Maybe Bruce Banner was in a relationship with a personality disordered individual?
Here’s a story that will hopefully sharpen up your personality disorder radars and alert you to the possibility that you may currently be in or were once in a relationship with a PD.
Last year a friend divulged to me that his girlfriend likely had borderline personality disorder. Through numerous discussions with him, it was very clear to me that she did indeed have a very severe case of BPD.
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) – The DSM Criteria
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM) as an Axis II, Cluster B (dramatic, emotional, or erratic) Disorder:
A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. [Not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, promiscuous sex, eating disorders, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). [Again, not including suicidal or self-mutilating behavior covered in Criterion 5]
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior.
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.
The Girlfriend
She had major problems, but had no insight so she blamed them on my friend, whom she was in a relationship with at the time. This woman had experienced a difficult childhood. Occasionally she was viciously violent and had even stabbed my friend in a fit of rage one evening (she minimise this of course, saying my friend had walked into the knife). She had lived a reckless life and had been taken advantage of and raped a few times as an adult. She always accused my friend of infidelity when he was always faithful to her. He loved her dearly, but she was convinced, despite his best efforts to continually prove it to her, that he never did. She would bring up his childhood traumas and call him vile names, wishing that he would “crawl into a hole and die”. She took over my friend’s life and controlled his every move. She would read through his text messages and delete friends and their phone numbers on his mobile. She would verbally abuse him and tell him to “leave”, but would berate him even more when he did leave the house, even if it was momentarily, saying that he had “abandoned” her. She would destroy his belongings and gifts that she had given him. Other times, she would threaten to set his belongings on fire if he did not come home immediately when she wanted him. She would accuse my friend of having a negative look on his face when he was serenely watching television. She would set psychological traps for him to test her twisted theories. She was emotionally labile (ie up and down) to the extreme. She was always worried about her weight and not having big enough breasts (despite having had a boob job) or being unattractive. She would be impulsive and do outlandish things like cut all of her hair off after experiencing difficulty with her work colleagues. She would cut herself with knives and drink petrol. She often threatened to kill herself and told my friend that it would be his fault if she did.
She was incredibly manipulative, controlling, needy, paranoid, abusive, impulsive and psychologically dangerous. If you asked my friend, she was also incredibly beautiful, good in bed, intelligent, and ‘special’ compared with other women. This is how she kept him ‘hooked’ on her like she was her own special brand of heroin. Without her, even though he knew she was destroying him, he would go into a type of withdrawal and look for any excuse to return to her to get his ‘fix’. The drama she caused was both traumatic and salaciously seductive.
Bringing Out the Worst
This BPD girlfriend would purposefully antagonise my friend and yell at him, “hit me” or “kill me”.
One day my friend did physically assault her. He is a bodybuilder and he pushed her hard, from one side of the bed over to the other side of the room. She immediately called the police. He was immediately horrified by his own actions. He had never assaulted a woman before. He had broken one of his most important values and was terrified of himself and what this relationship had brought out in him.
My friend took full responsibility for his violence toward her. He did not blame her for his actions in any way. He did however recognise that this relationship brought out the very worst in him. He saw himself enact things he never thought were possible in a loving relationship. He had never assaulted any of his previous partners nor had he felt the urge. He knew that being in this relationship was unhealthy and that it brought out the very worst in him. Although he loved her, he knew that a line had been crossed and that whereas he was still very much in love with her, that he had to learn to start letting go of this toxic love for both their sakes.
I too have noticed that with personality disordered people I am never completely myself. In fact, I have become things that I truly detest. This just gives the personality disordered person more fodder to use against you; to blame you for all that is wrong with the relationship, never having to accept any responsibility for their own bad behaviour. My friend’s BPD girlfriend repeatedly asserted that there was nothing wrong with her, though convinced him that he was an alcoholic and that he should get counselling for this and other psychological problems. She thought that because she had been to university and could hold a job that there was nothing wrong with her. Her insightlessness was pathological and just another one of her iron-clad ego defences to preserve her good feelings about herself.
I saw my friend bawl his eyes out on many occasions and drink to calm his anxieties. He was so confused. He was a mess.
What Being With a Personality Disordered Individual Feels Like
In this post I have used a real example of a woman with BPD in a relationship with a non-PD. However, BPDs are not the only type of personality disorder that will bring out the very worst in you…they all have the potential to do that.
There is a very strong ‘push-pull’ force in any relationship with a personality disordered individual. They can make you feel amazing one minute and insecure the next. They cannot control their own emotions but they’ll certainly hijack yours 🙂
You can never quite relax around them. You must always be on guard lest you make an unforgivable error that they will never forget. The ironic thing is, that even though you are so hypervigilant (or walking on eggshells, as I like to refer to it), you will probably feel like you’re screwing up this relationship like never before. You will have an inordinate amount of regrets over things you have said or done, leading you to feel that any problems are entirely your own stupid fault.
They will highlight your mistakes like a first year text book. But don’t you dare ever remind them of the hurt they have caused you…you might just make them feel guilty for what they have done and remind them they are not perfect. They do not possess enough emotional maturity to integrate this into their character.
You will be accused of being unforgiving and perhaps even that you are lying. You’ll feel as though you are going crazy, but you’re in fact, perfectly normal.
You will probably begin to pick up some of their PD traits, which are sometimes referred to as fleas (my mother has always said, “If you lay down with dogs, you are bound to get fleas”…it is true). You will wonder why the hell you have become so needy or abusive when you have never been like this in any other relationship.
The moral of this story is that if you get too close to someone with a personality disorder, such a relationship will very likely bring out the very worst in you. And if the personality disordered individual is anything like my friend’s former girlfriend, they may even taunt you and dare you to become a creature you will despise.
On that note, have a nice day, and remember to be kind to all people!
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