Possible diagnosis

[Depression = 72% of members]

I believe my girlfriend has BPD. She is in her mid 20s, has a part time job and lives at home with who she believes to have sexually abused her as a child - her father. She isolates herself for the most part - only has 3 close friends and several people she remains in contact with but doesn't get too close to any of them.

Throughout the beginning of our relationship she struggled with criticism or perceived criticism: I once asked her if she was being distant, and she responded very defensively. The one time we hung out with a couple of friends, if she felt I was slighting her at all she would get defensive and call me out on it. The few times we’ve argued, she initially became extremely defensive and threw all of the blame on me. This was followed by a period of extreme guilt and shame in which she’d call herself a host of self-degrading names.

She has told me she struggles with chronic emptiness. I have seen her dissociate and have a breakdown during an argument. She’s told me she doesn’t know who she is and is searching for the ‘woman’ in her. Part of her feels like she has to give up her worldly desires and surrender her life to God, like she has told me that her life has been prophesied and sees herself marrying a man and having a son. She has also told me that she sees herself living as gypsy in Africa. She also sees herself marrying me and having a family with me, which is what she has consistently envisioned for the past month or so. She is a college drop out but now says she is considering going back to school for me so we can start our life together.

She has told me that she struggles with caring for people like she knows she should. Even those she is closest to she struggles to effectively ‘care’ about at times. She dislikes the vast majority of people she is acquainted with. She doesn’t trust anyone, and even after you’ve been “let-in” to her life, she will still have a very hard time trusting you. She can be very needy and jealous when her needs aren’t being met. She is terrified of being abandoned: has chronic nightmares of abandonment and during every one of our arguments has told me explicitly to not abandon her. She is either extremely involved with you or distant/withdrawn from you.

It is incredibly easy to make her jealous – just mentioning someone’s name or directing focus on another person can make her very jealous. She has struggled with intense anger during her life. She’s punched holes in walls, blacked out from anger, claims to have get rage/get violent although I haven’t seen that side of her yet. When she cries, she cries crocodile tears. When she feels down on herself, she despises herself. When she’s scared, she runs away. When she’s in love, she is intensely in love.

Internally she is full of gratitude and is a very caring, faithful and dedicated friend. When she’s happy, she’s absolutely glowing. She has had several intense reactions to minor events in which she has been thrown into an uncontrollable rage in which she thinks I’ve betrayed her and views me as a ‘portal to evil.’ When this happened she hid from me by not talking to me for several hours/the whole day or in the worst, barely talking to me over the course of several months. This has only happened a few times. She has anxiety and during our arguments she was, according to her, in incredible pain, once calling my house crying, or manipulating me to get me to come see her so we could solve the issue.

She’s told me that everyone in her life has been torn apart from her, and they have. She’s had many friends throughout her life and they’ve all walked away, and so she projects that fear onto me thinking that I’m also going to leave her. She will easily detect when I’m feeling distant and begin to worry. After our arguments/before our break ups she told me that she was losing herself and that her past and future were colliding and causing immense pain and distress. She’s told me that the only way she can feel is through other people. So when she feels they are going to leave or when she can’t immerse herself in their world, she feels as though she is useless and nonexistent. When she was convinced I was going to leave her after arguing, she pushed me away in order to self-preservate.

She goes through bouts of depression and wonders if she can make it through the suppressing feelings of shame, guilt, and inadequacy. It took her months to recover from our arguments.  She’s attempted suicide at least once in the past when she was a teenager. Although she is often out of sync with sexuality, when in the mood she enjoys the riskiness of being sexual in inappropriate places. She always has difficulty establishing and following through with plans with others. She always picks away at the skin around her thumbs to the point where they are bleeding and forming scabs. She also experiments with other forms of self-harm that she hasn’t discussed in detail.  She has experimented with drugs in the past such as Molly and LSD, and one of her friends that she spends time with (though she is not close to him) is a registered sex offender who she’s been tempted to do harder drugs with. She does NOT drink or spend money excessively. As mentioned earlier, she used to struggle more with intense anger, feeling it come on completely out of proportion to events, but has gotten better about it.

HOWEVER:
Even during the months when she pushed me away, she was still kind to me and attempted to keep in touch with me. She has devalued me on several occasions and I’ve become evil to her or an awful girlfriend in general, but most of her fluctuations are between idealization and distance* rather than idealization and intense hatred.
She is capable of calling me, in so many words, a terrible girlfriend and acknowledging the good traits about me at the same time. So there seems to be a grey area, which is confusing to me.

