AS and BPD

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Yeah. Although some people who've been called borderline have actually told me they like it. Not for the pain, but because they can feel things more deeply than most people. I remember hearing of a book on the subject being dedicated "to people who listen to the feel of the music more than the words" or something. From when my friend's ex was diagnosed and we were trying to read up on it.

Not that those things make a person 'borderline', but that if you get called that you do seem to more often than not are extremely emotional, and that can be good as well as bad.

I remember when a person in an institution I was in was diagnosed with it, and they wouldn't allow her to read up on it. When my parents sneaked in reading materials for her, though, she just said "Yeah, I'm a total drama queen, yeah, this totally fits me, why didn't they want me to know what it meant?" And she was okay with large parts of it (not the feelings of emptiness or anything though).

I think also some of the reason it doesn't seem manipulative to the person who has it, is because they are so focused on their own feelings at that moment, and acting only on what they feel, that the effect on others is truly not visible to them, or not under their own control even if they do see it.

And what seems to them like a frantic search for equilibrium, seems to others like the emotional/mental equivalent of being jerked around in several directions at once. I know this because of having been in a few attempts at friendship with people like this.

I remember someone who, upon meeting me, had a very strong positive reaction to me. But then she seemed to want to control everything about me. It was always phrased in terms of her need to have a stable sense of self, but her "needs" rapidly became absolutely impossible to sustain. She lashed out every time a person deviated from what she "needed" of them, even though that deviation happened because what she "needed" of people was absolutely impossible for any human being to do.

In my case, I basically told her (not in these words) that the idealization/devaluation cycle she was going through was detrimental to my own sanity and that I wasn't going to be jerked around by her anymore. I also tried to explain why this kind of thing is not conducive to keeping friends. So she went from (immediately, irrationally, and intensely) acting like I was this wonderful supportive person who was almost family to her, to thinking I'm the epitome of evil, and lashing out in revenge.

But I'm willing to be that to her, what happened looks totally different. It probably looks as if she had gotten this fragile equilibrium with me, and was starting to get totally comfortable, and then I started hurting her, and hurting her badly, over and over again. And like she tried to point out in no uncertain terms that I was hurting her, but I didn't listen and that my behavior was irrational because why would any rational person want to hurt her? (Not that I wanted to, and not that I could avoid it given what her rules were that she imposed on others, but this is just what she probably believes.) And that I totally deserved the things she did in revenge, because after all she only had to protect herself, and she is a nice person who just doesn't understand why her friends always abandon her or hurt her.

But from the outside of course, I and all her other friends felt like she was jerking us around all the time, manipulating us into behaving in ways that were impossible for any human to behave, and then throwing a fit when we refused to go along with it anymore. Not to mention periodically pitting us against each other for no apparent reason.

Of course, then there's the question of whether something has to feel manipulative in order to be manipulative. I know that with many of the universal human failings, like selfishness, an action doesn't have to feel selfish in order to be selfish. Is it the same with manipulation? I'm not sure.

Seems to me looking manipulative from the outside doesn't define something as manipulative. If the person doesn't intend something as manipulative, it isn't.

Also, with both being manipulative, and attention seeking, lots of people do that, but they don't get labeled for it. The people who get called manipulative or attention seeking either aren't as good at it, or do it in less socially appropriate ways, or sometimes aren't even doing it at all. (I've never been called attention seeking when I was actually looking for a response, appropriate or not, from someone. The two times I was accused of it, I'd actually given no thought to being noticed by the person who's attention I was supposedly seeking.) The labels "manipulative" and "attention seeking" tend to be projections. I feel manipulated, so you must be manipulating me. But me feeling manipulated doesn't make it manipulation.

What is a good word for it then when someone controls other people's lives to the extent I described? Because the person was intentionally trying to change our behavior to fit what they wanted of us, which strikes me as manipulative. I don't know any other word to describe it when someone does that to such a degree and extent (whether they are devalued people or not -- I think the same of the way staff control every little move of psych patients, and think they ought to be labeled manipulative far more often than patients ought to). But the motivation to control us was that she thought she had a 'need' that we were not fulfilling, and she was going to force us to fulfill it. So the desire to make us do what she wanted was almost undoubtedly there, but the person thought of it all in terms of us doing something wrong and her bringing us back into line, so wouldn't have probably thought of it as manipulating. So... what would[/i ] that situation be called?

It'd be different if she was just reacting but with no intent to control. But she did seem to do things that implied intent to control -- explicitly instructing us not to engage in various everyday ordinary activities, for instance. It's just that she would have been thinking about these things in a very self-centered manner that [i]justified her intent to control. The emotional outbursts may have been without intent to do so, but then the immediate (mental/emotional) grabbing us and telling us what to do and what not to do, that is what I was talking about. She'd view that as restoring 'safety' for her, we viewed it obviously as something other than that.

