How do we know we're not borderline?

[KudzuGirl]

This is my first post here, so please be patient with me. I'm only just beginning to learn about C-PTSD after having a protracted emotional meltdown that nearly cost me my job. For years, I've thought that I was potentially BPD, minus the behaviors that negatively impact others. (I.e. I don't stalk people, etc. I don't "rage" at people in my life. I'm extremely empathetic.)

C-PTSD symptoms fit me to a tee. Also, it's not a shock considering the fact that I was adopted into a household where my mother almost certainly has BPD (or maybe C-PTSD?!). My father placated her for years and, while she tries her best, she was emotionally abusive. I now am married to a man with Asperger's and likely some narcissistic leanings. (Actually, he probably is covert NPD but I don't like labels.) He's been physically and emotionally abusive but blames me and my insecurities for his lies, etc. I can't remember half of what's happened between us most of the time, so... You get the picture.

So, here's my question: How do I know that my husband isn't correct when he tells me I have BPD/attachment disorder? I am overly attached to him, I'll grant him that. I have abandonment issues, true enough. I sometimes get pannicky and overstep his boundaries. (Like, I have a problem with him going out drinking by himself after I've found him watching numerous YouTube videos on how to pick up women at a bar. He's tried to pick up women on Craigslist in the past, but he says boundary violation?!)

Help a girl out here. I really don't know what's true anymore. I need to know if I'm actually the problem. I know I'm presenting a one-sided account. I'm not perfect, but I don't know where the line is between C-PTSD and BPD.

[voicelessagony2]

Hi Kudzu, welcome! 

I'm sort of new to all this too. I was actually diagnosed BPD by 2 different psychiatrists, but the week before last, I got a hold of Pete Walker's book (CPTSD: Surviving to Thriving, which I highly recommend you read ASAP) and I realized that EXACTLY as you described, I really don't belong in that category either. I also don't misbehave, manipulate, or lie, none of the outwardly destructive behaviors, and also I don't self harm in the specific way such as cutting. My mental and emotional state is a lot like BPD, but now that I am learning about CPTSD, it really completes the picture.

I also highly recommend watching this video. It's a little dry, but once you see what he is saying about BPD and CPTSD, you will want to watch it again and take notes!

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, delivers the lecture "Childhood Trauma, Affect Regulation, and Borderline Personality Disorder" as part of the 9th Annual Yale NEA-BPD Conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2NTADxDuhA

I also believe that my mother had BPD or CPTSD as well. She still gets very upset and aggravated with herself over very insignificant things, and she spaces out a lot, which I'm now beginning to see as signs of mental illness she has always had.

And like you, I tend to stay stuck in bad relationships, always ready to at least share the blame or wonder if I'm too focused on describing the negative behaviors, etc. not certain what is really true or objective. One friend told me a long time ago, something I will always remember: when looking at pros and cons in a relationship, it's not always a one-to-one balance. There are some cons that are bad enough to outweigh all the pros combined.

I know how hard it is to recognize abuse. I have stayed in abusive relationships for years, unwilling to let go of the illusion of security. I have driven myself to the brink of insanity trying to figure out if there really was abuse or if I was just over-sensitive. I defended my ex-husband's character for years, only to see him jailed for felony identity theft, and only now in hindsight do I see the scale of emotional and mental abuse he put me through.

You are not alone. I'm still figuring this stuff out, too, so maybe we can help each other. 

[schrödinger's cat]

Hi KudzuGirl, pleased to meet you! I'm sorry to hear that you're going through such hard times.    Now, if I get this right, the situation's like this:

The only argument in favour of BPD is that your husband says you have it.

Now, I might be getting this wrong. But if a bloke extensively studies pick-up techniques that are all about meeting other women at bars, and then he wants to go to a bar "all by himself"...? The first thought that sprang to my mind was, he's acting like a little boy who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He's deflecting from his own behaviour, maybe even projecting things onto you. So basically, I'd agree with you on this:

He's been physically and emotionally abusive but blames me and my insecurities for his lies.

But maybe it's not easy to really keep on believing this, given that he's living with you and you have to listen to his side of the story over and over again? I'm getting the impression that people with CPTSD often lead quite solitary, isolated lives. And that makes it harder to resist someone's attempts to brainwash us, or to put any kind of false or toxic idea in our heads.

One thing you could do is post this question over at Out of the Fog, our sister website. They've got a forum full of people who have experience with BPD and NPD people, so maybe they can tell you more. They might know how to tell if someone has BPD, and they might have tips for coping with your (potentially) narcissist and (definitely) abusive husband.