She tells me she hears voices, has had violent nightmares at night since she was a child, and has ‘seen things’ before.

Could it be that she hides her hatred for me very well during her periods of devaluation or that she has learned to turn her anger inwards?

Thoughts?

[anonymous93]

I believe my girlfriend has BPD. She is in her mid 20s, has a part time job and lives at home with who she believes to have sexually abused her as a child - her father. She isolates herself for the most part - only has 3 close friends and several people she remains in contact with but doesn't get too close to any of them.

Throughout the beginning of our relationship she struggled with criticism or perceived criticism: I once asked her if she was being distant, and she responded very defensively. The one time we hung out with a couple of friends, if she felt I was slighting her at all she would get defensive and call me out on it. The few times we’ve argued, she initially became extremely defensive and threw all of the blame on me. This was followed by a period of extreme guilt and shame in which she’d call herself a host of self-degrading names.

She has told me she struggles with chronic emptiness. I have seen her dissociate and have a breakdown during an argument. She’s told me she doesn’t know who she is and is searching for the ‘woman’ in her. Part of her feels like she has to give up her worldly desires and surrender her life to God, like she has told me that her life has been prophesied and sees herself marrying a man and having a son. She has also told me that she sees herself living as gypsy in Africa. She also sees herself marrying me and having a family with me, which is what she has consistently envisioned for the past month or so. She is a college drop out but now says she is considering going back to school for me so we can start our life together.

She has told me that she struggles with caring for people like she knows she should. Even those she is closest to she struggles to effectively ‘care’ about at times. She dislikes the vast majority of people she is acquainted with. She doesn’t trust anyone, and even after you’ve been “let-in” to her life, she will still have a very hard time trusting you. She can be very needy and jealous when her needs aren’t being met. She is terrified of being abandoned: has chronic nightmares of abandonment and during every one of our arguments has told me explicitly to not abandon her. She is either extremely involved with you or distant/withdrawn from you.

It is incredibly easy to make her jealous – just mentioning someone’s name or directing focus on another person can make her very jealous. She has struggled with intense anger during her life. She’s punched holes in walls, blacked out from anger, claims to have get rage/get violent although I haven’t seen that side of her yet. When she cries, she cries crocodile tears. When she feels down on herself, she despises herself. When she’s scared, she runs away. When she’s in love, she is intensely in love.

Internally she is full of gratitude and is a very caring, faithful and dedicated friend. When she’s happy, she’s absolutely glowing. She has had several intense reactions to minor events in which she has been thrown into an uncontrollable rage in which she thinks I’ve betrayed her and views me as a ‘portal to evil.’ When this happened she hid from me by not talking to me for several hours/the whole day or in the worst, barely talking to me over the course of several months. This has only happened a few times. She has anxiety and during our arguments she was, according to her, in incredible pain, once calling my house crying, or manipulating me to get me to come see her so we could solve the issue.

She’s told me that everyone in her life has been torn apart from her, and they have. She’s had many friends throughout her life and they’ve all walked away, and so she projects that fear onto me thinking that I’m also going to leave her. She will easily detect when I’m feeling distant and begin to worry. After our arguments/before our break ups she told me that she was losing herself and that her past and future were colliding and causing immense pain and distress. She’s told me that the only way she can feel is through other people. So when she feels they are going to leave or when she can’t immerse herself in their world, she feels as though she is useless and nonexistent. When she was convinced I was going to leave her after arguing, she pushed me away in order to self-preservate.

She goes through bouts of depression and wonders if she can make it through the suppressing feelings of shame, guilt, and inadequacy. It took her months to recover from our arguments.  She’s attempted suicide at least once in the past when she was a teenager. Although she is often out of sync with sexuality, when in the mood she enjoys the riskiness of being sexual in inappropriate places. She always has difficulty establishing and following through with plans with others. She always picks away at the skin around her thumbs to the point where they are bleeding and forming scabs. She also experiments with other forms of self-harm that she hasn’t discussed in detail.  She has experimented with drugs in the past such as Molly and LSD, and one of her friends that she spends time with (though she is not close to him) is a registered sex offender who she’s been tempted to do harder drugs with. She does NOT drink or spend money excessively. As mentioned earlier, she used to struggle more with intense anger, feeling it come on completely out of proportion to events, but has gotten better about it.

