who is the borderline?

[seenr]

Do any of you use the tools on this site & wonder if it is your ex-partner or you is the Borderline?

So far I have found the resources here excellent & I can see how so much of my ex’s behaviour was questionable. But then I think my own was too & start looking up more detail on this site and question if it was me or her was the borderline. For example – the material says that a borderline is rarely someone who is ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ and that they can feel after two weeks like someone ‘normal’ can feel after six. I know that my ex has come back after 12 & 6 month spells away and the connection on her side seemed to be more magnetic each time.

It feels a little bit negative to think that maybe my behaviour was questionable and that I may have borderline tendencies. I did speak with an ex recently who told me that I was an excellent partner and that she panicked and got out of the relationship for other reasons, but had no complaints about me whatsoever. That was re-assuring, but then maybe self-doubt creeps in?

[Reforming]

Hi Seenr

I think there are quite a few of us who wondered whether we might have borderline traits after our relationship ends. I think there are reasons for this

When you're in a relationship with someone who is disordered it's very challenging to stay centred and behave in a healthy way. I think a lot of people can find themselves responding to disordered behaviour with disordered behaviour of their own. This doesn't mean that you are borderline - it does suggest that the relationship was / is unhealthy.

Reflecting on your own behaviour and choices after a relationship ends is healthy and useful, but sometimes during that process we teeter between taking too much responsibility or too little. It can feel like a double blow to realise that some of our own behaviour was far from healthy. Striking a healthy balance takes time and effort. Processing what happened and taking steps to learn and be healthier in our next relationship is possible and very worthwhile.

I think a lot of our exes exhibited behavioural traits that could be described as borderline, but not necessarily all of the traits which would be required for a full BPD diagnosis. We're talking about a spectrum of behaviour here. Ultimately what's really important is whether the relationship was healthy for you and your partner.

It's good to hear positive feedback from other exes and self doubt is part and parcel of processing your relationship. I think it's healthy and vital to ask ourselves some hard questions when things go wrong - the challenge is to balance that with compassion and understanding for ourselves.

I realise I made lots of mistakes, but I accept that I did the best that I could with the skills, knowledge and experience that I had. I also accept that there's room from growth and development on my part and I'm working to address that.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts

Reforming

[rfriesen]

seenr,

Yes, absolutely I've wondered at times, in the aftermath of this relationship, what my own mental/emotional issues might be. I don't think it really helps to focus on the label "borderline", but I have had a pattern of withdrawing from relationships because I get bored or want something new. I haven't always been faithful to girlfriends. Maybe I have love/sex addiction issues -- though I think there's probably a fine line between what we take as normal male behaviour growing up and sex addiction. (I'm in my late 30s now, so it's definitely getting time that I stop acting the way a guy would while "growing up".) I also have had a habit of pursuing very intense emotional and sexual connections in intimate relationships. Again, it's a fine line between normal romantic longing and something more, I think. All that said, this past relationship has been a real gut-check for me and I've been working hard with a therapist on being a more open, honest, aware and emotionally available person. Just basically maturing, I suppose.

At the end of the day, the reason I think my ex has BPD traits is that she would rage so intensely at me, then fall into fits of hysterical despair at the thought of me leaving. I never did either of those things. I never yelled or insulted her or told her I hate her or wished evil things upon her. And when we talked about ending things, I never wailed and said it was "impossible" or that I couldn't survive it - which she did, only to immediately go out and start searching for my replacement. My ex also started going through my pockets, my bags, my phone, and constantly asking about my interactions with other women. I had never experienced that kind of jealousy and possessiveness. And I began walking on eggshells and keeping minor things (e.g. that I talked to a female friend on the phone) from her in fear of her rage ... .which, in hindsight, was so stupid, because my ex would explode when she caught me in these little things and I would start to feel like maybe she's right, maybe I don't know how to be open and honest. Certainly there's a kernel of truth there -- just that my ex would blow it up to insane proportions and always assume I was having an affair.

Really, it's not the label that matters to me - "borderline" or whatever it might be. I have some things to work on and this relationship made that clear to me. At the same time, I remember the extremes of rage, hate, love, despair, jealousy, suspicion, ... .that my ex displayed, and I know that I wasn't ultimately to blame for that.