Other than that, I second everything voicelessagony2 and Rain said about Pete Walker's book and website. He's got CPTSD himself. He gets it.

Anyway, I hope you'll find this site helpful, and I wish you all the best.

[marycontrary]

I read on a site whose link I got here the differences between the two. The biggest thing is that with CPTSD, your belief in life itself is shaken to the core. Being so abused and betrayed, it is easy to see ho a person might question god's prevalence, or even existence itself. Might even think god hates you, that you are the butt of some evil practical joke by a sadistic higher being. You ego has been shattered.

Also, there is an added paranoid sense with the CPTSDs over the BPDs. CTPSD has a fear of everything trying to hurt them. Like they have lost everything. Been abandoned by god, the family, maybe the political state. Pure BPDS,  fear abandonment by other people, not necessarily abandoned by god. CPTSD has been abandoned, like biblical Job, by everything, including god.
 

[flookadelic]

Hi KudzuGirl

I had a diagnosis of BPD a few years ago from a general practitioner. My clued up friends found this hilarious as I so obviously didn't fit critical criteria...Outside I have always been really eccentric and I have used that as a mask. I think they thought he thought me being so eccentric must equal BPD. The whole experience was completely weird as I went to see him about a physical complaint...but then I was wearing a skirt and blouse so perhaps he saw my transvestitism as some disorder or other.

But back to the point...I was diagnosed with PTSD about 1.5 years ago, but even though that ticked all the boxes I couldn't really relate to the PTSD experiences of veterans, or of those involved in single issue traumatic episodes. Only when I came across CPTSD could I finally feel that I was barking up the right tree, that my compass was pointing in the right direction.

It is, I feel, easy to mistake some symptoms of BPD for PTSD / CPTSD but only on a superficial level. You are by far the best person to know and evaluate your experiences. Wishing you every happiness :-)

[Badmemories]

@ flookadelic!

Isn't it great to find out what OUR real problems are? In a way it is a relief! I like the fact that I can really HEAL from it. I was diagnosed with Bi-polar... and I did not fit the criteria for that either!

Keep on Keeping on!

[schrödinger's cat]

Sooo... I just watched a video on "CPTSD and Borderline Personality Disorder" by a British therapist. (If you plan to watch it: he swears a few times, but he's not aggressive - it's rather like chatting to a friend of a friend down at the pub.) 

I've tried to fish out a few points that sounded like they could matter for this thread.

CPTSD and BPD all involve some emotional dysregulation. You veer between extreme emotional responses. Something triggers you, and you're caught in an emotional flashback. (He compares it to Frodo putting on the ring, which is brilliant.) Now, when someone with BPD "overreacts" with a very strong emotion, that's also because they're having a flashback. So something happens and they suddenly feel VERY threatened by abandonment - but the data just isn't there, it's not really grounded in (present-day) reality.

BPD is a fad diagnosis. Ten years ago, everyone was suddenly diagnosed as bipolar. Nowadays, it's BPD.BPD isn't a good word. He'd prefer Emotional Dysregulation Response. It's a better description of what's happening, and it sounds less dismissive. ("Oh, you're just BPD.")

More things concerning dismissiveness about BPD:
--Research of veterans with PTSD found out that 75% of them end up with Borderline traits.
--In another video, he says that many texts mention that most BPD sufferers are women, which he thinks is nonsense. He thinks people simply see that BPD is about feeling vulnerable and fearing abandonment, so hey, must be women. "But there are just as many blokes."
--In that same video, he talks about "benign BPD" and "malign BPD". Malign BPD would be BPD + Narcissism. Lots of narcissists also have BPD, he says, and those people are EXTREMELY difficult to live with. He says: "if you love someone like that, you'll be in pain for a long time. They eviscerate you and take your sense of self and turn you into a zombie." Someone with "pure" BPD (without narcissism) is easy to live with, comparatively. If you're emotionally steady even when the BPD person's emotions are all over the place, things will slowly begin to improve. [IMO, this extreme dismissiveness towards BPD could be explained by this - if people say "BPD" and think "BPD+Narcissism", then no wonder they're dismissive. Maybe that malign version of BPD is simply more well-known???]

