Stealth writes:
I guess that’s what you call it when someone experiences emotions more intensely than usual?
To put it mildly.
It is worse than that. Borderlines are trainwrecks. Human trainwrecks. And as if that were not bad enough, many of them are simply doing it on purpose. Why? Because they like to. They like to be crazy. They enjoy it. It’s fun. It’s fun to be nuts, to go in and out of the hospital, to attempt suicide over and over, to ruin your own life and that of everyone else around you. They’re doing what they want to do. This is how they want to live their lives.
A typical day for a Borderline is a maelstrom of intense emotionality, with strong states of anxiety, depression, rage, depression, etc. alternating throughout the day, often via rapid shifts even within the hour. They are up, down, and all around and all over the place at once. The hallmark symptom of the Borderline is rage. That is why Borderlines are Human Tornadoes and most sane people try to stay clear of them. They enjoy this rage and guard it zealously.
Most Borderlines are only capable of being good for a short period of time. With one Borderline I knew, I would calculate how long she was capable of being good. Towards the end, it was down to about 8 hours. She simply could not be good beyond 8 hours. She would fall apart and start acting bad again. Another Borderline I stayed with for a while was only capable of being good for 12 hours before she would start acting bad again. She would be a monster for the first half of the day, and then turn reasonable in the second half of the day.
When I say acting bad, this is what I mean. Borderlines “act bad” in the same way that 2 year old’s do. In fact, my opinion is that Borderlines are permanently 2 years old. If the world of the narcissist can be summed up by, “And now we are six…” the Borderline will be forever a 2 year old. They honestly stopped growing right around that time.
The worst Borderlines look to me like a human shaped like a drinking glass. Picture a human being as a drinking glass. In the case of the Borderline, someone dropped the glass on the floor and it’s now shattered into 100 or 1,000 pieces. I have worked with Borderlines who seemed about that shattered. The feeling one gets is you look upwards, circle your eyes round a few times, and say, “Where do I begin?” That’s the problem with the Borderline. The glass in on the floor, broken. There are 100-1,000 pieces on the ground. The clinician looks at the mess and throws up his hands because he can’t begin to figure out how to put this human being back together again.
The worst Borderlines have split so badly that they have developed what appear to be different personalities. I have known two Borderline women who seemed to have multiple personalities. I do not think this is true Multiple Personality Disorder, the existence of which is uncertain anyway, but it would look a lot like it to anyone who is not a clinician.
You can actually see the different personalities come out to play and watch as they take over the person. The personalities come and go as the Borderline moves in and out of them, oblivious. A relationship with a Borderline is a case of “Who is home today?” You never really know who is home. You never know what sort of a mood they will be in. They are unpredictable, worse than the weather.
Certainly Borderlines are in a tremendous amount of pain. On this basis, they deserve our sympathy. The problem is that it is hard to feel sympathy for Borderlines because most of them behave horrifically. The Borderline is always right. You are always wrong. The Borderline attacks you all day long when you have done nothing at all. This is called, “Fighting back.”
Borderlines are always picking fights, but they can’t see it so they see themselves as always “fighting back.” Their victims “started it,” except that they didn’t. The Borderline’s aggression is “self-defense and fighting back” even when the victim has done nothing wrong. You cannot retaliate against a Borderline. If a Borderline attacks you 500 times and you fight back on the 501st time, that is called “aggression.”
Any sort of fighting back by the victim is reason for extreme escalation, and the Borderline then starts “firing nuclear weapons.” Borderlines are extremely observant and one very interesting thing about them is that they will be able to figure you out very well, probably better than most people have ever figured you out in their lives.
They can’t figure themselves out, but Borderlines are brilliant at understanding others. Unfortunately, they do nothing good with this and only use this soul-mining information to create databases of all of your sore points, weaknesses and Achilles Heels. The create Oracle databases out of your weak spots and any time you try to fight back against them, they start shooting nuclear weapons at your rawest nerves.
As you can imagine, this behavior is infuriating. Most of us spend most of our lives dealing with folks who may be difficult at times but in general are not infuriating. Borderlines are infuriating. They are enraging. They “try to push you to your limits.” My own view that what Borderlines are doing is called, “Trying to get murdered.” It would not surprise me if a lot of battered and murdered women were Borderlines. Victims are not always as innocent as they seem. A lot of victims of violence are actually “asking for it” and I have little sympathy for such intrepid and heedless folks. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Borderlines are often suicidal. The Borderlines that I have worked with typically had racked up 8-13 suicide attempts by age ~30. Obviously, most of these are melodramatic cries for help and attention and are not serious. Borderlines often cycle in and out of the hospital. They are often in therapy, but often little gets done there other than infuriating the therapist.
There is some evidence that some folks can sort of graduate out of Borderline behavior. There are some women who get to this point at about age 40. I am not sure how healthy they are, but they do not have BPD anymore. BPD is hard to treat because the person is so shattered, everything is everyone else’s fault, and honestly, most of them really don’t want to get better.
Oh, one more thing. Almost all Borderlines – 80% – are females. Many male Borderlines are gay or bisexual, as Borderline can simply be seen as the Female Principle run amok. Male Borderlines are very bad. They are much worse than the females. They are often violent and many can be found in jails and prisons. It is hard to believe that anyone could act worse than a female Borderline, but male Borderlines accomplish this.
If you have a Borderline woman in your life, get her out of your world. Now. Not now, yesterday. Just do it.
With the onset of feminism and the unleashing and feralization of Western females, BPD has exploded. Fully 8% of US females are BPD’s. That number has been growing in recent years. I have spoken to my mother about her generation, and while women have always been nutty, there is no way that 8% of women were BPD’s in my Mom’s generation. In contrast, most women were rather sedate and controlled as being a “crazy woman” was seen as very shameful, at least in my mother’s circle. The “crazy women” in the family, friend circle or neighborhood were whispered about in hushed tones while the others shook their heads.
It is clear to me that increasing numbers of women in the US are mentally ill. This has coincided with the modern era and in particular with feminism. My conclusion is that there is something about feminism and the modern world that is making women crazy.
There is much more to say about Borderlines, but I will just leave it at this for now.
