Did She Really Love Me? ~ Joanna Nicola

[confusedbloke]

Women on the Spectrum of BPD - Did She Really Love Me?
Joanna Nicola

Falling in love is often thought to be one of the most amazing and enjoyable experiences a person can have. It can truly bring out the very best in each of us and can cause even the most independent individuals to yearn for a lifetime partner.

Yet for men who unknowingly enter relationships with women on the spectrum of BPD or borderline personality disorder, the happiness they find in discovering true love is often dashed within the first year of their relationship, leaving them not only alone but utterly devastated.

The pattern of disillusionment that so many men experience is due to a disturbing behavior pattern that is not found in any pop psychology books nor recognized by the average couples counselor. It is a behavior pattern so bizarre that even individuals with solid ties to their friends and family may wait years before disclosing the true state of their relationship, usually in a final plea for help.

As one of the unfortunate individuals who fell in love with a woman on the spectrum of BPD you may have at first felt like you had met your soul-mate. This woman may have made you feel more loved, desired and accepted than you had ever felt in your life.
 
She might have instilled the kind of trust that could make you drop all your barriers, and she may have given you a desire to join forces that seemed more right than any decision you had ever made. Every sign that you imagined would be visible telling you that she was the one may have been in plain sight. Without a doubt you would have thought this was the person you were meant to be with.

If you are like most men, during the next few months all of your hopes and dreams of your perfect relationship would have been either dashed or eroded away as her behavior towards you changed from the ultimate dream to a perfect nightmare.

The lucky ones find their way out of these relationships without guidance simply out of a sense of self-preservation. But even those who are strong enough to leave may have years of recovery ahead of them to heal from the psychological wounds that are inflicted when a human being opens up to love completely and is then treated cruelly by the person they are in love with.

One of those wounds is the lack of understanding of how a partner who swore they loved them could turn into someone who treats them hatefully. They want to know if the love the woman on the spectrum of BPD professed was true, even for the short time it was showered on them.

The short answer to this question is yes, chances are very high that their partner did love them. However, love means different things to different people. And the way love is experienced by women on the spectrum of BPD can be radically different from the way most of us experience it. So although she may have felt real love, the way she expressed it may not register as love in the way most people know it.

In this blog post we are going to take a look at love as it is experienced by a woman on the spectrum of BPD so you can come to your own conclusions.

[confusedbloke]

When Extreme Love Turns To Extreme Hate

When a woman on the spectrum of BPD transitions from her initial phase of idealization of her partner to the phase of devaluation, her change in feelings can lead to a breakup even if lifelong promises have already been made.

But in some cases, after she passes through the initial idealization phase of her relationship, she will switch back and forth from being in love to being in hate and then back to love with her partner.

She may spend the rest of the relationship mistreating or even abusing her partner one day and acting as though they are a happy couple the next. This is one of several common behavior patterns that can leave partners of women on the spectrum of BPD in doubt of whether her feelings of love were ever real.

Partners of these women who have not experienced the toxic combination of love and hate in a romantic relationship in their past may become very confused, particularly when the woman on the spectrum of BPD vacillates daily or even hourly between love and hate. These relationships leave innocent partners playing a highly destructive form of emotional roulette, trying to predict what kind of treatment they will be subjected to on any given day.

Other women on the spectrum of BPD may make a permanent transition and never return to the state of love they were in when the relationship started. Strangely enough, these women may feel that a relationship that is filled with what could only be described as hatred for their partner is perfectly normal. They believe that they still love their partner and that feelings of intense hatred are part of the overall feeling of romantic love.

People who grew up in abusive family environments often find themselves stuck in relationships with women on the spectrum of BPD. Having had caretakers who also associated love for their child with hateful behaviors, they may be unable to break out of a role they learned in childhood.

These behaviors may seem very confusing to someone on the outside, but there are actually very good reasons for women on the spectrum of BPD to act the way they do.

When Love Is Not Enough

Women on the spectrum of BPD are often seen as individuals who can never get enough love, attention, or emotional security. In other words, they don’t seem to be able to get enough when it comes to their emotional needs.

