Mr. Hyde in the Mirror: Life with Borderline Personality Disorder

I didn't know what to think when I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. This condition was usually found in promiscuous teenage girls who engaged in self-harm, like cutting, I was told. Borderline personalities tended to suffer from low self esteem. In a strange way, the diagnosis sounded sexy. I envisioned Wynona Rider and Angelina Jolie having a pillow fight in their underwear, a scene that may or may not have occurred in the film Girl, Interrupted. I wondered how my life fit the the diagnosis, though. After all, I was a middle aged man suffering from depression.

And my depression, I knew, was caused by how my wife and her children treated me.

From the very beginning, our marriage had been marked by tension. Bitter arguments arose when the topic of child rearing was put on the table; in particular, I was angered by the lack of respect I received from the stepchildren. On more than one occasion, I felt, they twisted the facts as far as suggesting that I was the intolerable jerk, the abuser. How could such treatment lead to anything other than a severe case of chronic depression.

However, the truth is that while no person living with borderline personality disorder (BPD) ever asked for this disease, we BPD sufferers are difficult to live with. Our friends and family members often feel that they spend their lives walking on egg shells. We explode into fierce outbursts of rage, typically without warning; our loved ones never know what will set us off.

"It's like living with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," said my wife.

No wonder that some theories concerning BPD are a little exotic. One writer suggests it is a type of demonic possession, while another claims it is a form of psychic vampirism. However, borderline personality disorder is an illness, not a theological, moral, or esthetic condition. BPD is not a metaphor. It has real causes, real treatments, and real, devastating consequences if left untreated. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, lists nine diagnostic criteria of BPD, five of which must be met in order to be considered as suffering from this disease. Among these is found "severe dissociative symptoms." During a dissociative episode, a person may not recall what he or she did or said, explains Robert O. Freidel, MD in his book Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified. This is why BPD sufferers and witnesses often have very different perceptions of what happens during a borderline flare.

It wasn't until very recently, during a family therapy session, that I became aware of how my own abusive behavior and anger unfolds itself during a BPD flare.

For most of my married life, I believed that my wife was not very good at handling the truth. Doubtlessly, this was the cause for our separation and my voluntary commitment to the behavioral health unit of our local hospital. This particular family therapy session seemed to follow the usual, disappointing pattern. I shared my feelings openly, present arguments in a calm, rational, even healing manner. She responded by being evasive. Then she began to cry. Then she put on her jacket, ready to leave the office and end the session and with that, whatever was left of our marriage. It was the usual pattern, but I was still surprised, because in the last few weeks our relationship had steadily improved.

"Please don't go," I said in one last effort to salvage the situation.

My wife returned to her seat. The social worker, who had been umpiring our conversation for the last forty some minutes, fixed her eyes on me.

"What I'm seeing is the classic pattern of the abuse cycle," she said. "You tried every angle. You tried to manipulate her, and when that didn't work, you resorted to threats."

I still don't understand what happened next, but I am grateful that it did. In previous BPD flareups, her words would have marked her as my next target. Or I would have reached the conclusion that she was biased against me from the very beginning, as all previous therapists, and that this session was yet another waste of time. But somehow I realized she was delivering an accurate account of what had just transpired. In all honesty, I credit my higher power with switching off my typical fight or flight reaction and making it possible for me to hear her words.

Had she not intervened at that moment, I would have sworn until the end of my days that I had been calm, rational, healing - certainly not abusive. It is because of this insight that I could now entertain the hope for healing. I also realized that a single insight, no matter how crucial, was not enough to repair a lifetime of faulty cognition and destructive behaviors. The key to healing, I came to believe, lay in discovering how my actions affected others, to understand how others perceived my behaviors when I was out of control. To maintain the same thinking and behavior patterns could only lead to disaster.

A few days after my release from the behavioral unit I asked my wife if she'd feel comfortable sharing her account of the therapy session. I took great care in assuring her I would not react with anger or sarcasm, but that it was important for me, for my own healing, to discover how she had experienced the event. I no longer trusted my own recollection.

"At first it was okay," she said. "You wanted to know what you had to do to be able to come home, and I gave you the list of things: hold down a job and not quit at the first bad day, get your emotions under control consistently, stop it with the temper tantrums. But it was like you didn't hear a word I said, and you kept badgering me about coming home, and blaming the kids for every problem in our family."

There it was, my old pattern. I was badgering and blaming while I believed my actions were calm and rational.

She continued, "I was feeling more and more pressured to say yes, to allow you to move back in, when I knew that would be a disaster, and finally you blew up. I remember saying things like, 'Maybe you are right, and I'm just being sentimental,' agreeing with whatever you said just to make it stop."

I didn't know what gave her the courage to speak with such candor. This could not have been easy for her. At the same time, the conversation assumed a surreal quality in my mind. This was not how I remembered things. This was not how I saw myself. And yet I knew that my own perception of that session and my actions was woefully inaccurate. In these few moments I learned more about myself than in all of the 42 years of my life. I felt like Rip Van Winkle, freshly awoken from his twenty-year slumber, shocked to learn that King George no longer ruled the American colonies. The debilitating shame I would have felt in previous conversations, which doubtlessly would have triggered another rage filled BPD flareup, gave way to something entirely different: curiosity.

I needed to know more. To what extent had I been out of control?

"Was I yelling?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "Not at full blast, but your voice was raising progressively as I kept repeating my stance. I wouldn't say shouting, though."

I pressed on, "Was it my volume or the tone?"

She said, "Both really - it started at a normal volume but it got louder progressively. The tone also got less and less cooperative and more defensive. I felt you were bullying me, threatening me."

"So when the social worker said I was being abusive, you'd agree with that, right?" I said.

My wife's answer did not surprise me, "I would absolutely agree."

What surprised both of us, however, was that I had to agree, also.

I am not proud of having learned this about myself. The fact that I am suffering from mental illness does not excuse the my abusive behavior toward my loved ones. I am not my disease. With that recognition, however, comes hope. Hope for healing. Hope for making amends. Hope for forgiveness.

Sources:

The Scariest Aspect of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPS): Is it Demonic Possession?, Mrs. Treasures, http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/646355/the_scariest_aspect_of_borderline_personality.html?cat=34

Borderline Personality Disorder: Breeding Psychic Vampires -- One Couple's Experience, Meryll Quinn,

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/530715/borderline_personality_disorder_breeding.html?cat=41

Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified: An Essential Guide for Understanding and Living with BPD, Robert O Freidel, MD, Marlowe and Company