Ever since Elizabeth Zetzel published her ground-breaking article “The so called good hysteric” in 1968, there had been increasing interest in what we now call Borderline Personality Disorder. When we factor in the distraught psychiatric personnel trying to deal with their frequent visits to the E.R., the advent of the film “Fatal Attraction” and the frequent experience of male partners trying to deal with their over-wrought female companions, we can begin to understand the bandwidth that this diagnosis has taken on in the public mind.

Because of this, it has become incumbent on us to try to understand what is going on with these people and how we can cope with their ‘emotional dysregulation’ as Marsha Linehan likes to call it. In that spirit and in an attempt to go beyond the empirically-based DSM5 I have discovered three mostly unmentioned characteristics that may help us to better understand and deal with these people.

1)An excess of pride that makes it almost impossible for the Borderline to admit their mistakes. This characteristic is well-known in the sister diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality -a diagnosis that has taken on a life of its own since the advent of the Trump presidency. For some reason its’ presence in the Borderline has gone largely unnoticed. Perhaps this is because other characteristics like suicidality and angry outbursts are so much more dramatic.

However, in dealing with these people, the fact that they almost never say, like the stereotypical alcoholic”I’m so sorry for losing it.. I’ll never do that again” makes it all the more difficult to make any progress. Perhaps it is the presence of such low self-esteem that makes the admission of guilt so problematic. It’s as if admitting one more error would be too crushing to their sense of self-worth.

2)Consistent bad decision- making. I think this is related to the power of the forces of desire and aversion which regularly overpower both their reason and theirintuition. So in a way this is also a derivative of emotional intensity and dysregulation.

3) An overconcern with the opinion of others. This is often counter-productive as these ‘others’ are often out of touch in their opinions and certainly, in most cases, not a good source of advice. In fact, these opinions may not even be those of the imagined ‘others’ but rather projected ones of the borderline themselves. This aspect can probably be traced back to the identity diffusion of the borderline pathology. The borderline typically has a weak sense of self. They do not have well-supported opinions of their own. So they become reliant on others points of view -regardless of the level of wisdom or ignorance of the other. In fact,  borderlines tend to choose the least wise advisors the same way they often choose the most inappropriate partners.

This is by no means the definitive answer to dealing with this problematic phenomenon. But hopefully it will add to our capacity to cope in a relationship-context-both for the partner and the borderline themselves.

Salaams,Ibrahim