More on Borderliners

I’ve written here before about my problems with those with borderline personality disorder. It’s a special kind of hell they can put you through. Yet there seems to be a growing movement to somehow sweep all that under the carpet, and complain about the ‘stigma’ surrounding them. The latest such post I’ve seen even says that ‘if you get abused, don’t blame it on them being a Cluster B personality disorder’. (Apparently, there are heaps of similar YouTube videos too. I don’t dare look.)

The problem with this is that the very roots of their abusive patterns lie in their untreated disorder.

Their personal histories mean that they have almost no concept of boundaries, or of what constitutes a ‘healthy’ relationship, or friendship, or any kind of connection for that matter. (Because of this, they’re almost as likely to be victims of abuse as perpetrators of it, and in fact often switch back and forth between the two states.) Hence, they consider any emotional tactic as okay if it controls the other person, and alleviates their terror of abandonment.

And their victims? Because they’re the ones forgotten in this ‘rehabilitation exercise’, their very existence almost denied by this ‘removal of stigma’. What are their lives like?

Imagine for a moment, that you’ve struggled through years of emotional abuse from your partner. You’ve endured temper tantrums, hissy fits, massive sulks and cold silences that can last for hours or even days. You’ve suffered through long rants about just about everyone you know - your family, friends, etc - effectively isolating you, and making you entirely dependent on them. You’ve been torn apart by the endless and relentless criticism of every aspect of yourself, worn down by the list of your personal ‘failings’, and how everything is Your Fault, and nothing you do is ever good enough.

Eventually you’ve come to believe you’re deficient in every aspect of your personality, worthless and useless, not even a proper human being. You’ve been manipulated so much, gaslighted so much, tossed around so much, that you no longer know what the truth is, about anything, but most of all about yourself. And when you tried to express your feelings about anything, those feelings were discounted, scorned, or just ignored altogether, because they make it plain that only their feelings matter. Everything must centre around them, or there’s hell to pay. So you’ve learnt to repress your real feelings, and tried to keep your partner happy at all costs. You’ve become psychologically beaten down. Self-esteem shredded. Shamed. Silenced. Disappeared.

Eventually, you’ve realised that nothing you do will ever appease or please them, and scraped together just enough self-respect to get out. After a while, your head cleared enough that you slowly realised that you’d been emotionally abused, and a small iota of relief seeped into you. Maybe it wasn’t you, it was them.

And then. Somewhere, somehow, you stumble across a list of characteristics of this thing called ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’. (Or maybe it’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the two have very similar characteristics.) And something in your head goes, OMG, tick, tick, tick, tick! That’s THEM! And you realise, no, you’re not crazy, or lazy, or stupid, or worthless. It really WASN’T you! A wave of relief washes over you, and your deep self-hatred begins to lift. Maybe you’re not so worthless after all…

Or perhaps you’ve had to watch helplessly as another such person created havoc, brainwashing and manipulating their spouse, turning them against the spouse’s own family, spreading malicious gossip about other family members behind their backs, running down their personal and even professional reputations, and finally so egging the spouse on, that they commit an act of violence against another family member. They end up effectively divorcing that spouse from their family – which of course, you finally realise, was their objective all along. And you feel sickened by it, and them.

Or you blindly trust a so-called friend, who seems okay to start with, but then begins to increasingly scorn you, disrespect you, boss you around, telling you what to do and even what opinions you should have. Meanwhile, they’re also isolating you, ranting at you for hours running down pretty much everyone else you know, and leaving you increasingly dreading contact with them. And when, eventually, you’ve had enough and decide to set some boundaries with them, they explode. How dare you set limits! Wearied beyond measure, because you’ve been here before, you distance yourself from them, but this doesn’t stop them doing their damndest to run you down to all your friends. You consider yourself lucky to have gotten away from them, but the mere mention of their name makes you feel like you’ve been wading through excrement.

