Ok, this is my attempt to diagnose my undiagnosed wife of almost 14 years. I am going by the 9 Criteria as published by Kreisman and Strauss in I Hate You Don’t Leave Me – Understanding the Borderline Personality (Perigree, 2010). The official cutoff is 7 of 9, but I think she scores all 9.
1) Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.One of A.’s episode triggers is me leaving to go do a hobby activity for a few hours at a time when she is already feeling other stresses. More on this in the next one... .
2) Unstable or intense interpersonal relationships, with marked shifts in attitudes towards others (from idealization to devaluation or from clinging dependency to isolation and avoidance), and prominent patterns of manipulation of others.A.’s episodes usually begin with a sudden nostrils-flaring announcement of “I’m leaving.” When asked why, the answers swing wildly minute to minute from “I don’t want to be with you!” to “You don’t even like me!” Often she will leave for no more than a half-hour or so and come back to verbally abuse me, other times she will not leave if I do not try to stop her. (I only try to stop her when she is bawling her eyes out as she cannot drive in such as state.) She will continually ask me leading questions seeking my agreement on things like, “You only want me around for cooking and cleaning, right?” and when I do not agree she will go to leave claiming I said I do not want her around. A common pattern is for her to say something negative and then believe that I said it. She actively begs me to end the relationship, then accuses me of not wanting her again.
Sex is a major trigger. She splits me all the time from her loving husband who satisfies her to an evil pervert who cannot satisfy her. Usually it’s when we do not have sex for more than a week that I can count on an episode, though sometimes if I initiate sex I get the storm instead.
When these episodes are not occurring, A. will rarely suggest things to do and claim to want to do whatever I want to do. During these times, she appears to be content to sit and do nothing. This will later be used as ammunition against me during episode time.
A.’s up-and-down family relationships also fall into this category, although the manipulation component is mostly missing. As we live out-of-state from her large (and mostly female) extended family of older sisters, mother, and many grown nieces with children, she is continually shifting from loving and missing them - her mother especially - to hating them for imagined slights. Sometimes it’s a sudden “remembering” of something that person said years ago, something that is now clearly-to-her an insult complete with snide tone of voice, but usually it’s Facebook which is a common trigger in two ways:
a) When someone posts something positive about their life, A. takes it as an obviously snide swipe at her for not having that positive thing, and
b) When someone posts something vaguely passive-aggressive (common in that family, lots of baggage there) A. takes it as a direct stab to her heart.
3) Marked and persistent identity disturbance manifested by an unstable self-image or a sense of self.A. never has anything good to say about herself, and uses her considerable imagination and creativity to continually come up with negative things about herself. When we lived in our home state, we went many thousands of dollars into credit-card debt to give her a substantial amount of cosmetic dermatology for her acne scars. This was a concerted effort to rid her of one of her major self-image problems. Now that it is gone, she seizes upon the slightest thing and seems to work against herself. Example: “I’m fat!” but an absolute non-interest in exercise or healthy eating. She continually accuses herself of being a terrible mother, and then spoils our son.
Many of her negativities center on why people hate, dislike, disrespect, and dismiss her. She worries constantly about what people think of her and always concludes that it’s bad. This ranges from strangers to family, and makes having any job a stressful task for her.
4) Impulsiveness in at least two areas that are potentially self-destructive.Definitely excessive spending and overeating, and she tells me often that she longs for sexual promiscuity.
5) Recurrent suicidal threats, gestures, or behavior, or self-mutilating behaviors.A. was hospitalized for one week 4 years ago. We were living apart at the time as her episodes had really been killing our relationship and I wasn’t dealing with them very well. She called me at work and asked me to take care of our son (4 years old at the time) and told me she had the pills all lined up on the counter. I got her to promise to wait until I got there and called 911 on my way there. She did indeed have the pills lined up, but often claims it was ‘a cry for help’.
Now she speaks of suicide often, for a time I had to confiscate all her sleeping pills. Every time her stress levels rise she talks of ‘going away’ but when she gets really down the ‘way’ turns into the permanent solution. In the past 3 years I have had to threaten her with hospitalization maybe 20 or 30 times, going as far as grabbing a phone and dialing 9.
I am hoping that this is all just manipulation but I’m not going to call her bluff on it. 6) Affective instability due to marked reactivity of mood with severe episodic shifts to depression, irritability, or anxiety, usually lasting a few hours and rarely more than a few days.This sentence is the clearest description of A.’s episodes I have come across. The storm comes quickly with little warning.
7) Chronic feelings of emptiness.For many years A. and I have believed that she suffered from depression. Several times she has been treated for it with mood-altering drugs that granted temporary stability but long-term worsening of symptoms. She often gets down on herself for dropping out of college, for not having a career, for not having more kids, for not doing this or that. She seems to lack a central core of ‘this is who I am’ and of course feels badly about herself for this lack.
8) Inappropriate, intense anger, or lack of control of anger, e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights.The worst was when she kicked me in the side while I slept soundly in our bed. Other bad times occur during her episodes when she is shaking with rage and states that she wants to smash my face in, and has taken a swing or two at me. Occasionally she will throw things.
9) Transient, stress-related paranoid thoughts or symptoms of severe dissociation.Two days before her breakdown and suicide near-attempt, A. had described to me that as she worked her night retail job she heard voices in the Musak talking about her. She will often speak of ‘them’ or ‘everyone’ thinking bad things about her. In particular she will rail against my mother, my sister, and myself as being part of a twisted conspiracy to keep her down and take our son from her.
Additional Notes:
Some of the warning signs date back to when we were young and dating, such as depression and clinginess.
Major rifts did not appear until after the birth of our 1st son. That was when the irrational hatred and paranoia of my family came out of nowhere
Before our first out-of-state move, A. had been moody and negative about her own family and often expressed a desire to move out of state. So with her blessing I took a big job opportunity 2700 miles from home, and we made the cross-country trek. Looking back, this was a grave error as it removed her from the support system she didn’t know she needed. It was there that her episodes grew bad enough for me to move out until her suicide attempt and hospitalization.
That job was a career move for me that didn’t work out very well, forcing us the very next year to make another cross-country move to a state 1200 miles from home (and to a terrible apartment which adds to the stress). Now we have been here 3 years and her episodes are worse than ever, but I have grown wiser in dealing with them (much thanks to bpdfamily dot com and the Lessons !)
[url=https://bpdfamily.com/content/communication-skills-validation]Validation[/b][/url],
[url=https://bpdfamily.com/content/communication-skills-validation]validation[/b][/url] all day until she wants to be validated that I'm evil and don't like her.
Since that move I have obtained a significant career jump here in our second out-of-state state, an opportunity that coincidentally came out of professional connections made in the first didn’t-work-out job. Now she continually pines for our home state as a magical solution, and while I pine for a big suport system I know that to move back there where the economic recovery is shaky at best would mean a sharp decrease in income and long-term stability.
At the time of this writing A. is 7.5 months pregnant with our second son and I am scrambling to purchase a 3-bedroom house in a good school district here, and I am trying very hard to bring her around to accept that she needs to go to therapy, an idea that she is terrified of. I have NOT used the word ‘borderline’ at all but I have told her that she does have a specific set of symptoms that there are specialists for.
Finally, yesterday marked the worst episode ever: she performed much of it in front of our son, who is a Highly Sensitive Child and is already suffering from behavior problems.