But what we discover when these individuals learn the basic skills for getting emotional needs met in a healthy way is that their extreme needs stabilize. After they learn how to take care of their emotional needs they experience needs very much the way the average person does.

The explanation for this leveling off in intensity once these women learn the skills that most of us pick up in childhood shows us that women on the spectrum of BPD don’t actually need more love, attention or security than other people.

What drives their negative behaviors in their relationships is not an excessive need for attention. It is merely the fear that they will never get enough attention. Not knowing how to take care of emotional needs for themselves, they tend to panic. And it is the panic that drives them to try to extort caretaking behavior from others.

Romantic love offers within it a salvation for the woman on the spectrum of BPD who suffers from the lack of ability to take care of her emotional needs. When we are in love we all enter a naturally obsessive state of adoration and idolization of our partner. This state makes us want to fulfill every desire of our loved one, and under its influence many people are willing to devote 24 hours a day to doing it.

For the woman on the spectrum of BPD, getting another person to fall in love with her is the only sure-fire way she knows of to get another person to fulfill the needs she can’t fulfill for herself. Women on the spectrum of BPD are often masters at getting their romantic partners to fall in love with them for precisely this reason.

By getting a partner to fall in love with them they are able to accomplish the impossible. Only a partner who is in love with them will be motivated enough to take care of their emotional needs, minute by minute, all day every day. And it is only when the woman on the spectrum of BPD feels 100 percent certain that all of her needs will be taken care of that she can feel secure in her relationship.

When we compare the motivation of the woman on the spectrum of BPD with the average person, we find that when the average person falls deeply in love they might enjoy it as much as the woman on the spectrum of BPD. But because most people have the ability to take care of their own emotional needs, their love is not filled with desperation and the terrible fear that they cannot survive if a partner is not 100 percent focused on them.

The average person may experience being in love as a wonderful sense of euphoria resulting from having another person doting on them as though they were the most amazing person in the world. But they will experience this feeling as a luxurious excess.

The woman on the spectrum of BPD will experience this extreme level of focus and adoration as the very minimum or bottom line amount of attention necessary for her to remain comfortable in the relationship. This level of attention will be the least amount that she needs in order to feel secure.
But relationships eventually must leave the state of mutual idolization where partners stop taking care of each others needs. Instead they must transition to partners supporting each other in taking care of their own needs. Therefore a woman on the spectrum of BPD will at some point have to reenter the state of emotional helplessness that she was trying so desperately to escape.

At some point she will be faced with the realization that her supply of emotional security can be taken from her based purely on the whim of her partner. This realization will cause her to be acutely aware of her powerlessness in her relationship.

There are many responses that we might expect from an individual who is unable to take care of her emotional needs and who realizes her new partner has all the control in the relationship leaving her helpless. Most women on the spectrum of BPD use a whole range of behaviors in order to try to control their access to what they see as a not quite reliable outside source of caretaking.

And it is this extra dimension of needing a love interest to fulfill all of her emotional needs that causes her to experience romantic love in a different way than the average person.

The Dark Side of the Spectrum of BPD

For most people, feelings of romantic love are positive ones. Our romantic partners add to our lives, and since we are already taking care of our own needs, we know we can survive if we lose a partner’s attention.

A woman on the spectrum of BPD will experience romantic love as fraught with peril. She may even have irrational feelings that make her believe she will die if she doesn’t have her romantic partner’s constant devoted attention.

Because she depends on her partner to take care of all of her emotional needs, a woman on the spectrum of BPD, in order to keep a partner’s undivided attention, may use any number of tactics to motivate her partner to take care of needs she should be taking care of for herself. She may feel compelled to convince her partner that she must to be taken care of because she is helpless.

It is common for a woman on the spectrum of BPD to appear helpless or to portray herself as a victim in her life in order to ensure another will take care of all of her emotional needs. She may also exaggerate or even lie in order to get needs she should be attending to taken care of by her partner. She may be very seductive towards her partner or she may try to make her partner jealous by being seductive towards others.