To me the term Borderline Personality Disorder is meaningless. If something is borderline it is on the boundary between two entities. So Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) must be on the boundary between two states such as sanity and madness, or psychosis and neurosis . But it is not. At one time BPD was thought to be a mild form of schizophrenia. The ICD-10 of the World Health Organisation has the comparable diagnosis of Emotionally unstable personality disorder- Borderline type, which name is more meaningful to me. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline ... y_disorder .

As far as I remember I first came across the term Borderline Personality Disorder three or four years ago.

Ms. A. J. Mahari is a Canadian Aspie who has BPD. Her website is here: http://www.borderlinepersonality.ca . She writes that:

This is one of the most clear, understanding, intuitive things I have ever herd anyone say. And yet they say people with AS have no empathy.

People have told me I have been manipulative; but in my own mind all I have been doing is communicating. If someone wants to leave you and drive their car away and you take their keys, I would consider that to be manipulative. Manipulatition requires malice of forethought, a certain chesslike thinking ahead that I completely lack in terms of people. And yet I have been called manipulative quite often. Which has led me to the conclusion that unless a person sublimates their will to the will of other people, he or she will be called manipulative. Example: I will not say I am happy with something if I am not. This is not being "manipulative", just being honest. And I suppose when I am not happy with something and let that be known, it inconveniences people by not allowing them to delude themselves into thinking that their desired action is the best for everybody. In other words, I think sometimes people will call you "manipulative" just because you inconvenience them. If that makes any sense.

Some of it is because even if I haven't done anything that bad, I have been minding my own business and gotten yelled at a lot for doing something to someone I didn't think I was doing it to.

And then one time I was in conversation with someone who told me how selfish I'd been lately, and I said "But I didn't think I was doing anything, I just was doing my own thing," and she said "That's the problem, you didn't think," and it dawned on me at that point that that's what thoughtlessness means. It means you weren't thinking of someone else, just yourself, and possibly really harmed them or at least needlessly inconvenienced them in the process. Of course it has to be separated out, between when you're really harming someone, and when the person just wants an excuse to be mad at you.

But at that point I realized that a lot of the time when people do things that harm each other it's not within intent to do so, it just sort of happens as the person is trying to do something else and forgets to take something important into account.

Of course there are also people who really do intend harm, and most people are probably a mix of both. And there are some people who will do things out of malice, but will actually try to convince themselves (and everyone else) that it's by accident and they're not doing anything wrong on purpose. And that gets really hard to decipher -- often beyond my abilities to do so.

But it was interesting figuring that out. And it made it a lot clearer why at least some people were doing things the way they were. It doesn't necessarily justify or excuse what people are doing, but it helps to understand why. It also helped me understand why I should apologize if I cause harm, even if I didn't mean to. That I didn't mean to wasn't the point, the point was I'm sorry it happened. Just like if I bashed into someone I might say (if I had access to a speech synthesizer) I'm sorry.

(Then there's over-apologizing. I once saw someone have a seizure, and then look terrified and say "sorry" in sign language the moment they woke up. (They're usually non-speaking after seizures.) I hate to think what must have happened to that person that made them think they had to apologize for how their brains worked.)

So all of that was a major social revelation to me, that came pretty late, and I'm still figuring out all the implications. But it's on that basis that I was thinking, what must she have been thinking? (Which is something I often have a hard time doing, because most non-autistic people really baffle me. But I really admire people who can get outside themselves and see things more objectively and with everyone's point of view taken into account, so I'm working on it not because I want to overcome autism or something but because I think it's a useful ability to have.)



Yeah it does.

Also... I remember having the weirdest conversation many years ago.

I had stated at one point how much certain viewpoints bothered me. (Which aren't important, since I have no intent of starting a debate on those topics here.)

Later on, I was involved in a conversation. I'm going to give people false names so I don't have to say Person 1 and Person 2. So...

I was involved in a disagreement with Renee about something. Specifically, she had stated she didn't like something Betty was talking about, and Betty kept talking about it, and then Renee blew up at her, telling her she'd already said not to talk about it. I didn't think it was something that people should avoid talking about, etc etc etc., and Renee ended up mad at me as well.

Then one thing she told me was that I'd told her not to talk about that topic that upset me, and that she'd always avoided it since then, and that I didn't seem the least bit grateful.

So I told her, that I'd never even once told anyone not to talk about that topic.

She pointed back to where I had said it was offensive, upsetting, whatever.

I told her that I didn't mean that she shouldn't talk about it.

She told me that I did in fact mean that.