[woundedPhoenix]

Hey Seenr,

It's obviously healthy to question your own role in the dynamic, after all it's the only good thing we can carry away from all of this: How we start to behave amidst an emotional battlezone, and what's all behind that. I have been driven to the extremes of being more ruthlessly defensive and more self-sacrificing than in any relationship before.

We are not borderlines, we just are people with similar wounds then a borderliner, the coping mechanism that we developped to deal with those wounds sometimes overlap, but for the most part they are very different.

And that's where all the drama originated, in the beginning it felt super exciting as those old wounds where seemingy healing eachother, but along the way these wounds would turn against the relationship and ourselves.

And all the crazy relationship dynamics, the dysfunctional behaviours are just a result of old wounds and childlike coping mechanisms. It's no longer a loving relationship but one big ping pong match between old traumas.

On a trauma and behavioural level, we had the hooks they could attach their tentacles to, and push us to extremes ourselves.

[VitaminC]

And all the crazy relationship dynamics, the dysfunctional behaviours are just a result of old wounds and childlike coping mechanisms. It's no longer a loving relationship but one big ping pong match between old traumas.

Extremely well put, WoundedPhoenix.   I am printing this out and sticking it up somewhere! Maybe I'll make a collage of the insights and advice I find here as a big art project for my bedroom.

Which is actually not a bad idea at all! Wow.

I also find myself remembering, in kind of hazy flashes, instances of bad behaviour from me - subtle invalidations, things I did deliberately to decrease his sense of security in the relationship when I felt he was becoming 'lazy' somehow. My own needs for being the centre of attention mixed up with an awareness of his waxing and waning adoration. Something was off from the very very start. It was intriguing, then wonderful, then weird, and then worrying. And then followed months and months of ... .euch

My point is that, yeah, I did a lot of things that were not only not helpful to someone so fragile, but actively bad for them. That realisation came about a year in and after a confession of cheating. That nearly destroyed me, but made me think hard about what kind of person I'd been in the relationship. I went back in to the fray to 'be different', to address my own fears of commitment and engulfment, and saw more and more similarities between us.

I also wondered, if, even with my history of reasonably stable relationships, I could possibly have BPD. I seemed to have some of the traits and maybe I was causing him such stress with my demands for what I saw as equal and fair support in the relationship that he was crashing because of me.

I have to remember the things he told me right at the start, (woven in with all the delirious things people discovering each other and falling for each other say):

that he had a porn addiction that he felt intensely shameful about,

that he had many episodes of paranoia thinking even his family were all against him,

that he had tried to kill himself,

that he had cheated in every single relationship he'd ever been in,

that no relationship had ever lasted more than 3 years,

that he was insecure and jealous,

that I'd not yet seen his petty and tit for tat side,

that he had a tendency to drink far too much and 'cured himself of this',

that he'd screwed up every job he'd ever had,

that he was easily swayed by others,

that he had a self-destructive streak he didn't understand,

that he was prone to depression,

that he got a sense of elation sometimes that would wake him out of a sleep and he had learned that it was just his mind spinning on some kind of chemical and he had to ride it out,

that he could 'dial down' his emotions because then he felt better and that he realised it affected the people close to him but that he didn't care,

that he knew he was oversensitive and hyper-vigilant to rejection, even the most cursory kind from someone he didn't even know,

that the only thing about himself he felt confident about was his intellect,

Of course, hearing such things right at the start just made me think he was exaggerating and also that if he was *aware* of these things, he must be working on them! I was even more charmed.  He often said he was determined not to make any of the known mistakes. He tried really hard for a while, I know now how hard and how resentful it made him, ultimately, that he had to work so hard to be a way that was natural for him.  I remember him saying more than once that I could have no idea how many smart comments popped into his head at every second and how hard he worked to repress them and not say them out loud.

I couldn't imagine what 'smart comments' they could possibly be. I found out in the last 9 months of the relationship, when he let them fly. Dismissive, callous, cold, crappy kinds of things to say, usually at the time that I was most vulnerable and trying the hardest to say something carefully and responsibly and fairly and bla bla.   

