Tips: Survive Your Borderline Enchantress

The next problem with borderline is decompensation.

Borderline personality disorder is an extreme form of infantile defenses, exactly like the narcissism is an extreme form of the fantasy defense.

Borderline is an extreme form of a series of infantile defenses, most notably splitting, projection, rationalization, and projective identification.

So, the borderline is surrounded, she has a wall, she has a firewall, she has a fortification, a fortress of ever active defense mechanisms. And the aim of these defense mechanisms is to falsify reality, to reframe reality, to recast reality in a way that will be egosyntonic, in a way that the borderline can live with, can survive.

If the borderline were to face herself, as she is, if she were to face the truth, she would not survive.

She needs absolutely to render reality more amenable, more acceptable, and she does this by filtering reality. She impairs her own reality testing via her psychological defense mechanisms.

So, under extreme stress, when she anticipates humiliation and rejection, when she is for some reason discarded, when she has a fight with you, when you are busy, this is all very stressful for the borderline. This stressors cause a process called decompensation. Decompensation is when the defense mechanisms of the borderline shut down one after the other. Tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, all the defenses shut down.

At some point, she is rendered defenseless. She becomes skinless. She has no protection and no isolation from her environment and from the unbearable and intolerable reality of her impending doom and catastrophize abandonment and humiliation and rejection. At that point, she falls apart. She even may develop a psychotic micro episodes. In other words, very brief psychosis can last a few minutes to a few hours.

And so you need to counter the borderline's propensity for decompensation. You need to counter it by using techniques that are usually used in tackling anxiety and panic attacks.

Decompensation feels very much like a panic attack. And we have developed over the decades very, very powerful techniques to cope with anxiety disorders, anxiety attacks, and panic attacks. And these techniques include breathing exercises, including controlled breathing, breathing into bags, breathing with counting and so on.

I encourage you to go online and read about breathing exercises for anxiety and panic. They include journaling, encouraging the borderline to note down, to journal, to write down all her cognitive processes when she is anxious or when she's panicking.

In other words, when she's decompensating or when she's panicking, she just writes down what goes through her mind.

And then at the end of the day, she reads these sentences aloud to herself.

So when she's in panic, when she's anxious, when she's about to decompensate, she notes down what's going on through her mind, and she reads it aloud to herself at the end of the day.

This feedback is very calming. It's axiolytic.

These are examples of techniques we use in treating anxiety and panic, and they should be very effective with decompensation.

Help your borderline to adopt these techniques on a daily basis. It might stun off, prevent, or postpone eventual decompensation.

When the borderline decompensates, she ends up acting out. Acting out is dysregulated, uncontrolled, self-harming, reckless behavior, and it is brought on by the self-states of the borderline.

One of the main self-states of the borderline is a secondary psychopath. When the borderline is under attack, when she's stressed, when she expects to be humiliated and abandoned and rejected, she brings forth one of herself's self-states, which is essentially a psychopath.

And that's a protector self-state. It protects her from pain. It is defiant. It's contrumaceous. It's angry. It's reckless. It's aggressive. It gets the job done, the job of protecting her.

The borderline has several self-states, and they are separated by dissociative wars. The dissociation, forgetting. The dissociation is not always total. It's permeable.

And this dissociation helps the borderline to compartmentalize.

So when the borderline, for example, acts out when she misbehaves, for example, she cheats on you, she is likely to attribute if she remembers the cheating, because many times she will not, especially if she's drunk or drunk.

But if she does remember the cheating, she will attribute it to her other self. She will feel contrite, ashamed. She will regret what she had done, but she would still defend herself by attributing it to another self-state.

Her impulsivity and recklessness are compartmentalized. She would not feel fully responsible for what she had done because it wasn't her. It was some other self-state that took over her.

So she's likely to say, I don't know what came over me. I've never done this before. It's not me. It's not like me. I surprised myself. I shocked myself, etc.

You need to help the borderline to not act out because acting out is seriously dangerous. Cheating is the most benign option.

She can do really, really crazy things. She can break your car. She can steal your money.