But in many cases in order to secure her partner’s role in taking care of all her needs, a woman on the spectrum of BPD will try to use domination and control, bullying, blackmail and even threats of self-harm. In her mind, her negative behaviors will seem like necessary corrections of a partner who she still loves but who is not behaving as she believes a partner should.
Although it may seem as though domination of control have no place in a loving relationship, the woman on the spectrum of BPD may see it differently. She may believe that it is her partner’s duty to take care of her needs and that it is her duty to correct or even punish her partner when she senses a lapse in duty.

Using this perspective, she is able to maintain her feelings of love for her partner while subjecting the partner to mistreatment. But for partners who are unaware of the role being projected onto them this transition will seem like the very opposite of love. It will seem as though her love has turned into hatred or at the very least cold indifference.

But for a woman who chooses to address her insecurity about taking care of herself through exerting dominance, it is simply a tactic that allows her to be secure enough to stay in the relationship. She will be capable of experiencing love for her partner while simultaneously feeling the need to use very unloving tactics to ensure that he complies with her expectations.
She will not, however, be consciously aware of the reasons she is treating her partner in what will seem like a hateful manner. This is because women on the spectrum of BPD have character traits that make self-introspection very difficult.

But in order to better understand the woman on the spectrum of BPD’s lack of insight into her behavior, we must take a look at what the woman who believes she still loves her partner even though she is treating him hatefully feels.

[confusedbloke]

When Lack of Insight Leads to Impulsive Behavior

A woman on the spectrum of BPD will try to make sense of the change in her feelings towards her partner. But because her insight is very limited she will experience the transition from idealizing love to complete devaluation of her partner in one of several ways.

She may after many months of idealized love one day simply find herself inexplicably irritated by her partner and simultaneously unable to suppress her impulses to say bad things about him. Or she may wake up one day in a bad mood which happens to last for days, weeks, months or even decades.

If she was capable of introspection she may realize that the combined effect of her criticisms seems geared towards making him feel bad about himself. She might, if she was able to stand back and look at this dynamic, discover that when her partner’s self esteem is lower than hers she feels more secure that her partner won’t leave her.

Another way she may experience this turnaround is through noticing that her partner seems to have mysteriously turned into a person who doesn’t deserve respect or that he’s turned into the kind of person who actually deserves her disrespect. She may either decide that her partner has changed since they first got together, or she may feel that she didn’t notice these character flaws at first.

If she was more capable of self-introspection she may become aware that her behavior towards him is irrational and that her partner doesn’t deserve it. With insight she might realize that she still loves her partner and is being abusive or needlessly cruel.

But to truly understand why women on the spectrum of BPD are so limited in their ability to apply cognitive understanding or insight to their behavior, we must take a look at the interplay between the cognitive and emotional processing centers in the human brain.

When we are very young we are highly emotional creatures. We have very little ability to understand our needs. We must rely completely on our early caretakers to identify, interpret and respond to our emotions and take care of our needs for us. For the most part we make sense of the world around us by using our emotional processing center.

When a young child has a need, they experience it as a strong emotion. They will alert their caretaker in a primitive way by expressing this emotion very loudly. This expression of negative emotion alerts the caretaker that something is wrong. It is then the caretaker’s role to use their cognitive processing center to make sense of the child’s emotions. The caretaker then takes an action to address the child’s need, whether it is through soothing words to calm fear, food or help with a bodily function.

As we get older our cognitive ability develops, and we learn to gradually take over the role of interpreting our emotions for ourselves. Eventually we learn to identify these emotions so we can take the appropriate action necessary to fulfill our own needs.

By the time we are adults, most of us are capable of shifting back and forth between these two processing centers, using the emotional part of our brain to identify our emotions which signal that we have a need, and then using the cognitive part to figure out what action can be taken to fulfill the need.

Women on the spectrum of BPD have very heightened emotional sensitivity. This sensitivity can result in too much stimulation of their fight or flight reflexes during early childhood. By the time they reach adulthood they are often awash in a sea of negative emotions.

This can leave women on the spectrum of BPD stuck in their emotional processing center much of the time and with very little access to their cognitive processing center. Without the cognitive insight necessary to interpret their emotions they may not be able to figure out what action will take care of their needs.

And without insight provided by the cognitive processing center, the conclusions they come to when trying to make sense of their behavior or the behavior of others can be very primitive. For instance, without the ability to apply context, when their sensitivity causes them to be afraid, they will see the person who triggered their fear as dangerous.