HOWEVER:
Even during the months when she pushed me away, she was still kind to me and attempted to keep in touch with me. She has devalued me on several occasions and I’ve become evil to her or an awful girlfriend in general, but most of her fluctuations are between idealization and distance* rather than idealization and intense hatred.
She is capable of calling me, in so many words, a terrible girlfriend and acknowledging the good traits about me at the same time. So there seems to be a grey area, which is confusing to me.

She tells me she hears voices, has had violent nightmares at night since she was a child, and has ‘seen things’ before.

Could it be that she hides her hatred for me very well during her periods of devaluation or that she has learned to turn her anger inwards?

Thoughts?

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[Tattered Heart]

HI anonymous93,

Welcome ,

I'm sorry that your relationship has been struggling. Everything you shared sounds so familiar as those with BPD have difficulty knowing who they are.

As to your question about her hiding her hatred of you, it sounds like you might be talking about splitting. Splitting behavior involves you (or others) as being all good or all bad in the eyes of the pwBPD. It's hard for them to see a gray area. Although it's hard to say for sure, if she remains in friendly contact with you while pushing you away, it may not be that she hates you but instead is using push/pull behavior . pwBPD will sometimes use this when they start to feel too close to someone and get scared that the person is beginning to take over them, whether real or perceived or the emotions get too high.

It sounds like your gf is very aware of her own experiences. What does she say happens during these times that she separates from you?

[anonymous93]

HI anonymous93,

Welcome ,

I'm sorry that your relationship has been struggling. Everything you shared sounds so familiar as those with BPD have difficulty knowing who they are.

As to your question about her hiding her hatred of you, it sounds like you might be talking about splitting. Splitting behavior involves you (or others) as being all good or all bad in the eyes of the pwBPD. It's hard for them to see a gray area. Although it's hard to say for sure, if she remains in friendly contact with you while pushing you away, it may not be that she hates you but instead is using push/pull behavior . pwBPD will sometimes use this when they start to feel too close to someone and get scared that the person is beginning to take over them, whether real or perceived or the emotions get too high.

It sounds like your gf is very aware of her own experiences. What does she say happens during these times that she separates from you?

Thank you so much!
The push-pull idea sounds about right.
She is very disconnected from sexuality and as long as I'd known her, was not considering marriage at all.
But, our relationship was becoming more intimate and she finally started talking about/considering marriage, and around the same time, In April, I accused her of cheating on me with an ex-girlfriend who was still one of her only close friends/her best friend, and who she admitted a month earlier that she still had feelings for. She was extremely defensive, angry and upset during our argument, and she began spiraling. She said she’s losing herself and that she can’t continue to live in the pain that she’s living in, and she can’t continue to put me through it. Given the circumstances my family was distant from her, and in response she became convinced that everyone betrayed her and was against her and so she became angry which she tried to control but she struggled to channel it, so it manifested as shortness when around them. She claimed that the people around her and her future were causing her to spiral into a depression. She said she felt abused, messed up and hopeless and called herself a bunch of self-degrading names and that God would never want her so she has to surrender her life to him in order to be the woman she’s searching for in herself. She had dreams of losing me and desperately trying to hold on to me while everything tried to take me away from her. She became more withdrawn.
In May we had another argument because I was confused and frustrated with her withdrawal and so she became increasingly withdrawn.
June came, and in the days leading up to the first time she tried breaking up with me she said “this relationship isn’t over until I say it’s over.” That in so many words, that she has to have control and would not let me have it. Several days later she tried breaking up with me, saying that we argue too much, I don’t genuinely care about her as a person, and that she doesn’t understand why I spend time with other people. In the same breath she said that she wanted me but that she was terrified of losing me and if she went any further with our relationship then that would inevitably happen and she couldn’t bear it. We ended up staying together regardless.
The night before the 4th of July she called me, was very passive aggressive about me spending the 4th with someone else and clearly was trying to make me jealous by saying she was spending 4th of July elsewhere as well. The next day she officially broke up with me, it was very emotional and messy. She said that all the accusations from before were things she was telling herself to make her feel better about having to break up with me. She said that she never really fell out of love with me, but that it was taken from her and she couldn’t feel anything for me. She felt empty, numb and depressed and we barely spoke for a month.

[anonymous93]

Also, what I think is worthy of noting, is that after breaking up with me she said that she could easily "hide herself" in me, but wouldn't do that because she couldn't stand the idea of losing me.