She can, acting out is simply being out of control.

And because a psychopath, secondary psychopathic state takes over, the acting out is largely antisocial and psychopathic. It's like you suddenly find yourself married to a psychopath or in love with a psychopath.

So you need to help her.

The first thing we should do is decatastrophize.

One of the main processes in decompensation and acting out is catastrophizing. The borderline anticipates unfavorable outcomes and consequences. She foresees humiliation, abandonment, and rejection.

So she catastrophizes and she's reacting not to reality. She is reacting to her catastrophizing imagination. She sees the future. The future is dystopian and bleak. She's reacting to the future, not to the present.

You need to bring her back to the present through a process called decatastrophizing. You need to bring her back to the present. You need to ground her. You can ground her physically by hugging her. You can ground her verbally by reassuring her that you're not about to abandon her or humiliate her or reject her.

On the very contrary, you're very much in love with her. You can bring her back to reality by reestablishing reality testing, ironically, for example, by attacking some of her assumptions as untenable or fantastic or paranoid or delusional.

So there are many ways to decatastrophize, but you must absolutely diffuse the time bomb of acting out by reestablishing reality as the yardstick and the benchmark of all her future behaviors.

You can do this also by mirroring her. When she becomes aggressive and violent on the verge of acting out, you can mirror her behavior.

Mirroring has a very powerful effect on the borderline. It calms her down. She suddenly realizes what she's doing. She kind of wakes up from the stupor and the nightmare and she's back in reality.

Another thing you can do is use techniques for impulse control. Redirect her impulses.

She wants to do A. You redirect her to do B. She wants to be aggressive with something. You redirect her aggression. You rechannel her aggression and hurl it, use it in some other way, redirection via reframing and via re-motivation.

There are many techniques for impulse control. Again, I'm not going to review all of them. You just go online and type techniques for impulse control.

When you witness the decompensation and the acting out of the borderline, it's clear that she is not acting out the way a narcissist would or the way a psychopath would. It's not acting out because she is emotionless, because she has no empathy, because she's vindictive, because she wants to hurt you or because she's goal-oriented, wants to take something from you. Her acting out is very clearly highly emotional. She's hurt. She's hurting. She's bleeding and she wants you to experience the same pain. She wants to hurt you, not in order to hurt you, but that you could share the experience of her pain. She wants to have a shared experience of hurt with you, a universe of hurt where both of you will belong.

So her acting out is about you, actually, and it is the outcome of something we call emotional dysregulation. She is overwhelmed by her emotions. They're too strong for her. She can't cope. She's drowning, and she's dragging you down with her.

You need to help your borderline with her emotional dysregulation.

Number one, teach her to talk about her emotions, to communicate her emotions, help her to verbalize her emotions.

Number two, ask her to label her emotions, to call them by name, because the borderline experiences her emotions as a cloud. The emotions are diffused. Very often she doesn't know what's happening. She's totally disoriented. In many cases, she goes into a dissociative state. She depersonalizes. She derealizes, or she becomes amnesiac.

At any rate, she is very hard pressed to say what's happening inside her head. Very often a borderline will tell you, I'm having a brain fog. It's a brain fog. I can't tell you what's happening. You need to force her to help her to collaborate with her, to label her emotions.

You can ask her, are you feeling anger? Are you feeling envy? Are you afraid?

You need to help her to call her emotions by name.

When this is done, when she had gained a handle, when she had gained a label, she calms down because just labeling the emotion provides her with control over the emotion.

Her problem is dysregulation, which is a fancy word for lack of control. She loses control over herself. Labeling helps her to regain control, then teach her to externalize her emotions.

Ironically, the borderline acts out because she bottles up emotions. She's very wary, hypervigilant, and cautious. She's very unlikely to communicate efficaciously with you.

So instead she bottles up everything. She acts pseudo stupid. She doesn't talk much, or she talks about irrelevant things, or she diverts the conversation, or she kind of digresses and tries to avoid the painful topics.