I told her that I certainly was upset by it but that my emotions should not rule a whole discussion. That in fact I found it very annoying when people used the fact that they were upset about something, to win (or at least halt) a debate, and that I would never do that.

She kept insisting that "I'm upset/offended/whatever by this" always means "You should not talk about this."

Which was bizarre to me. Completely bizarre. I can't stand when people say "I'm upset" when they really mean "You shouldn't do this." The most likely reason for this has been the proliferation of the idea that it's somehow better to say "When you ______ I feel _______" than to say "You're doing something wrong and you shouldn't do that." So now, instead of saying the second thing, people say the first thing when they still really mean the second thing, and that's becoming so commonplace in some places that people just read the first formula as meaning the second idea.

Anbuend, all I can say is I don't make judgements about people's intents, because I know how often people have been wrong about my intents. We can't read others minds.

And, like I said, manipulating others is pretty normal. Like me touching my husband because I want sex. The difference between "manipulation" and manipulative actions that don't get that label is how other people see it. If they don't like it, it's manipulation. If they do, it's okay and not commented on. It has nothing to do with the other person's intent.

And I don't think it's fair to label someone with mean put down words when they are merely trying to get their needs met, trying to deal with emotional needs the best they know how.

Etymology is not destiny. Yeah, the word borderline doesn't in any way describe BPD. But that doesn't make the term Borderline Personality Disorder meaningless. It may not be label where the meaning is evident from the words that make it up, none the less it is a useful label. Not always. Sometimes people misuse it. But it's also helped a lot of people to get help or to help themselves. Including me.

Yes, having such extreme emotions is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it (to me) is like a sixth sense, I can pick up on vibes instantly, weigh up a person in a split second glance, almost like seeing into their soul. I have extreme empathy and soak up others emotions like a sponge.

A curse because I cannot regulate my emotions, they overwhelm and terrify me in their intensity, everything hurts me. I read somewhere that many borderlines have emotions like burnt flesh, the slightest touch is agony. That is so true!! ! For me anyway.

How do you know how accurate these "vibes" are? "[A] split second glance" sounds like a bit of a snap judgment, and snap judgments are often particularly inaccurate when the judgment is of a person with Asperger's syndrome. People's impressions of me are all over the place, without my making any effort to give a certain impression; sometimes I think it's mostly projection.

Borderline personality structure used to be defined much more nebulously. A whole class of psychiatric disorders were thought to lie on the borderline between neurosis and psychosis, displaying symptoms of both as well as symptoms unique to the borderline psychodynamics. Borderlines as we know them today were among this group because their somewhat more extraverted and socially aware form of borderline psychosis was thought to mask an underlying disorder similar to schizophrenia. Those who displayed classically schizophrenic or paranoid symptoms but in milder form were also thrown in the borderline category (or diagnosed with ambulatory schizophrenia or some such); today they would be diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder (schizotypal disorder in the ICD-10) or paranoid personality disorder. Thus borderline personality disorder only applies to a subset of the older borderline taxon, and these are not especially related to schizophrenia or any other psychotic disorder (except for the transient, stress-related psychotic episodes that remain a diagnostic criterion).

I'm afraid it's very difficult to describe, I've never yet been wrong about a person. It's nothing to do with the way a person looks, their facial expressions or anything like that. It's more of a sense.

People seem to do that a lot. Take an "expert opinion" and extrapolate it to the point of near harm. "when you do X I feel Y" is supposed to remove damaging personal associations, is supposed to replace phrases like "you're inconsiderate" and "why are you so stubborn?" that might give the person you're talking to the idea that you devalue them. But of course, now it's its own source of miscommunication. Enlightening, but depressing a little bit, actually.

Been thinking about this half the night...fell asleep and just woke up with this page still on the comp.

It was only suggested I was borderline, so I have to wait. I completed a 200 question test, which, to be honest it bothers me. My outcome will rely on a paper test which at the time my mind was thinking...what do they want me to answer. Still got my becks test, anxiety test and anger management test here on my desk.

I seem to fall into both AS and BPD at some level. I am not empathic people irritate the f**k out of me most of the time. I do think in terms of black and white either you are my friend which to me means complete loyalty or you are against me....ugly side of my personality but that is how I think.

I have a constant anger simmering just underneath and with very little provocation I can lose my temper. I am aware of this so it is another reason I stay away from people. If this is borderline and it can be cured I want the cure. There is nothing nice about being oversensitive, and emotionally feeble.

Just to add,

The differential diagnoses for Asperger's are (this means that upon first viewing, they may look similar):

Autism
PDD-NOS
Schizophrenia
Schizotypal Personality Disorder
Schizoid Personality Disorder
ADHD
OCD