When their sensitivity causes them to feel lonely they will conclude that the person who triggered this feeling has abandoned them. Because they are locked into their more primitive processing center they will be unable to apply the context that would tell them it is really their over-sensitivity that has caused their pain, not the actions of others.

In unraveling the question of whether a woman on the spectrum of BPD really loved their partner we have up to now been focusing on situations where the woman on the spectrum of BPD has decided to stay with her partner and use tactics to secure her partner’s focus on her needs. Let’s now take a look at the behavior of women on the spectrum of BPD who do not stay with their partner after transition.

There are many women on the spectrum of BPD who do not use tactics to try to guarantee their partner will take care of all of their emotional needs. When these women come to the realization that their relationship partner may not be able or willing to take care of all of their needs they simply leave the relationship and find someone else who can deliver.

A woman on the spectrum of BPD will often leave behind a string of partners who she initially got to fall in love with her and who she subsequently dropped after her transition. When a woman with BPD leaves the relationship for another and seems to be as deeply in love with the next person as she was with the previous partner, it can be a shocking experience for the partner who has been left.

If they are not aware that part of their partner’s love for them was motivated by their inability to take care of their own needs, it may look like their partner faked their love. However, in most cases she is not faking. In other words, she will experience the same kinds of feelings of love as her partner. The difference is that a woman on the spectrum of BPD, unlike the average person, can lose those feelings of love just as quickly as she found them.

When we closely observe the behavior of women on the spectrum of BPD in their relationships we will notice that they don’t seem to experience love in as stable a way as the average person does. But in order to truly understand this important difference, we must first take a look at how the rest of the world experiences it.

The Two Sides of Romantic Love

We are going to now address an aspect of romantic love that is rarely discussed, but which almost all of us experience at some point in our lives. Although we seldom distinguish them, if we observe our own love life or the love lives of others we will discover that there are actually two different kinds of romantic love.

There is the way we feel when we fall in love, and there is also a more mature and long-lasting love that we develop for partners we choose to make a long-term commitment to. When we talk about romantic love, we are often referring to not one but two types of love that human beings experience towards their potential mates.

People often experience the phenomenon of falling in love with a potential mate as a rational feeling towards a person who fully deserves their adoration. But although falling in love may feel very real, science has shown us that these feelings are actually a result of a chemical change that seems to be hard-wired into the human species.

Although it may be slightly disappointing to realize that the magical feelings we have when we fall in love are chemically induced, we can at least be assured that there is another type of romantic love that most people experience that is based soundly on reason and rationality.

While our brain chemicals are drumming up the euphoric emotions that seem to help us bond at least temporarily with individuals who are often complete strangers, the cognitive part of our brain will also be at work behind the scenes creating a more stable and long-lasting form of love.

We might label this more stable kind of emotion mature romantic love. It rests on a foundation of trust that is built brick by brick each time our partner shows us by their actions that they are capable of honoring their long term commitment to us. For most of us, by the time the chemical reaction that creates the feeling of falling in love wears off, this more mature form of love has been firmly established and can take its place.

Unfortunately, this more mature form of love may not be attainable for a woman on the spectrum of BPD. Because of their sensitivities to rejection and abandonment they may not be capable of recognizing their partner as trustworthy enough to build a foundation for mature love.

But the inability to form mature romantic love isn’t the only weakness for a woman on the spectrum of BPD. As it turns out, the way women on the spectrum of BPD experience romantic commitment is also different than how the average person experiences it. We will find that in many cases the commitment that a woman on the spectrum of BPD makes to her partner may be as fleeting as her love.

A woman on the spectrum of BPD may feel completely committed to her new partner and honestly believe her feelings will last a lifetime. But without the mature love as a foundation she may find her commitment fizzling at the same rate her love for her partner runs out.

A women on the spectrum of BPD, when she senses she can no longer control her partner’s desire to take care of her needs may find herself wanting to look elsewhere for someone who will give her the devotion she needs to make her feel secure. She may experience a break in her feelings for her first partner which then develop for another. She may very quickly feel the same level of intense love for this partner and believe that this new person is actually her true soulmate.