Teach her to externalize her emotions, to show that she's angry, to demonstrate her envy or jealousy, to act appropriately other negative emotions or positive emotions. Teach her to externalize behaviorally her emotions, but also teach her to talk about her emotions.

You can do this by using a variety of techniques.

One of the most powerful is known as chair work. You can ask her, for example, to put her anger on an empty chair and then to talk to the anger in the empty chair, to have a dialogue with her own anger. You can ask her to put her envy, her hatred, her fear on the chair. Talk to her abandonment anxiety. Interrogate the abandonment anxiety. Ask the abandonment anxiety for help.

Chair work. Dialogue with the emotions via the methodology and instrument of an empty chair.

And finally, you can use techniques for cognitive behavioral therapy, or you can attend cognitive behavioral therapy in order to negate, in order to counter negative thoughts.

The borderline has negative automatic thoughts, which leads to catastrophizing and lead to despair and depression and anxiety.

The borderline assumes the worst. And because she assumes the worst, the worst outcomes, because of this, she sinks into anxiety and depression, anxiety, depression, a very strong concomitance of borderline. They are comorbid with borderline very often. And they are usually the outcome of these negative automatic thoughts, which are which CBT is very successful at eliminate, learn the techniques of eliminating automatic negative thoughts, or simply attend a few therapy sessions with her, having learned to control her negative thoughts, having learned to label her emotions, having dialogue with her anxieties and fears, having verbalized what's happening inside her, having externalized her emotions via behavior, the risk of acting out the risk of emotional dysregulation, the risk of the compensation, these risks are much reduced using these techniques.

One of the main problems with borderline is that she cannot, as she cannot regulate her emotions, she cannot control her anger.

Borderlines are very angry, and they're angry in a very violent and aggressive way.

You need to learn anger management techniques. You need to teach your borderline to cognitively restructure. Cognitive restructuring is a major anger management technique. It's simply teaching the borderline to think about things in a different way to consider triggers, stimuli, provocations, fears, frustrations, to consider all this in a totally different way, maybe as positive opportunities for growth and learning.

For example, cognitive restructuring, established communication protocols, very rigid and strict communication protocols. If she wants to say something, she has to say it according to the protocol. No personal attacks, no attacks on the other.

Like if you want to say something, for example, if you want to say what you're doing is hurting me, don't blame, don't accuse, don't say the way you're misbehaving is really bad.

Instead, say I'm in pain. Talk about yourself. Don't talk about her. Describe your own reactions, your own internal state rather than attacking her.

That's an example of a communication protocol, established communication protocol and adhere to them religiously. Communication protocols are very powerful tools which prevent a lot of misunderstanding and pain down the road.

Finally, introduce humor. Humor is the best antidote to anger. Whenever she's angry, don't mock her. Don't invalidate her anger. Don't minimize her anger. Don't minimize her.

That's not what I'm saying. But say something humorous that suddenly exposes the whole situation as irrational.

And if she's amenable to humor, this will diffuse the anger.

The borderline has what we call moodlability. Moodlability. She's mood is as dysregulated as her emotions. Moodlability can be counted with physical activity, a sleep schedule, a series of rigid routines. The routines provide structure, provide a skeleton, so rigid routines, and with stress management techniques.

Again, I encourage you to go online and look for stress management techniques.

So moodlability in the borderline is a serious problem. Mood swings. Very serious problem.

Anyone who had lived in the borderline knows what I'm talking about.

This is not like three days of fun and three days of depression. This is like one hour of fun and two hours of depression, and then two hours of fun, and three hours of anxiety, and then three hours of rage, and two hours of the mood swings are enormous, and they are never ceasing.

And so if you want to survive with the borderline, you need to regulate this. You need to control her moods. She needs to control her moods, and this is what I mentioned.

Physical activity, sleep schedule, routines, stress management techniques. The moods of the borderline are reactive. They are not produced internally.

Most of the time, they are reactive.

Regrettably, her reality testing is impaired so what she perceives is very often wrong, very often deformed, very often inappropriate, inaccurate.

So by restoring reality testing, you're going to reduce mood-lability considerably.

