I have been married for 14 yrs and was diagnosed 6 years ago. Not everyone has relationships doomed to fail. Maybe a little more compassion, therapy and understanding would go a long way….

That being said, I also have a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and I have gone through years of outpatient group and individual treatment in various modalities (including mentalization, CBT, psychoanalytic) — I found DBT most helpful. It helped to explain the world to me. I knew how to mentalize, so that therapy wasn’t very revealing to me. I also liked psychodynamic therapy because the transference and insights gained fascinated me. It was intensely painful for me to handle all the emotions brought up by such therapy, but luckily I was learning DBT at the same time and that gave me some skills.

I want to remind anyone reading this that people who have borderline personality disorder and other personality disorders are also individuals who cannot be diluted down to their diagnoses, even as that may be an easier way for us to be perceived. For instance, I don’t see myself in the portraits of people described here, in the black-and-whiteness that is emphasized. Most of the relationships described above, albeit in very few words and hence it is hard to get a whole picture, seem to be of people who seem very out-of-control at the expense of others. BPD can be treated, and I have seen in myself and in other group members that personality can change. It is terrifically hard work and it does require a large degree of insight into your own condition. And you have to be able to accept yourself the way you are, which means seeing some things you might not like to see and hearing some things from other people that you don’t want to hear about yourself.

I had a different problem from the people described above — I was *too* controlled. My affect was restricted. My anger management problem was more that I had difficulty expressing any anger at all. And I certainly didn’t take it out on anyone. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone.

But I have been idealized by people who I have dated and I didn’t liked that at all because I couldn’t live up to an ideal. I felt as if I was misunderstood and not known at all and that depressed me and made me anxious around the other person. It became difficult to express myself when someone saw me as simply perfect when I knew I was not. When I was treated in this way, I withdrew from the person, which made them angry. And the more they got angry with me for not being who they thought I was, the more I withdrew. I felt angry, myself, that I was being pushed into a corner. I took this anger out on myself in destructive ways and my relationships never lasted long because I couldn’t handle the incongruity between who they thought I was and who I felt I was. They fell in love with a stranger, and I felt increasingly estranged and certainly not in love with them at all, for which I felt guilty. I always broke it off.

People who suffer from bpd really do *suffer*. It is an incredibly painful disorder. When I read about all the chaos people with bpd cause in the lives of those around them, I have to say it takes two (or more) to tango. I didn’t ask for a personality disorder. There are reasons, very horrible and painful reasons, that my personality developed in the way it did. Ways that I strive daily to undo. I understand it is hard to “walk on eggshells” around someone with bpd — they can be manipulative, unpredictable, and destructive. But just remember, while you crunch your eggshells, they are walking on sharp knives and trying their best to cope with a world in which they feel they do not fit in, can never fit in, do not understand at all, and in which they feel completely misunderstood, in which they feel they can do nothing right — they ruin everything. And the tragic fact is, they, we do ruin things for ourselves — self-destructive behavior is sometimes the only way people with bpd know how to act. And when you want to reach out to stroke a rose petal, and you end up crushing and killing the whole plant, and bleeding from it besides, that hurts really really bad.

But not everyone with bpd acts like those in the portraits described here. It can be a largely hidden disorder.