The explanation for how a woman who flip-flops so rapidly could have possibly loved her first partner lies in a third observable difference between the woman on the spectrum of BPD and the average person. To understand how she can blatantly claim that her new love interest is her real soulmate so soon after promising a lifetime commitment to the old partner we must take a look at the differences in ethical and moral judgment between those on the spectrum and those who are not.

Ethics and the Woman on the Spectrum of BPD

Women on the spectrum of BPD generally have a very well developed moral code for themselves. In fact, they are often much more critical than the average person of immoral or unethical behavior of others. But when it comes to their own behavior, they may seem to be navigating through life without any sort of moral compass.

Although it may look from the outside as though these women lack morals of any kind, what is really happening is that their sense of moral judgment is being overridden by their emotions. No matter how strong a person’s belief system is, if they lack the ability to control their emotional impulses, they will be unable to act according to those beliefs.

The woman on the spectrum of BPD is often caught in a Catch 22. Her moral and ethical code may be highly developed. Yet her emotions are continually causing her to take actions that go against that moral code. And to make matters worse, there is also a third difference in the experience of love for women on the spectrum of BPD behavior that can contribute to this toxic mix.

We will find that the tendency of a woman on the spectrum of BPD to judge others as either saints or sinners applies equally to their judgment of herself. Under the influence of her primitive emotional processing center, any behavior of hers that does not fit into the saint category will automatically cause her to believe that she is a sinner. Some women on the spectrum of BPD when their black and white thinking casts them in a monstrous light, will turn against themselves with self-punishment or self-harm.

But there are many women on the spectrum of BPD who when faced with what they imagine are unforgivable violations of their own ethical and moral codes will find themselves unable to tolerate these painful feelings. Being unable to tolerate such high levels of shame, they often make a desperate attempt to absolve themselves by latching onto any justification that might clear their name.

A woman on the spectrum of BPD may tell herself and others that she made a big mistake and didn’t see what a loser partner number one was. She may choose to lie to her friends and family saying that partner number one abused her. She may even call the police and have partner number one arrested on false charges, not only absolving her of what she feels are her own crimes but also giving her a convenient excuse to flee into the arms of a partner offering her a fresh supply of caretaking.

As unlikely as it may seem, these women may still believe that they love their partner and many have been known to return to a partner they called the police on after their new relationship fizzles out with an expectation that the relationship could resume. In this case we might describe their experience as a lapse in love just long enough to justify the emotional impulse.

Up until now, we have been focusing on how the woman on the spectrum of BPD feels about her partner. But in order to put the last piece of the puzzle in place you may need to also gain a clearer understanding of the nature of your love for the woman on the spectrum of BPD.

[confusedbloke]

Why You Fell In Love

Most partners of women on the spectrum of BPD find that the experience of falling in love is different than any other relationship they have ever been in.

In order to understand why you may have fallen so hard for this individual, it might help to first take a look at a few interesting observations that social scientists have made in relation to the way human beings fall in love. As it turns out, one of the ways in which the chemicals that define our experience of falling in love can be artificially jump-started is through recreating certain behavior patterns that tend to happen naturally when people are romantically drawn to each other.

We now know that something as simple as staring into another?’s eyes for long periods of time is an emotionally moving experience that can help trigger falling in love. We can also observe that divulging certain kinds of deeply personal thoughts, beliefs or emotions to another person can create a bond that can trigger the process of falling in love if both people are naturally attracted.

It can be enlightening to look back to the beginning of your relationship with a partner on the spectrum of BPD to try to remember if there were times when you looked deeply into each others? eyes, communicating without words.

And when you think back, chances are high that you engaged in deep and meaningful sharing. We know that women on the spectrum of BPD can be very candid with their emotions and very encouraging of their love interests to tell them things they never told anyone else.

But in order for you to even more clearly understand the extreme nature of falling in love for romantic partners of BPD, we need to take a look at two behavior patterns that women on the spectrum unconsciously put into use during their initial phase of idealization that can in some cases cause men to fall head over heels in love with them.

