Intimacy With Someone Who Has Borderline Personality Disorder?
Is intimacy possible with someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)? Can you really create a bond with someone with BPD? If you do create a bond with someone with BPD can it include intimacy? What is
the likely quality of it and outcome of it? Family members and
relationship partners of those with BPD as well as friends often find
out that those with BPD are not capable of achieving or sustaining a
healthy bond.
Borderlines have trouble bonding or attaching to a partner without feeling as if their psychological existence is threatened. Unless those with BPD are successfully treated and successfully address the core wound of abandonment that is so central to BPD, intimacy is just too stressful and causes those with BPD to fragment, regress, act out, or cling to others in ways that promote the re-living of the abandonment most feared and that also support ruptured toxic relational styles - not healthy intimacy.
Non borderlines really need to learn the reality and truth about borderline love and how to overcome any misunderstandings, misconceptions, or misgivings about the toxic love of the borderline false self.
- The Puzzle and Mystery of Hope on the Other Side of BPD
- Inside The Borderline Mind
- The Shame of Abandonment In BPD
- Breaking Free of The Borderline Maze - Recovery For Nons
- Facing the Facts of BPD - On The Other Side For Nons
- Overcoming Denial About BPD and Love
Borderlines are unable to congruently bond or attach to a partner in healthy ways because they were unable to successfully master the separation-individuation phase of development in early childhood.
Borderlines wreak so much chaos, drama, havoc, and often abuse, in relationships. When they try to relate to someone intimately the stress creates the rise of a myriad of false self defenses that push other away. Most with BPD have not learned how to regulate or modulate the emotions associated with the flux of distance and closeness that is part of healthier relationships.
According to N. Gregory Hamilton, M.D., in his book, Self and Others – Object Relations Theory In Practice, “Struggles between closeness and autonomy gradually subside as rapprochement resolves. The child finds an optimal distance. The intensity and duration of temper tantrums decrease. Emotions become more modulated, and a new emotional repertoire emerges.”
Closeness, for the borderline, brings with it the terror of annihilation or engulfment – the re-experiencing of the loss of authentic self. Whereas distance is experienced as either pending re-abandonment or threatened abandonment.
Often this propels the borderline to punish and seek revenge or to wish to annihilate the significant other in his or her life, as a means of defending against the loss of self through other.
Borderlines need to find their way to the kind of therapy that will make it possible for them to learn how to relate in ways that aren’t abusive, self-defeating, and sometimes even criminal. They need to be helped to heal their abandonment trauma so they can emotionally and psychologically mature.
Some borderlines can do some terrible things and cause untold pain and chaos in their own lives and the lives of those who care about them. Though everyone with BPD is responsible for his or her own behaviour, most deeply regret not only their own pain, but the pain they cause others.
It is not correct to assume that due to the way in which many with BPD treat others, that they have no conscience or remorse or compassion. They can act in ways that are totally opposite to this when triggered to regressed wounded and dissociative past experience, however. This often creates confusion for those in relationship with borderlines.
Self-forgiveness
is important for those with BPD so that they can psychologically unhook
from the self-sabotaging and self-hating cycle.
For those who are non borderline learning to unhook from the pain you experience in reaction to the person with BPD in your life and Breaking Free From The BPD Maze - finding your own recovery is needed whether you maintain a relationship or contact with the person who has BPD in your life or not.
If we, as non borderlines, are capable of compassion we have an ethical and moral responsibility to understand the person with BPD without sanctioning abusive behaviour. However this understanding can be a major stumbling block that can hook us into remaining in toxic and unhealthy relationships. As I share in my ebook, Full Circle - Lesson For Non Borderlines it is important to be fully aware of the limitations of the borderline when it comes to age-appropriate interpersonal relating. Limitations that invariably mean that the borderline cannot achieve healthy intimacy. Any intimacy achieved or bond formed is bound to be unhealthy and/or toxic as well as fleeting and inconsistent.
Bonds formed with those with BPD are rendered toxic by the borderline's inability to relate in mutual and reciprocal age-appropriate ways. Borderlines tend to be fairly needy and fairly "self-absorbed" - absorbed within a protective and angry false self - because they truly do not have an actual "self" from which to relate to others. This is why those with BPD live through others in ways that render them and their wants and needs invisible and/or non-existent in the borderline's emotional world.
If intimacy is a re-play of your borderline's childhood in your life, detach emotionally. If necessary, end the relationship. Non Borderlines need to get off the unregulated chaotic emotional roller coaster of borderline emotional dysfunction and dysregulation by unhooking from the things that pull them into it and result in toxic and unhealthy relating for both the non and the borderline. I have written about this in my ebook, The Other Side of Borderline Personality Disorder Mindfulness and Radical Acceptance for Non-Borderlines
Intimacy with most people who have Borderline Personality Disorder (until and unless they have significant successful therapeutic intervention) is not possible in healthy adult mutual and reciprocal ways. Non borderlines need to come to terms with the reality that Borderline "Love" is an oxymoron.
Borderlines struggle with abandonment fear that causes them to regress to the role of the child in intimate relationships.
The result of this triggered and dissociative regression is that they experience their partners as bad mother or not-good-enough mother. Borderlines are not able to stay in the present when stressed by the re-surfacing of their abandonment trauma. They are not able to regulate their needs or emotions in congruent ways that allow for the necessary moving in and moving out that healthy intimacy requires.
Lacking
object constancy borderlines’ attempts at adult emotional intimacy,
more often than not, result in intense and unstable push-pull and
“I-hate-you-don’t-leave me” behaviour of the borderline
false self which is a major reason why both those with BPD and non borderlines need to understand the on-going impact of the core wound of abandonment - the root reasons for so much of the difficulties that borderlines have in relationships.
Age-appropriate adult intimacy with someone with Borderline Personality Disorder is not possible until and unless they learn to unhook from all of the loaded inter-relational triggers of their arrested emotional development and learn to attach and bond in the here and now congruently with object constancy.
Expecting someone with BPD, in its active throes, to be able to relate as if they were not personality-disordered is entirely unrealistic. Believing this illusion causes untold pain for those who are non-borderline and in any type or form of relationship to an untreated borderline.
Borderlines do not know how to regulate their emotions in ways that prevent them from re-experiencing the cycling control struggle between dependence and independence – the separation – individuation struggle that they were unable to master as young children.
© A.J. Mahari, February 1, 2007 with additions November 15, 2008
A.J. Mahari is a Life Coach who, among other things, specializes in working with those with BPD and non borderlines. A.J. has 5 years experience as a life coach and has worked with hundreds of clients from all over the world.
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