After any, or all, of these experiences, you finally feel like you’re starting to get some clarity, get your life together, your self-respect together… and then. And then. You stumble across a piece like the one I mentioned above. One that talks of abusers like your ex, or your ex-friend or someone else you’ve known, as ‘unfairly maligned’, as ‘victims’ of ‘discrimination’ and ‘stigma’ against the mentally ill. And that people need to ‘accept’ them, even embrace them, as they are. That gosh shucks, they’re just people like anyone else...

And you’re cast right back into it. BAM. Into feeling like the worst of the worst. Into self-hatred, into wondering if you’re a worthless failure, a nobody, a nothing. Again. You’re triggered, again.

Traumatised, again.

Shamed, again.

Silenced, again.

Disappeared. Again.

Because you know you’ll never be able to forgive the harm they’ve done, and you feel sick to your stomach at the thought of ‘embracing’ anyone even remotely like them. Are you a ‘bad person’, you ask yourself? Is your anger, your fear, your loathing and pain a personal failing on your part – again?

NO. It isn’t. Because these ‘stigma removers’ are going about it the wrong way, albeit for the right reasons. The Cluster B disorders are not like other mental illnesses, some even dispute they are truly mental illnesses. They are viewed by professionals, rightly (I’ve seen borderliners complain that mental health staff ‘treat them badly’, which can be translated as ‘they know all my tricks’), as the most difficult disorders to treat – precisely because they so often refuse to face up to themselves, or admit that they’ve done anything wrong. That they are mostly able to function in society, ‘pass for okay’, only adds to that. And increases the likelihood of them doing it all over again, sooner rather than later.

Patting them on the back and saying ‘there, there, it’s okay, we understand you had a rotten childhood, it’s not your fault’, not only scapegoats and re-traumatises their victims, but it doesn’t actually help the borderliner. At all.

They don’t need pats on the head, or more love, or whatever. That, I can tell you from bitter experience, is pure enabling. I tried it, for many, many years. I worked on being ‘supportive’, on being a good listener, on helping them ‘work through their issues’. It didn’t work. Their behaviour only got worse and worse. It wasn’t till I stopped doing all this, that things improved even a little – and I though, wow, I should have done this years ago! But it was really too late, I was done, out of there, gone and gone.

So to those borderline apologists, I say this - NO. They don’t need their ‘stigmas’ removed. Instead, they need to have firm limits set with them. To be told ‘your behaviour is not on, you need help’. And to be made to get that help – specialist help, such as Schema or Internal Family Therapy, not just some poor dupe of a regular counsellor who they can fool into believing that there’s Really Nothing Wrong With Them. Because they are so good at that, often possessing a good deal of personal charm and manipulative ability.

And to the borderliners themselves, I say – if you truly want to be ‘rehabilitated’, get your act together. Both individually and collectively, acknowledge the harm you’ve done – all of it, not just the select bits that don’t make you look so bad. Get serious help of the kind I mention above, and stick at it, for years if necessary, until they say you’re done. It may take years, but it’s worth it. You can be healed. You can have healthy, functional relationships as a result. Do it.

Because I don’t want to keep writing about this. I’d rather be writing on autism and autistics, or working on my next book, or completing any of the many unfinished paintings I’ve got lying around. Hell, I’d rather even be dealing with the ants in my kitchen than talk about this again.

But these posts keep popping up, and someone has to say something. You can dismiss me as ‘full of hate’, or as too ‘damaged’ to be worth listening to, or whatever. I don’t care. If it was only me, if it only happened one time, with one person, I wouldn’t say anything. I’d write my experiences off to bad luck. But it wasn’t only once, and isn’t only me. There are a lot of others out there, still reeling, still suffering in silence, licking their wounds and wondering what’s wrong with them. I speak for them, because someone has to speak up for the victims, and for sure it won’t be the enablers and reputation ‘cleaners’.

PS – I know that many autistics are wrongly diagnosed as borderline before their autism is recognised, my post isn’t about them. I feel for them, it must be a horrible experience. I’m also aware that some ‘anti-borderliner’ websites are written by male survivors of female borderliners who are using it to fuel misogyny. I know this. But it doesn’t cancel out any of what I’m saying.