But because it's mostly reactive, you need to eliminate the triggers and the stimuli and the provocations in the environment, and you need to structure her life. You need to help her to structure her life so that she can reduce stress, and the stress leads to anxiety and anxiety leads to mood-lability.

Reduce stress and you solve an entire chain reaction.

The borderline outsources internal functions, internal what is known as ego functions. She outsources these to you.

The intimate partner of a borderline is her source of regulation. She is the one with the hand on the key. He is in control of how she feels, her emotions, her moods, her reactions, her explosions, her love.

What the borderline does, because she lacks a regulated inner world, because the inner world is one gigantic, gigantic twister, what she does is she actually is telling you, help me by regulating me. Be my external control. Be my external board of control. Be my user manual. I'm transferring my locus of control to you, the borderline says.

And from now on, you are my God. You are in charge of my moods, my emotions, my cognitions, my happiness, my unhappiness, my aggression. Everything I do, you are to blame everything I do you're responsible and accountable for. Even if I misbehave, I misbehave because of you. This is, of course, outsourcing, of course, is extremely unhealthy. It's extremely unhealthy.

A lot of the many of the dysregulatory behaviors and emotions and moods of the borderline have nothing to do with you as a partner.

So attributing everything to you is scapegoating you. Don't let the borderline scapegoat you.

Teach her to regain locus of control. Transfer these responsibilities that she had given to you, that she had abrogated. Transfer these responsibilities back to her. Do it incrementally. Do it gradually.

Do it gradually. Do not threaten her. Do not demand. Do not control. Do not chastise and castigate and criticize. Be nice. Be kind.

She is not well. Help her to recover. Provide her with increasing control over herself, her circumstances, her choices, her decisions, and gradually her emotions and her moods.

Remove this locus of control from yourself and help her to regain an internal locus of control.

At the same time, help her to develop and reward what we call autoplastic defenses. Autoplastic defenses is accepting responsibility for your actions and for the consequences of your actions. Alloplastic defenses is when we blame other people for everything that's happening to us. That implies an external locus of control.

If you are to blame for what's happening to me, then I'm not in control of my life. You are.

You want the borderline to regain control of her life also by accepting responsibility for everything she had done, everything that's happening to her.

And it can start with a very simple manipulation of language.

Borderlines often say, this happened to me. You should tell the borderline, no, this did not happen to you. You did it.

Very typical cases when the borderline comes and says I was drunk and I slept with another man. It happened. It did not happen. You did it.

Restores a sense of responsibility, self-control, locus of control. Reward these defenses. Reward these behaviors when it's warranted.

When she does something good, something nice, reward her. When she does something bad, refuse to accept responsibility.

Reject any attempt to put it on you. You're not responsible for her actions. You're not responsible for her moods, for her emotions, for her cognitions, for her misbehavior, for her aggression, for the violence.

Never ever accept responsibility.

But do it lovingly because you love her. Do re-establish a sense of control and sense of personal responsibility and accountability, lovingly.

The borderline, exactly like the narcissist, tends to idealize and devalue. She idealizes you and devalues you on a daily basis.

These are very rapid cycles as opposed to the narcissist.

In borderline, the cycling is very rapid. She can idealize you and devalue you several times a day.

The problem is when she, when she idealizes you, you're God. When she devalues you, you're the devil. And she doesn't feel bad when she is in the stage of devaluation. She doesn't feel bad to betray you, to cheat on you, to harm you, to undermine your interests.

So it's very dangerous when the borderline is in the devaluation phase.

Because in this phase, when she is devaluing you, she is controlled by a secondary psychopathic self-state. She is a psychopath.

You don't want the borderline to devalue you because she will damage you really seriously and badly. You don't want her to idealize you either because then her expectations are unrealistic and she is bound to be frustrated and disappointed and devalue you.

You want to stop this cycle. You want to stop it dead in its tracks. You don't want idealization and devaluation. You want a realistic assessment of who you are, what you can give, what are your limitations, and you want this realistic assessment with the foundation of your relationships.

