BPD and Me

A post by Angel, concerning Avoidant Personality Disorder, had me thinking again about the possibility of me having Borderline Personality Disorder.  This is a suspicion that has plagued me throughout the course of my treatment within the last year or so.  Instead of going straight to the Borderline Screenings, I went to a personality disorder screening to see the possibilities of what I may be dealing with.

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid Personality Disorder:	High
Schizoid Personality Disorder:	Low
Schizotypal Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Antisocial Personality Disorder:	Low
Borderline Personality Disorder:	Very High
Histrionic Personality Disorder:	High
Narcissistic Personality Disorder:	High
Avoidant Personality Disorder:	High
Dependent Personality Disorder:	High
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder:	High
— Take the Personality Disorder Test — — Personality Disorder Info —

I really never imagined that I would be symptomatic of multiple disorders in Axis II.  Since BPD still remained the highest, I decided to take a specific screening.

Results of Your
Borderline Personality Test

You scored a total of 43.
Severe Borderline Personality Disorder Likely
You answered this self-report test in a way that’s consistent with people who have been diagnosed with severe Borderline Personality Disorder. This suggests that these concerns may be an issue for you as well, and something that you should seek out further assistance with this issue from a trained mental health professional immediately. Borderline Personality Disorder is characterized by a pattern of unstable and intense relationships, as well as frantic efforts to avoid abandonment — even if it’s not real.

I thought about the entire year and the instability of my own marriage – the most solid thing I can think of.  I had all of these paranoid delusions that my husband was cheating on me, although in the back of my mind, I knew it was not a possibility.  I sabotaged myself at work with the line of thinking that everyone was against me.  I started severing ties with coworkers and hiding in my classroom.  I had always thought that was characteristic of bipolar psychosis, but now, I’m not so sure.

Using the same site that Angel used, I discovered something kind of shocking:

You may be at risk for developing BPD if:

• you have a family member who has BPD
• you felt emotionally unstable or emotionally vulnerable as a child
• people in your household were impulsive when you were a child
• you were emotionally abused as a child

And all of those were true.  My mother does not have a confirmed case of Borderline Personality Disorder, but it seems she is symptomatic.  When she was a very young child, she was put into foster care.  She has absolutely no memory of this, and none of her family members will detail what happened.  My mother married her first husband on a whim, because his draft number came up to go to Vietnam.  She had an extremely turbulent relationships with him, and he mostly left her alone all of the time.  That’s how she met and fell in love with my father.

Their marriage isn’t much better.  In private, she has gone on and on about my father’s faults.  They have had a rocky relationships, where I recall them throwing around the word “divorce” probably far more often than they should have.  She binge drinks and sometimes takes too much medication.  Medication that isn’t even hers to begin with.  She is as impulsive as she can be in her restrictive environment and goes through so much emotional turbulence.  But, she will never leave my father, no matter what.

I was an emotionally unstable child, and I wasn’t the one to immediately notice.  My preschool teacher had mentioned to my mother that I needed to “toughen up”.  That one little phrase was enough to spark years of tough love and general emotional abuse and neglect.  It gave them a free pass to call it “good parenting”.  As a result, I developed this need for achievement as a means of recognition.  I was designed to people please.  Regardless, another comment came from a teacher stating, “Doesn’t take constructive criticism”.  And the idea that criticism was encouraged compounded what I was already going through.

Impulsiveness!  My father used to just go drive off in his car without telling my mother where he was going.  He’d be gone for hours, and she’d be a wreck.  One time, he went through the house waving a gun, terrorizing us with suicidal gestures.  Honestly, I can never get that scene out of my head as hard as I could ever try.  My parents have both run their credit into the dirt over impulsive shopping sprees.

Now, here’s where things get tricky.  Friends and family in the past have suggested that I may be suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder.  An ex used those weaknesses against me.  So the presentation is convoluted because my actions are purposefully deceiving.

frantic efforts to avoid real or perceived abandonment

I self-sabotage in this area.  When I perceive abandonment, I start to shut that person out of my life.  I have this funny idealization that person will perceive my own emotional abandonment and come running back.  It’s what my parents and my ex did to me, and I seemed to have picked it up.

I’ll also become more sexual and start having defensive sex or performing certain sexual acts to peak someone’s interest and entice them into staying with me.

I also have this habit of changing everything about myself to appease my partner.  This is an effort to avoid abandonment.  And it’s one that’s been preyed on before.

pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships, characterized by alternating between idealization and devaluation (“love-hate” relationships)

People that are close to me are also subjected to this regularly.  Honestly, this is a major reason why I don’t let people get too close to me.  At first, I idealize someone and pick out the best of their characteristics.  Then, I start to idealize how the relationship with them will go.  Soon, I will become disillusioned at the first sign of trouble.  And it is at that point that I begin to demonize someone.  Everything about them is bad, and I have ever right to be suspicious at their deceptive behavior.  Except, it wasn’t deceptive.  I perceived them to be something that they weren’t and assigned them to the task of living up to my unrealistic expectations.

extreme, persistently unstable self-image and sense of self

I’d like to paraphrase the way I perceive myself.  I have lived a dozen lives, and each time, with every death, I’ve risen like the phoenix out of the ashes.  In my life, I have been a dozen different people and will be dozens more, each with their own birth, life, and death, only to start once more.