PPS - I suppose it might be possible to have a decent relationship or a friendship with a borderliner, if you set firm boundaries right from the start, and keep reiterating them. But frankly, I don’t want to have to work that hard. I’d rather associate with people who respect me from the beginning, without having to be pushed into it. People who are restful to be around, not constantly creating drama or discord. I try to be someone who is inclusive and accepting of difference, but there have to be limits, and this is mine.

The Dishonesty of NTs

I don’t want anyone getting me wrong here – this is not an anti-NT rant. I don’t do such things, not even in my worst and most frustrated moments. That would be doing a disservice to the many NTs I love dearly. Not to mention that I don’t believe that autistics are superior overall to NTs, anymore than I believe that NTs are superior to me/us. Rather, we have strengths in different areas, and in our thinking and approach to the world and life and other people, we’re simply, totally, completely and overwhelmingly different.

And it’s one aspect of that difference I want to explore here, as I attempt to get to grips with something that’s long puzzled me about NT behaviour. Namely, their dishonesty. Or what seems like dishonesty to us.

Note, I’m not talking here about those blatant acts of dishonesty – theft, shop-lifting, burglary, fraud, embezzlement, con-artistry, espionage, treason, and so on - that get punished by the law, and rejected by most NTs even, and rightly so. Nor do I mean the deliberate but not usually illegal deceptions of negative intent – the cheating spouse, the manipulative workmate, the political trickster. I’m talking, rather, about the little acts of social dishonesty.

I’ve come to realise that NTs, unlike us, place ‘getting along with others’ way, way, way ahead of ‘telling it like it is’. So they will do all sorts of little fudgings of the truth in service of that, where we would just blurt things out – and then get jumped on for being ‘rude’, ‘insensitive’, etc. As we almost never intend this, we end up confused and even hurt. What, we wonder, did we do wrong? Why is the truth so bad?

Anyway, here’s something of a guide to the various kinds of social dishonesty (though they wouldn’t call it that) I’ve seen NTs doing.

Phrasing things politely. This is using diplomatic versions of the truth, to soften harsh messages. So people will say that so-and-so is “a bit upset”, by something, when in fact they threw a tantrum, or are bawling their eyes out. Always take a message like this as a huge understatement – the truth is almost certain to be far worse than the literal words. Phrases like “a bit”, “kind of”, or “somewhat” are red flags for this sort of dishonesty. Even between aspies, I’ve seen this one trip some of us up.

Euphemisms. This is a variation on polite phrasing, where softer expressions are used to blunt harsh realities, eg saying that someone has “passed away” rather than simply “died”. I have often used these myself, finding them either less likely to cause offence, or just kinder. Or more bearable – eg when referring to my mother’s recent passing. It has its place therefore, but too much of it is like constantly wearing cotton wool in your ears – you start to feel like everything is a bit muffled.

Circling the truth. Basically, this involves verbal beating round and round the bush, till you’re not even certain what the heck the bush is. I have always found this extremely difficult to cope with. I’m still not sure what the point of it is, other than a kind of super-politeness, or maybe not wanting to commit to saying the truth, but if you’re faced with someone who never clearly states what is it that they want, or are trying to say, circling is likely what they’re doing. My recommendation is, be blunt. Ask straight out what they mean. It tends to disconcert people, sometimes annoy them, and even then you don’t always get a straight answer, but at least the issue is out in the open. And that’s got to be far less anxiety-provoking for you.

The little white lie. Years ago, my then-partner told me about a previous flatmate of hers, who fancied a guy who was obviously gay, something she refused to acknowledge, even once saying to my ex “people say so-and-so is gay, but he’s not, is he?” My ex’s private thought was that the guy was as camp as a row of pink tents, but she agreed no, he wasn’t. This is the ‘nice’ lie, to spare someone’s feelings and supposedly not harmful, though I have my doubts. How can not facing up to the truth be harmful? How long would that woman have gone on deluding herself this guy was potentially available? And how hurt would she have been, in the end?