You want, in other words, to restore reality testing, insist on reality. Whenever she says something wrong, counterfactual, correct her, insist to introduce reality at all times, hundreds of times a day, if you have to, repeatedly on the same topic if you have to.

Restoring in reality testing is the only guarantee that your relationship will not end in a self-annihilating nuclear mushroom cloud, which is a typical way a relationship with a borderline ends, ask me.

Maintain the entire picture. Integrate her splitting. When she says that someone is all bad, remind her that this very person has good aspects, good traits, and had behaved nicely with her, was kind to her. Negate her splitting. Negate her projection. Act against her defenses. Do not let her idealize and devalue you or anyone else.

Integrate splitting. Maintain the entire picture. Serve as a reminder. Serve as a database. Serve as a repository of the totality of experience.

If she tries to divide experience into black and white, we call it dichotomous thinking, black and white fallacy. If she tries to divide people and life into black and white, reminds her that life is actually gray and that people are always in between, partly bad, partly good.

Help her because she's stuck at a very infantile stage. She regresses to an infantile stage where mommy is all good or all bad. You are all good and all bad, etc.

Help her to integrate.

One major problem with borderline, and this is the focus of dialectical behavioral therapy, frankly, is self-mutilation, which could lead to suicidality. Between 10 and 11 percent of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder actually commit suicide. It's an enormous rate.

So the borderline self-mutilates. She can self-mutilate classically by cutting herself or burning herself with cigarettes. This is dermatological self-mutilation on the skin. It's visible.

But there are many other ways to self-mutilate.

For example, she can sexually self-trash. She can self-trash sexually. She can do horrible sexual things. Anything from, I don't know, gangbang to sleeping with disgusting men that she finds revolting. She just thrash herself. She can abuse substances. She can behave recklessly and as a way to self-harm. If you drive recklessly, you may end up in an accident.

So there are numerous ways for the borderline to self-mutilate, self-harm.

The ultimate is suicide. The ultimate is suicide.

You need to prevent this. Prevention involves recognizing the warning signs of suicide. These include extreme mood swings, feelings of hopelessness, giving away possessions, losing interest in activities that hitherto she found interesting, talking about death or suicide, saying goodbye to family and friends, saying that everyone is a burden on her. She doesn't want to see anyone, so schizoid face, withdrawing from friends and family. All these things are signs of impending episode of self-harm.

The problem with borderline is escalation. The borderline drinks one drink. She drinks 20. It's like alcohol craving, writ large. So she can't regulate her behaviors. When she starts to do something, she has no intention to end where she usually ends. She had intention to have one drink. She ends up being in a blackout, alcoholic blackout. She had an intention just to flirt with the men. She ends up having sex with him in a dingy, sleazy hotel. She had intention just to drive in the breeze, but she ends up wrecking the car. So she escalates.

If you see these signs, they may lead to suicide because she can't stop herself. There's no regulatory mechanism there.

So she starts with one intention and she ends up with totally different act.

You need to listen. You need to be attuned to her. You need to be like a seismograph. Do not judge her. Do not dismiss her. Do not discount or invalidate her feelings. Just be a good listener. Just sit next to her and let her talk to you. Encourage her and prompt her, motivate her, incentivize her to talk to you by being a kind soul, by loving her truly. Encourage her to verbalize. Encourage her to sublimate her aggression some way. Do something. Punch a bag, write a book, read a book, watch a movie, go on a walk.

Physical activity is always very important in all these things.

The problem with the borderline is dissociation. She doesn't remember, and because she doesn't remember things, she can't learn. There's no process of learning. There's no memory.

And because when there's no memory, there's no identity and there's no identity. There's no one there to learn.

So borderline never learns. It's infuriating because she keeps repeating the same mistake over and over again. She keeps associating with the same people who had mistreated her, disrespected her, raped her again and again. She does everything again and again.