The key elements of BPD: the sense of self is damaged; there's a huge fear of abandonment; and there's an inability to cope with emotions, usually ones triggered by emotional intimacy. When people with BPD get into close relationships where they feel vulnerable, they start to flashback more, and they get freaked out and extremely insecure and paranoid. He goes on to say:

"Why would that occur to someone who has CPTSD or PTSD? Well, if you've lived through a war or a natural disaster, your sense of reality is going to be damaged. You'll feel that the world is not a safe place. If you've seen people die in front of you, or if you've seen people kill other people in front of you, you'll end up with this deep deep insecurity about human nature, and a deep insecurity about your place in the world. [My note: I'd say the same goes for all kinds of interpersonal trauma - seeing someone abuse someone else, being abused ourselves...] If you've experienced extreme terror, and lived with terror... yeah, you're going to have some abandonment issues. In situations of trauma, or if someone has been captured and tortured - are they not abandoned? Or if someone's in a natural disaster and they get separated from other people, they'll end up feeling abandoned. So that's where that trauma gets placed in there.

And then the emotions will become dysregulated because [your body] will respond to that by overreacting. Your unconscious mind - which is the place where your biology interacts with your consciousness - it doesn't really care about you being happy. Not really. At the deepest biological levels, happiness isn't a concern because it's not absolutely necessary for survival. At the rawest genetic level, happy is irrelevant, peaceful is irrelevant: what matters is, will you live or not? Safety is the key word. So even if these flashbacks are making you miserable, even if you can't function, your unconscious mind doesn't care - because at least you're safe. At least you're alive. At least you're surviving."

Which I suppose means: Traumatic event causes (1) trauma, (2) feeling of abandonment. Unconscious mind goes: "whoa, that was BAD, let's avoid this happening ever again by sounding red alert whenever something even remotely looks like our trauma. Yes, it's going to make us pretty miserable, but hey, at least we're safe." This leads to emotional dysregulation.

Throughout the video, he doesn't say that "people with CPTSD also have BPD", he simply talks about "borderline traits". And he loudly complains about that term and prefers to say "emotional dysregulation".

All in all, his view of things is one I can live with.

(Sorry that this was so long. Sometimes it's literally quicker for me to write long texts than short ones, and I was in a hurry. I realize that this sounds bizarre.)

[schrödinger's cat]

I can definitely recommend the video. This bloke has a LOT of videos on all kind of issues, many of them related to CPTSD. Credit for discovering him goes to voicelessagony2.

[voicelessagony2]

Thank you for the summary, cat! I'm so glad you also think he is pretty good.

I also like how he explains the differences between the types of flashbacks and triggers. I think it's an EXTREMELY common misperception (one that I held until about a month ago) that PTSD flashbacks are only the type where a war veteran (always a war veteran) hears a loud noise and thinks he's back in Vietnam or wherever he was fighting. He explains that often, those of us with emotional dysregulation can be triggered by smells, music, and intimacy, and sometimes we don't even know what has triggered us. Which is exactly where I have been all my life! I didn't know what "triggered" really meant!

[flookadelic]

If Kudzugirl will forgive me - @badmemories - God yes.

[Sasha2727]

I just want to say that I have bpd diagnoses and honestly I think it's like this cptsd and bpd are the same thing. I think that's hard to except sense most of us grew up thinking " is it me or is it them ?" And when we have this ah ha moment about bpd and how " omg bpd is what my parent has !" It can feel like a god send! So to think it's been passed down to us the victims!!! That's too much to handle! But what I think is the actual issue is this...

Years ago if you had all of the bpd symptoms which there are 350? Traites that can make up bpd and you only have to have 9 for a diagnosis lol. Anyway years ago if a man walks into the shrink and says I do x y z and it's causing issues, they where labelled either PTSD narrcessist or scociopath. Now if a women says I do x y z and it's causing issues in my life ... Well they where " hysterical " or borderline. Bpd is passed down via two things in my understanding 60% genetics ( I believe the label highly sensitive person constitutes the genetic component personally ) and 40% environment. That means we have this highly sensitive little baby picking up on all of the sensory / emotional stimuli from caregivers and environment and trying to express this to caregivers to mirror them. However caregivers with bpd or npd do not take this as a warning " oh hey my child's acting out I need to validate them " soooooo little child is instead told that there emotional reactions are wrong they are confused and must act look feel the opposite of what they are experancing physically.