 If you do hear someone telling one of these white lies, however, it’s best not to barge in with the truth. These situations often needs delicate handling, and are best left alone by those as socially clumsy as we aspies. Of course if someone asks you outright, they should know better than to expect you to lie, but do ‘phrase it diplomatically’ if you can.

The ‘Fairy Tale’. A more elaborate version of the ‘little white lie’, we see this one most especially on sitcoms, where some of the characters invent a complicated tale to tell another character, because they feel they can’t tell the truth for some reason. However it also sometimes happens in real life too, usually I think to spare someone’s feelings, or to escape the consequences of something.

I’ve been tripped up by this one more than once – confused, I would jump in with “no, that’s not true!”, and blurting out the truth. And of course getting a very sharp reaction, which confused me even more – why were they telling a lie in the first place, and why didn’t they tell me they were going to do it? I still think it’s stupid, and usually unnecessary. Or at least they didn’t need to invent such a convoluted lie.

Zipping the lip. Sometimes NTs avoid telling a lie by simply saying nothing at all, also known as ‘keeping mum’, ‘keeping stum’, and similar phrases. Like the little white lie, it’s done to spare other’s feelings, especially in situations where it’s felt that revealing the truth would do no good, and possibly even hurt someone. So there is a place for it, and I’ve done it myself – kept quiet about stuff that it really wasn’t necessary to reveal.

Maybe, for instance, you’ve got a sweet little old auntie who’s on her deathbed, and who’s always idolized her long-dead husband. Why tell her that in fact he had an affair thirty years ago? What purpose would be served by telling her now? (This is a fictitious example, I hasten to add, not one I’ve ever personally faced.)

Keeping our mouths shut is I think about the only ‘social dishonesty’ we aspies can manage, in response to all the situations mentioned above - difficult though it can be, not to blurt things out! I’ve found it best to watch what others are doing. If they aren’t revealing something, I don’t either.

It’s important to remember that all of these ‘dishonesties’ are done with positive intent in mind – the sparing of other’s feelings, at least in the short term. Whether they do in the long run of course is another question, but the golden rule here is “if in doubt, don’t say anything”.

My Love-Hate Relationship with the World

I have become aware lately of how much I both love and hate the world. Actually I think I've always known this, but I recently seem to have become way more conscious of it.

When I say "the world", I mean "everything that we know exists", and by "love", I mean love in its broadest, spiritual sense.

I love the Universe, in all its infinite variety and splendour, the amazing beauty of the stars and galaxies and so on. I find pictures of space totally awesome, and mind-blowing, when you think about the immense distances of space. They're saying now those vast distances aren't so empty after all, which to me makes it even more awesome.

I love our planet, because it's home, and utterly beautiful too, on the whole, still. I love wild sandy beaches, heaving oceans, thundering waterfalls, soaring mountains, rolling hills and the ever-changing skies. I do what I can to take care of it all. I love the environment.

I love animals too, not in any cutesy-Bambi kind of way, but because they are what they are, and worth caring about. Pets bring pleasure to many, working and farm animals are valuable, while wild animals play their part in the ecology. They're all our responsibility.

I even love human beings, most especially my family and friends of course, but also humanity in general. There are good people in the world, many of them doing good things, things that will help the world. Even knowing that there's also a lot of people doing harm to each other, doesn't change my concern for everybody's welfare. I want the world to be a better place, not only for autistics, but for everyone.

I even feel compassion, or at least pity, for those I have the least in common with - the blandly ordinary folk whose lives seem so boring you wonder how they stand it; the mega-rich whose wealth doesn't seem to guarantee them personal happiness; the hate-filled religious fanatics and "loony right" types; and even the abusers, rapists, murderers, etc, the last two groups of whom are so far from the Light I don't know how they'll ever find their way back. Yes, even them. (I avoid them like the plague of course, but I still pity them from afar.)