His colourful family history mainly includes an abusive, crazy father who definitely sounds as if he had BPD. He died about 3 or 4 years ago. He spoke about him a good bit when we first got together, but always with a kind of black humour, a rancour, that I found confusing. I questioned him gently then, whenever he brought it up, but never got a single layer deeper. I just felt v protective of my ex when I heard these stories, protective of the vulnerable little boy he was and so sad for the awfulness he had to witness and experience.

Imagine, I thought that my love would heal him a little.

Anyway, the things he knew and stated about himself were all true and I should have listened, because each point is just a false glassy surface of extremely roiling waters of a bunch of subterranean rivers. No wonder I almost drowned exploring all those fascinating secret waterways.

But what I really should say is that I could make a list of things like that about myself. Maybe that would be a good exercise, I don't know.   I am pretty sure that I'd find that whatever coping mechanisms I have learned and rely on are, in general, less confusing and damaging to another person.

Does any of this make sense? I hope so, I didn't mean to barge in here and then not make sense

[Meili]

I agree with everything that Reforming said, especially this part:

I realise I made lots of mistakes, but I accept that I did the best that I could with the skills, knowledge and experience that I had. I also accept that there's room from growth and development on my part and I'm working to address that.

It seems that a lot of us have looked at our behaviors and questioned our actions. Sometimes we exhibit the same behaviors because we were taught by our pwBPD that is how things should be; even when we knew that wasn't right. That's where the term "fleas" comes from. 

Yesterday, my uBPDexgf even accused me of being disordered because I started to act the way that she did. She seems to have forgotten how I was before she started with her antics or that I was forever trying to figure out her disordered thoughts.

Like you, I have checked with and looked back on my past r/s. My average r/s lasts for five years and I'm still friends/friendly with many of my exes (much to my uBPDexgf's shindig), she cannot say the same.

So, while it's good that we actively look at and examine our behaviors and what got us and kept us in these r/s, we should only accept responsibility for our part. We need to compare fact to feeling. Do the facts show that you displayed those traits before you were subjected to them repeatedly?

[Icanteven]

Am I the borderline?

Wanna know what a psychiatrist told me a few months ago?  ALL of us are in the DSM somewhere.  Maybe not as personality disordered individuals, but if you look long and hard enough you'll find a trait where you say to yourself "oh sh*t that's me." 

I don't believe for a second that if you're self-aware enough to ask that it means you're not, because my wife is self-aware to know that she is severely mentally ill.  So, have you talked to someone?  Is there a therapist you can get referred to in order to discuss your concerns with? 

I'm sure you said and did things you regret, but this is true of all relationships whether they are with personality-disordered individuals or not.  And, as has been pointed out in this thread, it's a spectrum; I had a convo with a T last week who specializes in Cluster B and her remark was "I've been doing this since before you were born and was one of the earliest adopters of DBT; to this day it's sometimes difficult to say 'this is histrionic' versus NPD versus BPD; in the end they're pretty darn identifiable as Cluster B disorders, almost always with overlapping traits from all four of the disorders; what matters is getting into psychotherapy and doing the hard work of DBT/CBT/mindfulness/whatever, and sticking with it, because otherwise the outcomes are almost always poor."

Hope that helps.

[seenr]

Thank You.

I did see one Counsellor for 7 years and asked her this one day. She looked at me puzzled and said 'You are not borderline, you are not Narcisstic, you are a classic empath, fixer type who cannot realise when something or someone is beyond repair'. This is not to say she is right, but it was her opinion that this is what I was & I was Narcisstically abused.

However, she did say that the longer you stay in this abuse cycle, the longer I have to wonder if you have sadistic tendencies.

The Counsellor I am seeing now specialises in CBT and I find it is helping.

Thank You for your reply :-)

I'm sure you said and did things you regret, but this is true of all relationships whether they are with personality-disordered individuals or not.  And, as has been pointed out in this thread, it's a spectrum; I had a convo with a T last week who specializes in Cluster B and her remark was "I've been doing this since before you were born and was one of the earliest adopters of DBT; to this day it's sometimes difficult to say 'this is histrionic' versus NPD versus BPD; in the end they're pretty darn identifiable as Cluster B disorders, almost always with overlapping traits from all four of the disorders; what matters is getting into psychotherapy and doing the hard work of DBT/CBT/mindfulness/whatever, and sticking with it, because otherwise the outcomes are almost always poor."