Loving the Borderline in Her Fantasy
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2021-04-02

Borderline Personality Disorder is a form of CPTSD (complex trauma) and, in many cases, gives rise to compulsive sexual ideation and hypersexuality (“sex addiction”).

In early childhood, the Borderline had learned to associate sex, pain, and love inextricably, sometimes owing to a history of childhood sexual abuse. Hereditary brain abnormalities are at play, too, predisposing the child to develop emotional dysregulation and mood disorders and lability.

The Borderline sexualizes her emotions and her needs: to be loved, to belong and be accepted and valued, to feel safe, empowered, irresistible, in control, and “at home”.

Even in one night stands turned ugly - and she goes through many of these - she is likely to embed the dissonant experience in a fantastic narrative of love, redemption, and rescue.

Her litany of failed relationships - the inevitable outcomes of selecting for all the wrong mates - predisposes the Borderline to anticipate the worst: acrimonious and agonizing abandonment and rejection. She often cheats her way out of such calamitous dyads.

She catastrophizes in all her liaisons and then, at the first sign of discord or sexual rejection, she decompensates and acts out: becomes violent, promiscuous, deceitful (cheats), or psychopathic (defiant, impulsive,dysempathic, and reckless).

To cope with overwhelming shame and guilt having egregiously misbehaved, she dissociates: becomes amnesiac, depersonalizes, or derealizes.

People with personality disorders who are high-functioning are very disconcerting: they compartmentalize their promiscuous, antisocial, addictive, sadistic, and defiant behaviors.

During the day, they are competent professionals, diligent students, pillars of the community, responsible citizens and fathers or mothers, loving husbands or wives, and thriving entrepreneurs.

Come evening, the mask drops, the drink and drugs are out, replete with dissolute reckless sex with virtual strangers, gambling, or any number of self-trashing and dysfunctional, even self-destructive behaviors.

What baffles scholars is that all these self-states are a part of the personality. There is no faking involved. The switching is abrupt but seamless. Dissociation is often involved, but never to the point of rupturing continuous autobiographical memory and core identity.

Cleckley called it the “Mask of Sanity”. It challenges everything we thought we knew about psychology.

Everyone advises that falling in love with broken, damaged people is self-destructive: they are bound to hurt you and traumatize you for life. Ruination awaits in such an affair of the heart.

But this blanket advice is often wrong and self-defeating.

The corresponding pathologies of the members of a couple can either cancel each other out, bringing a sense of safety, anxiety reduction, and even healing - or they amplify each other, exacerbating the underlying conditions of everyone involved.

The shattered are much more open and vulnerable: their “innards” are on full display. They are skinless and defenseless.

But exactly this susceptibility renders the interactions and emotions in such relationships both deeper and more intense.

Loving the mentally ill is an exasperating technicolor wild ride - not the black and white tones of healthy boundaries.

The hurt and the traumatized know each other’s lingering volcanic agony intimately, better than any outsider can. The same way alcoholics sponsor their kith and kind in AA 12 step programs, the broken see each other through the howling miasmas of their souls.

It is a gamble with one’s life and sanity. Yet, so many take it because loving such the wounded is the most selfless act there is and a hyperdrive of personal growth even through adversity.

Such tortured relationships go south when we want our partner either to wound us further (affirm our victim status) - or we expect them to “fix” us.
Women who possess both strong, unfulfilled maternal instincts and abandonment anxiety find in the narcissist the perfect solution: a child who will never grow up and separate from them.

These intimate partners subtly encourage the narcissist’s infantilization, immaturity, learned helplessness, and dependency.

They frown upon and disincentivize - even punish - any attempts to transform, break away, or display adult behaviors (including having sex).

Sometimes, they even give up on having children of their own to dedicate themselves exclusively to this “safe” child at home.

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