BPD woman, this provokes the reaction she was subconsciously looking for. She has succeeded in getting Jane to react to her with heightened defenses. The BPD woman will then go on to use this incident to justify her feelings that Jane is an angry, abusive person, never acknowledging that her very own actions provoked Jane's defenses, and were, in reality, far more destructive than Jane's.
As illogical as this perception of reality is, it is common for a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder. BPD women are delusionally self righteous. They seldom think that the normal rules and principles of interpersonal behavior apply to them. They see their situation as different from others, even though any objective viewer could see this is not true. They frequently feel that they "deserve" better than what they have, and though these women are frequently tormented by periods of self-hatred and/or deep, inner feelings of inadequacy, they also obfuscate, and shirk responsibility for those feelings, blaming circumstances and people in their life for making them inadequate.
BPD women are no less intelligent across the board, and they are capable of going for periods of time without incident. As with all personality disorders, there are varying levels of severity, and highly symptomatic periods can be associated with "triggers," and/or stressful situations. By and large, however, BPD women have more problems getting along with others over extended periods of time. A common "red flag" associated with Borderline Personality Disorder is when a woman always seems to have trouble with the "people" at any given office or workplace. A woman with BPD might very well have a successful career, and stay at each job she takes for years, and yet still always find, perhaps despite excelling in her individual area of career expertise, that her co-workers are difficult, or that the interpersonal side of each working environment is bad or toxic. The element of this that serves as a "red flag" for friends, co-workers, or family, is that the woman cites the other people as being the problem inherent in each of the places she has worked, despite the fact that she herself is the common denominator.
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