Do pwBPD have generally have trouble understanding money?

[Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse...]

I'm wondering if something that I observed is a common trait, or just individual to my situation. Please note that I'm explicitly not talking about impulsive spending or financial irresponsibility, which I'm aware are common and even worked into the diagnostic criteria. What puzzles me is that my exBPD often didn't seem to understand money or finances at a very basic level.

For example, early on in dating she came to me upset at how insensitive a friend of hers was to her for suggesting that she take a multivitamin to help with some general tiredness and health problems. She told him (and me) that he just didn't understand that she's a poor woman and can't afford all kinds of crazy luxuries. She was especially insulted that he offered to pick up a bottle for her, and went on about how insulting it was and how she didn't want to be indebted to anyone.

The thing is, they're cheap - like $8 for 3 months worth at Target. She smoked half a pack a day, and ate a lot of fast food and convenience store food. Switching to buying coffee drinks and string cheese from the grocery store could easily save $8 in 3 months, and she had time and a fridge. And she had no problem at all accepting someone's offer to pay for lunch or dinner, which is the same cost or more. I was in the early stages at the time so I just assumed I was misremembering the price or that I was missing something about the situation, but looking back it really doesn't make sense.

Later on after we had moved in, I had talked some about how I had a problem with her lack of financial contribution to the house during her voluntary unemployment time, and how she wasn't doing the non-financial stuff that she said she would (chores and various house projects). This was something we needed to work out, and I was scared of BPD-RAGE in talking about it, but I needed her to either contribute financially or actually do stuff. In the meantime, we were talking about getting more healthy, I started going to a gym, and offered to cover a $20/month membership for her so that we could work together. I also offered to put her as an allowed user on my Lowe's card so she could buy stuff for housing work without convolutions. She angrily turned all of this down, because she couldn't see the difference in scale (monthly contributions to house should be in the $hundreds) and felt that my wanting her to contribute meant that I didn't trust her, so she was confused by the credit card thing.

There were a lot of other weird, non-impulsive driven money things that I see now, and I'd like to know if that's common or not.

[Gonzalo]

I'm wondering if something that I observed is a common trait, or just individual to my situation. Please note that I'm explicitly not talking about impulsive spending or financial irresponsibility, which I'm aware are common and even worked into the diagnostic criteria. What puzzles me is that my exBPD often didn't seem to understand money or finances at a very basic level.

For example, early on in dating she came to me upset at how insensitive a friend of hers was to her for suggesting that she take a multivitamin to help with some general tiredness and health problems. She told him (and me) that he just didn't understand that she's a poor woman and can't afford all kinds of crazy luxuries. She was especially insulted that he offered to pick up a bottle for her, and went on about how insulting it was and how she didn't want to be indebted to anyone.

The thing is, they're cheap - like $8 for 3 months worth at Target. She smoked half a pack a day, and ate a lot of fast food and convenience store food. Switching to buying coffee drinks and string cheese from the grocery store could easily save $8 in 3 months, and she had time and a fridge. And she had no problem at all accepting someone's offer to pay for lunch or dinner, which is the same cost or more. I was in the early stages at the time so I just assumed I was misremembering the price or that I was missing something about the situation, but looking back it really doesn't make sense.

Later on after we had moved in, I had talked some about how I had a problem with her lack of financial contribution to the house during her voluntary unemployment time, and how she wasn't doing the non-financial stuff that she said she would (chores and various house projects). This was something we needed to work out, and I was scared of BPD-RAGE in talking about it, but I needed her to either contribute financially or actually do stuff. In the meantime, we were talking about getting more healthy, I started going to a gym, and offered to cover a $20/month membership for her so that we could work together. I also offered to put her as an allowed user on my Lowe's card so she could buy stuff for housing work without convolutions. She angrily turned all of this down, because she couldn't see the difference in scale (monthly contributions to house should be in the $hundreds) and felt that my wanting her to contribute meant that I didn't trust her, so she was confused by the credit card thing.

There were a lot of other weird, non-impulsive driven money things that I see now, and I'd like to know if that's common or not.

[BorisAcusio]

Many of us can relate to that, Gonzalo, I think it comes down to the fact that their transitory presence in most cases only consists the "here and now" dimension, while having expectations of being carried like a child in life or having a pseudo-parent for a partner, remaining in irresponsible state.

half a pack a day, and ate a lot of fast food and convenience store food.

Making reasonably rational decisions requires a certain degree of object consistancy and the ability to delay gratification. In your example, she simply chose what benefited her and filled the void in the present, over something that would have marginal effect on her well-being months later.