So what I'm saying is as hard as it is to fight the urge to " label yourself " and others and patterns and anything you can to gain some sense of control back... Labels don't solve emotional pain or emotional dysregulation. It's a wild goose chase and in the end it is another way to intellectualize the emotional pain that got is here.  I'm not at all saying it's wrong to seek proper diagnosis but the stigma attached to bpd is not there so much anymore! They now recognize it as learned coping vrs. " your a crazy borderline " many poor traumatized people where retraumatized by the treatment they received in getting that diagnosis! It's not that way now due to the " bio psychosocial " theory's of development vrs all that shamefull Freudian stuff... I believe the key in good help is addressing dissociation first! Master grounding during disregulation and avoid the crazy bpd like acting out or acting in , that way the memory process won't drive you to trance out and do uncharicteristic things for your self.

One more thing : the in acting / quiet bpd or waif is so similler to cptsd I so no real distinction at all.
Hard to not label ourselves but I really think the behaviors are what needs addressing not the names. Like others have said in this thread. Really hard for me sense I was labelled horrible untrue things in childhood, of course I don't want a bpd label society has told me that's conformation I'm defective! But it's not, it's 3 letters vrs. 5cptsd. Now that I found a dissociative specialist I don't care what letters they call me as long as I got help staying right here and not living in the flashback past that hurts me so much. If memories do surface I now get them validated and that makes them go back to where they where meant to be stored in my brain not my amagdyla which has tasks to do today and should not be holding memories of dissociated states in my past.

[Whobuddy]

That means we have this highly sensitive little baby picking up on all of the sensory / emotional stimuli from caregivers and environment and trying to express this to caregivers to mirror them. However caregivers with bpd or npd do not take this as a warning " oh hey my child's acting out I need to validate them " soooooo little child is instead told that there emotional reactions are wrong they are confused and must act look feel the opposite of what they are experancing physically.

That makes so much sense! Baby mirrors parent behavior and then is told the behavior is wrong. How confusing to a little one trying to figure out how the world works. Profound.

I also agree that labels are not as important as healing. Very insightful post. Thank you. 

[Kizzie]

Great thread Kudzu and all!

I'm with all of you that in the end it's really about the healing, but at the same time for me there is an important difference. BPD is a personality disorder whereas CPTSD is a stress disorder.  The former feels like a sentence of sorts (something fundamental is broken), whereas the latter refers to psychological injuries that can be healed if that makes sense.

Last year I had a huge blowup with my PDM and out of nowhere I found myself shouting at her, "I am not a bad daughter, I am a good person, I am kind, patient, loving and caring. I would not treat you this way and I do not deserve to be treated this way" and marched out of her apartment slamming the door behind me.  While I was quite clearly angry, it was a big "aha" moment in that I did not rage at her or try to hurt her like she had just done to me.

And therein lies the biggest distinction between the BPD and CPTSD for me. She will always be punitive and vindictive when she is afraid or hurt because her personality is disordered. My personality, however, is basically intact albeit a little frayed and bent in spots, and with some developmental arrests that can be dealt with according to Mr. Walker.  I believe him when he says that all of our natural tendencies are still in there waiting to be fanned into life, whereas in PD I'm not sure that's the case.

FWIW 

[Kizzie]

I have worked with several clients who were unfairly labeled borderline by themselves or others. I could however tell by the quality of their hearts, that they were not. This was evidenced by their essential kindness and goodwill to others, which they always return to when the flashback resolves. They also exhibit this in their ability to feel and show true remorse when they hurt another, as we are all destined to do from time to time. Unlike the true borderline who has a narcissistic core, they can sincerely apologize and make amends when appropriate.

Tks Rain and Mr. Walker   Truer words were never spoken - we are kind and caring or I don't think we would have found our way here.  My M does not look for help because she does not believe anything is wrong with her, whereas until we come here we tend to think everything about us is wrong in one way or another.

[neenonee]

Does it really matter whether we're borderline or not? Everyone wants so bad to avoid that heinous label but borderlines are people too. Maybe there is no such thing as borderline or personality disorders anyway. But there is no official diagnosis of cptsd, is there? So all we can really do is find whatever treatment works for us and whatever explanation makes sense to us. One thing I didn't like about PEte Walker's book is he tried so hard to distinguish himself from people with personality disorders, as if they were bad people. Maybe that's just me being sensitive. Anyway Kudzu I'm sorry that you got adopted into a bad situation, that's so unfair when that happens. And I hope you find the strength to believe that you don't deserve to keep getting abused in your current relationship. And, it's so rude when spouses/partners try to diagnose the other- unless they are qualified it's just verbage that has little meaning.