The first aspect that can profoundly affect the speed and intensity which men fall in love with a woman on the spectrum of BPD is the way she makes her partner feel about themselves. In order to get her partner to focus obsessively on her needs, a woman on the spectrum of BPD will do whatever it takes to make her partner feel better about themselves than anyone has ever made them feel. This is often accomplished by shows of adoration, idolization and levels of care and kindness that the partner has never experienced before.

The woman on the spectrum of BPD will initially give the kind of love that is only possible to give when there is complete trust in a relationship. The way she accomplishes this without first building trust is by suspending all of her fears and willing herself to believe her partner is 100 percent trustworthy. And by suspending all of her fears she also gets her partner to in turn trust her completely. The end result is what we might describe a feeling of perfect love.

The second aspect that can profoundly affect the intensity and speed of falling in love with a woman on the spectrum of BPD is her ability to initially show exactly what she is thinking and feeling to her partner. We all have walls that we consciously put up in the presence of others. These invisible walls are very necessary for our self-protection. They are the healthy boundaries that we use to keep ourselves emotionally safe until we get to know whether the person we are with is going to accept who we really are without negative judgment.

Because all people suffer from insecurity around negative judgment from others, it is essential that we spend a great deal of time testing new people before we completely open up to them. Most people never pass all of our closeness tests that we subtly put them through. Yet we can still have a comfortable and healthy relationship without having to disclose our most private thoughts and feelings.

But in order to be in a long term romantic relationship we must develop the kind of trust where we can completely let down our guard with our partners. Although we will always have boundaries in place in terms of how we let our partners treat us, in order to feel safe enough to enter a permanent partnership we must feel certain that as long as we behave in the realm of respectful behavior, our differences, weaknesses and flaws will be accepted.

A woman on the spectrum of BPD, in order to get a love interest to devote themselves entirely to her, will let down all of her walls immediately without testing the waters of trust first. She will let her love interest see her most vulnerable side right away. This is not a conscious move on her part. In her panic to have her needs taken care of, she will throw caution to the wind. In her mind a new partner will inexplicably appear to be a person who seems incapable of hurting her.

Because we are very used to seeing people’s walls or boundaries, the experience of being allowed complete access to the inner world of someone we barely know can be quite a profound experience. When we encounter someone who has no walls up, no defenses, we may feel the same way we do when we encounter a young child or a helpless baby animal. We cannot help but want to protect and nurture them.

In addition to making us want to protect and nurture them, the act of another person dropping their defenses in front of us can often give us the freedom to drop our own defenses. Sharing on this unusual level of openness with a new acquaintance, particularly when there is a romantic element involved, can release us from our inhibitions and the feeling can be exhilarating.

Often this initial experience of interacting with a woman on the spectrum of BPD can be so powerful that despite the fortress of defenses she puts up in the later phase of this relationship which can include severe levels of mistreatment or abuse, her partner may not be able to stop trying to access the vulnerable person that they imagine must be trapped inside the walls of her defenses.

The powerful combination of a person making you feel better than you ever have plus the experience of being let in past every boundary can create a feeling of love so strong that no amount of negative treatment can convince the partner to leave. It is the woman on the spectrum of BPD’s siren-like effect that can keep partners in unhealthy relationships for decades.

Not knowing what has attracted them so strongly, most partners of women on the spectrum of BPD believe that she must be a special match for them and that their unique connection synergistically created the perfect relationship. But what they may not realize is that the perfect love that is created when both partners have 100 percent trust is not sustainable, nor is it particularly healthy in a relationship.

As human beings we can never be completely trustworthy. We all share universal character traits of selfishness as well as fear of the negative judgment of others that makes us all flawed partners. For this reason, in order to be healthy in a relationship we must already know how to take care of our own emotional needs. That way we can enjoy the wonderful feeling of another person taking care of our emotional needs from time to time without having to fear that without our partner we will not be capable of survival.

Although every one of us has a childlike wish to be loved as a perfect parent would love a young child, once we reach adulthood we must find a way to be content with respect over adoration and a mature and lasting love over the euphoric highs of the head-over-heels type of love that is the hallmark of women on the spectrum of BPD.


Joanna Nicola graduated from New York University with a B.F.A. in 1979. She has taught Linklater Technique, a method that allows people to work through emotional blocks, at Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Hofstra University, Hebrew Union College and Mills College.