The self-harm keeps repeating. The self-mutilation, the wrong choices, the disastrous decisions, the horrible people who had trampled all over her. She keeps coming back for more because she has no memory. She's totally dissociative. She lives in the presence in the worst sense of the word. She is discontinuous. She has no continuity. Encourage her to develop continuity. Ask her to journal, to have a diary where she writes everything that's happening to her, everything she thinks, everything she feels, and then encourage her to read the diary the next day. So this creates continuity, at least cognitive continuity. Journaling is a very powerful tool.

Mementos, objects that carry memories or are associated with memories, something with a smell, something with a taste, a visual thing that provokes her memory. Memory triggers, like in the famous movie Memento, so memory triggers. Encourage her to place post-it notes on the refrigerator, on the door, on chairs, all over the house. Post-it notes to remind her of things she wanted to do, things she's thinking about.

There's a close affinity between borderline personality disorder and patients with early onset dementia. It's very reminiscent of some phases of Alzheimer.

You need to re-establish continuity via memory. Encourage her to video record herself because video recordings are much more powerful than written notes. Maybe she should video record herself and keep these recordings for a few days. Watch them a few days later to establish this thin thread of memory and identity.

Programmed reminders, as I mentioned before. Use them a lot. Reminder of this, reminder of that. Ground her in reality by force, by force of love and kindness. Drag her down. She's floating. She's like an air balloon, you know, a helium balloon. Drag her down.

Ground her, moor her in a good way. Tie her to your wrist. Keep her with you. She's worth it. She's worth it because most borderlines are beautiful, intelligent, heartbreakingly tender women. She's worth the investment and the effort if you're up to it.

And finally, borderlines have transient paranoid ideation and they are very likely to make you the enemy, the persecutory object.

If you insist on introducing the borderline to reality, if you try to regulate her emotions and her moods, you're bound to clash with her. There's bound to be conflict. As these conflicts accumulate, she's going to begin to regard you as the enemy. We call it persecretary object. She's going to begin to develop transient paranoid ideation about you, paranoia. She's going to begin to suspect you of malevolence and bad intentions. She's going to be wary of you. She can be suspicious of you. She's going to interrogate you. She's going to spy on you.

This is common in borderline. You don't need to worry. You just need to take it in stride. It will pass.

That's why we call it transient paranoid ideation. It passes. Insist on reality testing when she's paranoid. Journaling. Question her. Doubt her. Counter her paranoia with your own paranoia. Mirrored her. Use a secret code or an exit strategy and agree on it when she is not paranoid. And when she is paranoid, use this secret code or exit strategy or safe word for her to freeze and suspend her paranoia.

So when you say the word, she freezes. She doesn't continue with her paranoid ideation until it passes. You need to counter all these things. You need to fight. Being with the borderline is a prolonged, prolonged fight on multiple fronts, every possible front, actually.

Now, some intimate partners, some men, because I'm using the example of a woman with borderline, some men find it worthwhile because the borderlines have gifts to give, which very few women do.

The borderline, the typical borderline maintains her childlike pureness and goodness. A typical borderline, when she loves you, you would never, ever experience a lot like that in your life. It is total love. She's immersed in you. It's not like the codependent. Codependent depends on you.

So in the codependent, there's a strong transactional element. The borderline loves you essentially unconditionally, like I would say a mother does.

But she loves you as a woman, not as a mother. A borderline is typically a woman's woman because she's very flirtatious, seductive, into this kind of woman. She's a woman's woman.

There's a lot. It's a treasure.

A typical borderline woman is a treasure, but the price is very high and constant. And you need to be on your toes. You need to walk on actions all the time.

Most men would say the price is not worth the price. I'm one of the few who thought, think, probably will think in the future that the price is well worth the price.

I have paid a very big personal price for my exclusive choice of borderline women.

But whatever price I had received made all the prices I've paid well worth it. Not your cup of tea. Go away. Don't even start. You may get captivated and trapped. Avoid contact with borderline women.

They are very, very alluring and addictive. If it's not your cup of tea, walk away. If you can't do all these things that I just mentioned on a regular daily basis, hourly basis, I mean, just walk away. It's a full-time job. It's a full-time maintenance job.

If you can, and you're up to it, a treasure awaits you at the end of the rainbow. Go for it Dorothy.