Just a lot of comments on here suggesting that borderlines are actively nasty because they’re evil people that want to destroy everything in their paths, when in reality that’s just us assigning meaning to their actions from a place of unresolved pain, grief, and insult. There are also some confusing comments asserting that borderlines, narcissists, psychopaths, and complex trauma can all be used interchangeably.

I don’t agree with the assertion that borderlines are actually just confused narcissists. All PDs have distorted self concept but they don’t operate in the same way. For the Narcissist (ever pre-occupied with the inflation and deflation of self) it is said that emotions follow states of self-esteem, while for the Borderline esteem appears to follow emotions. Although we perceive both as “self-absorbed,” they are not the same. Where the borderline seeks safety through cycles of extreme need for closeness and extreme rejection of closeness, the narcissist only finds safety in extreme rejection of closeness or—if otherwise inclined—rigidly controlled closeness.

Lastly, all adults with BPD have neglect/abuse in infancy. There’s a lot of research on this. Early trauma results in developmental deficits and life long neurocognitive dysfunction. It’s like growing up with your brain being literally malnourished. The experience creates real, measurable problems with the brain’s social and emotional circuitry that can be seen on MRIs.

It’s like if someone threw you into a cave tomorrow and tasked you with learning Mandarin on your own— your brain needs information to do this, needs a teacher to observe and model after, needs to see it, needs to hear it, needs to read books, sing songs and tell stories, needs to practice with a native speaker. In BPD, you have an infant that is tasked with building all of its most foundational knowledge in a vacuum. Things like self concept, self-other differentiation, object permanence, mentalization, theory of mind, empathy, and emotional regulation without access to any resources. That’s why the brain grows with cognitive deficits and becomes disordered. BPD is a grave and serious disorder, not a personality.

I’ve had my share of BPD abuse. It was terrible. There’s no excuse. I still try to have some understanding and perhaps pity even. Calling a borderlines evil predators just feels like “reciprocal splitting.” But maybe that’s just me.