The Face of Borderline Personality (BPD), Part 5

According to the DSM-IV, the eighth diagnostic criterion for borderline personality disorder (BPD) is "inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g. frequent displays of temper, consistent anger, recurrent physical fights)."

Many people living with BPD are also abusive: verbally, emotionally and even physically. The most dangerous and feared characteristic of the disease is the "borderline rage." Borderline patients are often unable to control their anger which tends to rise to a level inappropriate to the given situation, explains Helen's BPD Resources. A bordeline's anger easily escalates into an all-consuming rage during which he often dissociates, disconnecting to the situation at hand and becoming oblivious to the effect of his rage on others. Helen's suggests that during these moments, he no longer responds to the situation but to a past trauma, such as childhood abuse.

Borderline rage is not tragic, and it is certainly not condonable. A borderline in his rage is not to be pitied - or reasoned with. In fact, he can be very dangerous.

"A borderline in a full-blown rage is not to be reasoned with or otherwise tolerated," Helen's BPD Resources cautions. "If the rage is clearly out of control, it is appropriate to remove oneself from the immediate area and notify the authorities."

Persons who have experienced BPDs in their full-blown rage have reported episodes of self injury, threats, cursing, uncharacteristic shouting, but also broken furniture, holes punched in the wall, and knife battles; people living with borderlines should take care to remove any potentially deadly weapons from the premises (www.bpdresources.com).

What triggers these rages? According to Helen's, it can be something as trivial as "suspicion of abandonment or intimation of criticism/invalidation)." While that is a central theme to my own rages, I believe there is more to it. I remember a sense of being completely emotionally overwhelmed, a sense of primal, unconquerable panic.

I am not proud of my own rages. In fact, I deeply regret them. I will spend a large part of the rest of my life making amends for the damage I have caused, especially to my wife and my stepchildren. True, I was not physically or sexually abusive. My own brand of domestic abuse was verbal, emotional, and environmental. The terms verbal and emotional abuse are self-explanatory; environmental abuse is the breaking and throwing things while the victim is present. During one rage, I kicked out the interior of a car door, during another, I broke my stepson's CD.

When my stepchildren were eleven and nine years old, they vacuumed the living room floor. A glass marble was sucked up, and it shattered the dust receptacle, rendering the vacuum cleaner useless. It is praiseworthy that children so young participate in household chores, and accidents can happen. The glass marble shattering the dust receptacle clearly was an accident, but that was not how I saw it. In my warped way of thinking, I had interpreted the incident as an underhanded way of getting out of having to vacuum, and the children were subjected to a half hour-long screaming tirade. My eleven year-old stepson tried to reason with me, but no matter how much his words made sense, I was unable to stop screaming.

My anger was chronic, and my behavior manifested itself in varying degrees of severity. There were put-downs. There were constant criticisms. And there were draconic punishments for very small infractions.

Strangely, I often believed I was being calm, rational and even healing when I was actually in a towering rage. The fact that everyone around me was in tears or speechless by my outrageous behavior was, to me, a sign of their unwillingness to face uncomfortable truths, their hysteria, their insanity - certainly not mine. In short, I was dissociating from my own behaviors, as borderline patients often do.

Helen's BPD Resources suggests that borderlines do not respond to the current situation but to past traumas. Many BPDs have had traumatic, abusive childhoods. My own childhood certainly was verbally and physically abusive. My father had an unpredictable temper; he set unrealistically high expectations of us, even when we were very young, and he would resort to name-calling, shouting, and beatings, when we failed to meet them.

An event that has burned itself particularly deeply into my mind was a late night beating when I was four and my sister was three. We had been too loud, and my father wanted to sleep. He dragged us out of our beds and beat us severely. My mother tried to protect us as much as she could, but in the end, she was powerless. During such moments the entire universe shrinks into a sense of flooding, overwhelming panic. Ironically, it was the same sense of panic I felt when during those moments that I myself was abusive.

BPD is an illness, even though many in the therapeutic community dispute this. They say it's just a sort of malformed personality. I didn't ask for BPD, though, and continuing research gives me hope that healing is possible. But illness or no, borderline patients need to understand that they are 100% responsible for their behaviors.