Borderline Personality Disorder: The Mental Illness that Keeps on Giving

So I saw this article and probably should have known not to read it, because within two paragraphs I was screaming obscenities and walking around punching my own fists.   I long ago developed the habit of remembering that when I'm angry about something, it doesn't always mean the other person has done anything wrong, only that I'm pissed off about it.  This is one of those times.

BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER MAY BE ROOTED IN TRAUMA

I understand that mental health professionals are doctors, and they need to be equally available to everyone.  They can't stigmatize people whose mental health conditions make them FUCKING PREDATORS TO OTHER PEOPLE, like THOSE WITH BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER.  Borderlines hate to have that bit of reality checking smacked upside their fucking heads, and yet WHOOMP, THERE IT IS. 

There's an old saying about Cluster B personality disorders, including borderline:  they don't suffer from mental illness, they're carriers (medically, a carrier is one who transmits a disease without being personally affected by it.) 

Borderline personality disorder is about hating yourself, and constantly looking for other people to offload that onto, full stop.  They're broken on the inside, and instead of fixing it, they choose to make that the problem of everybody in the fucking world other than themselves.  It's all about finding some way, by hook or by crook, to make whatever you don't like about yourself somebody else's problem.  Dogs get euthanized for much less than what these people do constantly.

What set me into a rage spiral about this article -- which represents perfectly valid and necessary work by mental health professionals on behalf of people who are technically still human beings and worthy of support -- is the way they got centered as maligned victims. 

I have extensive personal experience with BPD, because I'm quite sure both of my parents would have been diagnosed with it had they ever subjected themselves to diagnosis, which neither of them ever would. 

This right here was when I started rage screaming:

"Of all those horrible experiences, Ann says that the thing that hurts the most is how little her parents seemed to care about her. When she told her mother she had been raped, her mother responded by saying she was to blame for her own assault. When she was hit by a car while biking to work, her father unsympathetically said, “Get up, everything is fine,” and sent her on her way. It was only after a colleague rushed to her in shock, asking why her head was covered in blood, that she realized how bad the accident had been. “That’s the hardest thing for me,” Ann tells me, as her voice starts to tremble and tears fill her eyes. “To have parents that don’t see you as a person.”  [Emphasis added]

Mommy that never saw her as a person!   BOO FUCKING HOO!!!  I'm sure that's the deal with my mother, too.  That's why she doubled down on that shit with me.  That's exactly what borderline personality disorder is about.  You marry a man who's as selfish as yourself, take the shitty parenting you got, and pay it forward -- especially for boomers like my parents.  It was a deeply Gen X groove, to be so entirely invisible at all times.  "Latchkey" is all about having borderline parents who couldn't give a fuck less about anything but how they feel in every moment, like drug addicts who never want to come down.

One thing they don't really mention in the article is that lying, rampaging dishonesty, is the key to borderline personality disorder.  They will have a baby and gaslight the poor thing into actual fucking blindness to suit themselves.  Borderlines need to feel special and important, without doing anything to merit that sort of admiration.  Of course one way you can get that sort of adulation is by having a child.  And you can force that sort of unrequited love by leaving them in the sort of despair, where they're in the sort of anguish where they're wailing for a mother, and then you can just flick your wrist and walk away and feel SUPER fucking important, and my god that's an amazing high for these broken, broken, worthless bags of shit.  Nobody can abuse a child like a borderline.  I don't think forced sterilization is necessarily an abusive consideration with Cluster B personality disorders.

Look I'm not saying that woman had a good childhood.  I'm saying I got gang raped every weekend, and after my mom found out about it, she screamed "Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about!" in my face any time she saw me not okay.  She has no idea why I came home with my front tooth broken out at age 8 (assault) and I wasn't allowed to explain.  The childhood described in that article was a fucking cakewalk compared to mine, as was both my mother's and my father's -- and granted, all three of those sucked and could be considered traumatic.  But my childhood was not entirely survivable.  And fuck all three of those borderline assholes.

My mother was a drunken, lying piece of shit who should have gone to prison.  Fuck her mental illness and the family that imposed it on her.  Yes, her childhood sucked.  Her family are cold, dishonest, selfish, greedy, and meaner than snakes.  And she chose to continue sucking up to them all her days, at my expense.  She's still trying to sit at their lunch table now and she's almost 90. 

Meanwhile, I suffered trauma so severe that I'm not even getting into it.  No, seriously it's a miracle I'm still alive at all.  And my asshole mother literally doesn't even know any details of what happened.  What happened to me was so much worse than anything in that article, ten times worse than anything that happened to my mother or anyone in her garbage Lace Curtain Irish family, that this entire article just made me want to drown all the highly privileged psychologists who think  that shit sounds reasonable.  No, seriously.  They all had mothers who hugged or comforted them at least once in their lives. 

That thing where George Floyd cried out for his mother, that freaked me out in a number of different ways.  As a rape survivor, I feel like everyone in the world knowing that about him was much too invasive of his privacy, for the whole world to be in on his murder in that way.  That disgusts me, how intimate that was for the whole world, and it's not necessary, like the sick spectacle of true crime and dead women.  It's gross.  Leave him the fuck alone with it. 

But also I've heard that about other crime victims before, that in the height of their despair they always cry out for their mothers.  And it always makes me feel like an alien from space, because I can't imagine anyone that I would call to for comfort in that way, certainly not that fucking rage demon.

Fuck your borderline personality disorder.  People get borderline personality disorder because they consistently choose weakness over personal accountability, FULL FUCKING STOP.  They are allowed to continue on with that shit until it becomes a full-on disorder.  They don't get regulated and made to grow the fuck up, and it's all wah wah manipulative bullshit and other people have to carry them through life, and then psychologists are like "Don't be mean to them."  FUCK OFF.