While our delay discounting findings are consistent with research in other impulsive populations (Mitchell, 1999; Petry, 2001, 2002; Petry & Casarella, 1999), the extent of the preference for immediate rewards and the discounting of delayed rewards in our BPD sample, as compared to the healthy controls, is remarkable. Even when the delay was 1 day, BPD participants were inclined to accept a lesser amount of money because it was available immediately instead of waiting 24 hours for the full amount. In contrast, while control participants discounted the value of $1,000 over long delays, the lowest amounts they were prepared to accept were much larger than the BPD group’s choices, suggesting a greater degree of selfcontrol and ability to delay gratification. Many of the BPD participants joked about how they wished the money was real so they could pay outstanding mobile phone bills or buy more cigarettes. Such comments reflect how this style of decision-making is manifested in the day-to-day lives of individuals with BPD, where immediate gratification often takes precedence over pursuing longer term options such as saving money or quitting smoking. It is possible that the level of decision-making bias might be accentuated in our sample since younger age is associated with greater impulsivity in BPD (Stevenson et al., 2003).

www.goo.gl/AvtDbM

[iluminati]

That jives with my experience.  With pwBPD, money isn't thought of in the same way we do.  Everything has to attend to whatever immediate need they have.  They operate so much in immediate crisis mode that they have a hard time thinking of the bigger picture when it comes to money.  After all, when that trauma from your past is threatening to overtake you, the future seems like a cruel joke.

[Gonzalo]

The 'here and now' explains not wanting to manage money, but not the whole part of getting mad at the friend offering to buy them. I think there is also a large bit of constructed identity in the refusing to accept the free ones, where she felt like she was supposed to be someone who didn't accept money/things from other people, so she got angry at the suggestion of him picking up a bottle for her. Maybe it ties back in to some of the dissociation/splitting stuff, since she actually had no problem taking money/stuff in general (as her idea of dividing stuff 'fairly' at the end shows, ), but occasionally would insist that she was very self-sufficient and responsible.

[BorisAcusio]

The 'here and now' explains not wanting to manage money, but not the whole part of getting mad at the friend offering to buy them. I think there is also a large bit of constructed identity in the refusing to accept the free ones, where she felt like she was supposed to be someone who didn't accept money/things from other people, so she got angry at the suggestion of him picking up a bottle for her. Maybe it ties back in to some of the dissociation/splitting stuff, since she actually had no problem taking money/stuff in general (as her idea of dividing stuff 'fairly' at the end shows, ), but occasionally would insist that she was very self-sufficient and responsible.

HappyNihilist had a great post about this.

Also, without a stable sense of self, the child cannot develop appropriate mentalization - the ability to understand the mental state of oneself and others. Peter Fonagy explains that "mentalization acts as a buffer: when actions of others are unexpected, this buffer function allows one to create auxiliary hypotheses about beliefs that forestall automatic conclusions about malicious intentions." pwBPD don't have this buffer. For them, there is only one possible version of reality. As Fonagy says, "an oversimplified construction [of reality] is uncritically accepted. This frequently leads to paranoid constructions of the other's desire state."

They are known to be exceedingly sensitive to perceived slights, she could have interpreted the situation as putting her in a one-down position.

[enlighten me]

The 'here and now' explains not wanting to manage money, but not the whole part of getting mad at the friend offering to buy them. I think there is also a large bit of constructed identity in the refusing to accept the free ones, where she felt like she was supposed to be someone who didn't accept money/things from other people, so she got angry at the suggestion of him picking up a bottle for her. Maybe it ties back in to some of the dissociation/splitting stuff, since she actually had no problem taking money/stuff in general (as her idea of dividing stuff 'fairly' at the end shows, ), but occasionally would insist that she was very self-sufficient and responsible.

It may have nothing to do with money. Maybe she realises there is something not right with her and the fact that someone is offering to buy her "medicine" may be perceived as them thinking she's not quite right.

[Gonzalo]

Well, there was another case shortly after she moved in. It was a bit hard to find a job, so she had been out of work for a bit. We were in a big round of fighting, but I was very much in the 'figure this out and sort it out' stage. She was broke and needed a bit of cash for thrift storing for clothes, so I asked her how much, it was like $40 (not any big deal) so I handed her the money, and she stormed off calling me an ass. A little bit later, during an argument she got furious about a toothbrush that I threw out (it either fell on a dirty floor or I didn't know who's it was) and insisted that I was damn well going to pay her for it. So she's furious about a $2 toothbrush that we had more of while she's not paying any rent for a place to live. Another time she bought some garlic and herb cheese spread, and I asked her if she'd like salads with cheese spread on bread for dinner, and she raged at me about how the spread cost $6 and it was just too expensive to be used like that.

It sounds like what I ran into might be more individual to her than a general thing, there were just a lot of things really specific to money and who owes what that perplexed me. It wasn't all tied to another issue like medicine, so I think it had more to do with her wanting to see herself as fiscally responsible when, well, she isn't. I think writing them out here also helps me get them out of my head, even if there's going to be no clear answer on what leads to what. I also like that by posting here people will see the toothbrush or cheese spread bit and go 'Yeah, that's a mess' instead of 'you must be leaving something out'.

[enlighten me]

I did have similar experiences. Its as if they like you say want to show they are financially independent but arent capable of it. The little things that they can control become huge issues where the big stuff gets swept under the carpet.

The fact I was paying my exgf's mortgage and then the arears when it eventually sold was completelyy ignored by her. But if I spilt something I would get berated for wasting her money.

[Trog]

I find they understand it very well. Especially how to spend yours and stash theirs.

[Clearmind]

My ex was impulsive and impulsively spent money. Saved nothing and was in debt. My own boundaries around money was very loose - I handed it over to him on a number of occasions. He moved in with me and paid minimal contributions towards the household = I enabled him = lesson learnt.