So I love the world.

But I also hate it.

And a lot of that hate, or at least loathing, dislike, exasperation, anger, rejection, etc, is connected to the reasons I love it.

I hate the idea of humans stuffing that beautiful Universe up. Even though, as an avid sci-fi and fantasy fan, I've enjoyed many stories of space travel, I kind of hope it never happens in reality. After all, colonising different parts of our own planet didn't really improve things all that much, did it? It simply created a whole new raft of problems.

I hate how so many people, especially those in Big Business, seem to be racing each other to pollute and generally stuff up our planet, would it really be so hard to be environmentally responsible? We've only got one planet, people!

I hate how some people treat animals. I'm not sentimental, I'm not even a vegetarian, and I know you have to assert mastery over animals (think of dog attacks, or a 500-pound bull trampling a human into the ground, and you'll understand why), but it doesn't need to be done with cruelty. Mistreatment of animals upsets me deeply. And I don't like either the whole 'performing seal' thing, or dogs on cushions with bows in their hair, and so on. The forcing of animals against their true nature seems to me a travesty of dignity for the animals concerned.

I hate the sensory barrage of the world. The whole blaring, glaring, flashing, whirring, humming, roaring, reeking, heaving, seething, frantic, chaotic mess of it. I hate how bloody overwhelming it is, and how pervasive it is. Sometimes I wish it would just STOP. Even just for a little while.

I hate how difficult social contact is in general. It feels like a minefield I have to tiptoe through, for fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, and getting people mad at me. I hate feeling I have to choose between pretending to be NT or offending people with my bluntness or 'weirdness'. And sometimes I end up offending them anyway, or they sort of withdraw from me, or give me funny looks. I hate how tired I am at the end of any day spent having to 'make nice', and how distant I feel from, and how jaundiced I feel about, humanity in general by then, especially when I know that most of them are really not bad people, and that it's me, not them. I hate how shitty that makes me feel.

I hate the emotional games some people play. They seem to love to spin emotional webs and jerk others around. Why can't they be honest? Why do they have to screw with people's heads? What on earth do they get from it? It leaves me feeling confused, lost and like the ground is shaky beneath my feet. And then there's all those so-called 'nearest and dearest', with their silent demands and unspoken expectations, which you can't possibly know, not being bloody psychic, and yet they feel perfectly entitled to punish or pressure you when you don't meet those expectations. I hate how in relating to such people, I used to feel like I was lost in a swamp.

I hate how some people never say what they really mean, using various kinds of roundabout talk, clichéd rubbish or New-Speak instead. This seems particularly prevalent among politicians, bureaucrats and similar authority figures. An offshoot of this insanity is when these same people put in place policies designed to make them popular, but which actually harm those most in need. You can usually spot these policies by the weasel words used to justify them.

I hate how hard it is to navigate through the world, and how little help many people will give you, especially if you are in any way different. Dress differently, look differently, behave differently, be obviously homeless, poor, an immigrant, disabled, or anything else outside the norm, and most will simply look away, or dump on you for being whatever you are. I hate how judgemental of difference many are.

Most of all, I hate how so many are so cruel to each other, the damage they do, the wars they start, the oppressions they perpetuate, the 'isms' they create and keep going. I especially hate the jeering, sneering, sniggering, name-calling, derision, bullying, beating, abuse, spirit-crushing, cold-shouldering, forced normalisation and so on that is perpetrated on autistics, but I also hate how anyone else who is 'not normal' is treated. I hate that people think that it's okay to do these things to people, especially those who are most vulnerable.

I hate how if you don't or can't or won't "fit in", then you're cold-shouldered, excluded, and if you finally withdraw from it all in overloaded confusion, your absence probably won't even be noticed. The world is a cruel place, and I hate it for that.

So I hate the world. And I don't know what to do with that hate, or how to reconcile it with that love.

How do you feel about the world?