I take one aspect of my life and characterize myself through it.  I’ve been a baker, a mother, a wild child, a caretaker, a housewife, a teacher, a crazy woman, a bipolar woman, etc.  And for some reason, I can’t seem to integrate all of those periods of my life into the same entity.  They are just all separate from one another, as if I were living so many different characters in the same skin.

impulsive behavior in at least two areas (such as spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)

It is well known that I have a substance abuse problem with alcohol. But, here are a few facts that are the most difficult things for me to admit. I am guilty of day drinking every now and again. It is never when I’m alone with my child, for the record.  I am also guilty of taking too many benzodiazepines to escape reality from time to time.  Yes, I abuse my medication every now and again.  But, it’s not a dependence kind of thing.  I don’t find that it’s necessary, until I get into a frenzy of hysteria that produces so much distress that it’s unbearable.  The drugs quiet my mind.

And the other one is very difficult to admit as well, and I’m not sure if I can spell it out in detail.  I have a difficult relationship with food, dieting, and exercise.  I am guilty of binge eating.  I am also guilty of purging if I am distressed.  Especially if it’s about my weight.

And lastly, I recently made a confession of my sexual exploits in my youth in Promiscuously Yours, in the series The Friday Confessional.  I had multiple reasons for cheating on my ex, which is something I wouldn’t normally do.  I have a better moral compass than that.  Sometimes, I was so distressed that I just wanted to feel some kind of love.  Sometimes, I was trying to prove to myself that I was something special.  And other times, I did it out of spite.  Any which way you look at it, I did it in highly emotional moments.  And I always regretted it later.

recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or recurring acts of self-mutilation (such as cutting or burning oneself)

My cutting has been well documented in the past.  Unless I make a mindful effort not to self-harm, I will engage in the behavior.  I’ve written posts about the whys and wherefores in Why Self-Injurious Behavior?.  It’s complicated.

unstable mood caused by brief but intense episodes of depression, irritability, or anxiety

The mood episodes aren’t brief, so it leads me to believe that I may have a co-morbid diagnosis instead of a misdiagnosis.  However, I’ve always said this, and people have disagreed with me.  The only two constants for me and my disorder are reactivity and irritability.  I was under the impression that everyone with bipolar disorder is reactive and generally irritable most of the time.  Apparently, I was wrong.

I always have this underlying anxiety.  It’s made worse by social interaction, certain phobias I’ve developed, and worst of all, having to make decisions on my own.  It’s difficult for me to take care of my personal affairs, because I am always waiting on another person’s approval.  I get anxious when I make a decision by myself, because I often second guess myself.  I am constantly seeking reassurance about my decisions and guidance from others.

chronic feelings of emptiness

This one is complicated.  I don’t often feel empty.  I often feel lonely or distant.  Sometimes, I feel invisible, rejected, or ignored.  Most of the time, I actually feel too full.  I’m too full of emotion, noise, and stimuli.  I often have several voices and personas that follow me and make commentary on my life.  It’s too much.  But when medicine gets rid of them, though I am relieved by the lack of conflict, I am lonelier.  It feels like a piece of me is absent.

inappropriate and intense anger, or difficulty controlling anger displayed through temper outbursts, physical fights, and/or sarcasm

I recently wrote a post called, “I Want My Yellow Dress” using the analogy of a little girl in a movie in the most epic temper tantrum ever known to describe my own inner child.  My anger is often out of proportion for a given situation.  I have a bad temper, and I know it.  It’s something I’ve tried to deny for a long time.

In Love the Way You Lie, I described a mutually abusive relationship.  It was the only time in my life I have ever lashed out physically, but the point is that I did.  Whether a person could classify that as self-defense is questionable.  There were times I did it because I wanted to inflict pain on him.  I felt like he needed to know my own pain.

stress-related paranoia that passes fairly quickly and/or severe dissociative symptoms— feeling disconnected from one’s self, as if one is an observer of one’s own actions

I’ve written scores of blog posts and theories about this.  I am prone to paranoia, and I experience it rather frequently.  With my recent medication change, I can say that I usually only go through it once weekly.  Prior to the medication change, it was much more frequent than that.

The dissociative symptoms have been documented in Conscious, Subconscious, and Extraconscious, where I described a theory of multiple personas rather than full blown personalities residing in a place between the conscious and subconscious mind.  It’s complicated to get into, but it’s worth a read honestly.  It would give you a better idea of what I’m talking about in terms of dissociative symptoms.

When I’m doing something out of character, I often feel like I’m not the one who is doing it.  I feel like I’m trapped inside myself, or even completely outside of my own body, as a helpless observer.  When everything is said and done, sometimes I don’t quite remember the details of what happened.

It’s something I’m going to have to talk to my doctor about, because as I get older, it seems to get worse, rather than better.  Sure, I am not self-injuring in the sense that I’m not cutting.  But, I am still engaging in impulsive behaviors, and I can’t tolerate distress or disappointment.  My anger is out of control most of the time.  And that’s not when I feel too doped up to do anything.  Sometimes, I have symptoms regardless of the medication.  When I relapse, it’s usually very bad, and feels like it’s worse than the one prior.  I don’t just have a blip of an episode, but a full blown, complicated one.