Thank you for this - I have worked with a number of highly destructive women, whose power and persistence rests entirely on them being seen as a victim.
I was raised by three. The psycho-emotional abuse since born has wired me in ways i am working on changing. As a child looking to my mother or her female relatives as loving, nurturing and supportive has deeply harmed me. This clear article shows what a child would get, if one can imagine. I don’t need to imagine. I lived it. And this article is so descriptive it is visceral to me.
Thank you for your candor here. It’s rare when it comes to BPD. What’s coming up for me is that there really is a myth in our field that therapists themselves cannot be harmed by these dynamics ie somehow training confers invulnerability, as if our insight functions like literal
armor in the clinical room. The fantasy runs like this: with enough supervision, enough theory, enough personal work, one becomes structurally immune to repeated transference/relational injury. Yet therapists remain embodied persons with nervous systems, attachment histories, and moral intuitions. Knowledge refines my clinical lens but doesn’t abolish affect, a part of me wishes it would! Thanks again for this piece.
Same goes for addiction recovery coaches. I’ve had a BPD client but she was so passive-aggressive I had to pass her on to a BPD specialist. She avoided doing anything that would help her get better and kept trying to manipulate my emotions. I never fell for her manipulation, but I couldn’t get anywhere with her. Hope she found treatment that works.
Earlier articles on this case stated that the court overturned the conviction with reference to the perpetrator being from a different culture, which, they argued, meant that he should be excused for not realizing that the child was against having sex with him. Absurd and horrifically evil court.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of whitewashing of psychopathy going on these days.
But you are right that the refusal to see female psychopaths for what they are is endemic.
In my experience, they are not rare. And they are terrifying.
Women and men are a lot more equal by nature than some people like to realize.
That immigrant has been effectively feminized as a victim. That's what intersectionality does: it erases agency and assumes a criminal like that couldn't possibly be culpable.
It is classical Marxist doctrine that the criminal is the truest revolutionary as he better than anyone helps to break down the old society. Therefore he should be excused and cosseted, even treated as a hero. That's what's behind this attitude, I believe: Decades of romanticizing Marxism in the West.
I can't agree with the use of the verb 'feminized' to describe this action, though. Women do have agency and can be culpable of wrongdoing; they should be held fully responsible for their actions and tried for crimes on an equal footing with men.
I do appreciate that you’re restoring the notion of integrity to women which is the right thing to do. My use of the term is to flag how often women get away with hyper emotional behavior, but of course this shouldn’t be tolerated.
Massive elephant in the room Anglosphere cultures nowadays is that localizing a male predator's pain in his childhood and organizing societal life around his suffering - this is OK to the ruling elite as long as the predator is not a western Christian man.
Western Christian men do not get empathy based on dominant cultural energies. But BPD/narcissitic/manipulative women and non-western men who rape little boys do merit empathy, it seems.
Makes me think of Will Ferrell's SNL comedy skit where he is dressed like a teenage girl and screams "You just don't understand!!"
Wish western courts would just do that since it is what they do anyway when they insult the population - shaming us that we should have more empathy for the foreigner who rapes our kids. Eff off.
I wish Western courts would uphold real justice. Equal justice for all and proper action taken against predators. We are starved of justice, but it is a fundamental human need.
"Dominant cultural energies" - well, that is a Marxist belief - that only certain classes are worthy of empathy, and that the real hero of society is the criminal, because he helps to break down the extant structures and pave the way for a violent revolution. Early socialists wrote openly about this. Present-day marxists just quietly practice it.
This is why Christians need to be got rid of more than anything else, in their view: Because Christians keep the extant society (Western civilization) alive and functioning.
It all makes sense within the system of Marxist thought. Not a bug, but a feature.
Really liked this piece. Thank you. I am a GenX physician (cardiologist) who was encouraged by the system in our training to always interpret the psychologically suffering as victims. My gut over the years has told me that something deeper is often going on, particularly with the emotionally neurotic, volatile, and hypersensitive. But the psych/therapy field seems to refuse to budge on that stance that such a person is always the victim.
Your description - that these traits may be "a Machiavelian drive to regulate the environment through emotional volatility"..... Man. On the money. "The manipulation may not be helplessness so much as it is cold, detached calculation".... I am going to keep these words and use them and will cite you as the source! :)
The healthcare system often expects docs to have no self-standards - to be needless/wantless during training and beyond, to abandon ourselves for the sake of the patient, to always accommodate above and beyond.
The older I get, the less I enjoy being manipulated "for the sake of the patient." Thank you for encouraging us to reclaim agency. The system needs standards - though as long as the healthcare system is run by the woke, I don't have much hope that it will ever maintain healthy standards. You are correct: the most emotionally/psychologically broken person holds the most social power nowadays.
Thank you sharing your experiences, sounds like ours are quite similar. That’s what had me going from loving the field to growing angry. So many doctors and psychologists are just puppets for the progressive woke ideology! And they don’t see how it contributes to dysfunction.
Many in medicine are those whose goal is to rise to the top of the system they’re in. This is often the cohort who is accepted to med school to begin with - institutional system achievers who love positive feedback from the system to feel good about themselves. Courageous independent thinkers often don’t thrive in woke corporate medical systems where lip service is paid to DEI but where they have zero interest in diversity of thought or opinion. They want what drives profit - anything that might hamper profit is suppressed. The entire system is overwhelmingly superficial.
Ultimately it becomes a self selecting group - those who stay are the useful tools.
Covid put this phenomenon into the limelight - doctors who disagreed with what was at the time the party line on Covid treatment, for example, were shunned and disciplined. Puppets put in positions of power.
To maintain courage one needs to know how to thrive in spite of the dominant systems.
DEI Stochastic entryism and True that “Ultimately it becomes a self selecting group” and deliberately so when, offering land acknowledgments, and stating one’s pronouns become signifiers of cultic adherence. Only the woke, elevated victim class need apply. Especially rampant after 20+ years of one party rule in California. e.g. the “unhoused”/“safe use” parasitic bureaucracy complex.
This is such an important piece and totally on the money. The relational aggressive techniques are lethal in their own way. As you say, an easy case can be made that they are also anti social. Could it be gynocentrism that keeps therapists from seeing the lethality that you describe. I wonder.
My favorite part of this was "The resulting state of intermittent reinforcement keeps the partner addicted to the “good” version and terrified of the “bad” one." Very well said. I have seen this repeatedly and it is the cornerstone to understanding the manipulative nature of these behaviours. Meanwhile the "good" version simply does not exist.
I think BPD spectrum disorder describes women. Some are low.
I remember my infant son begging for good Mummy and not bad Mummy.
Women lack the objectivity and persistence of identity to prepare for adulthood while their secondary sexual characteristics grant them immense power of manipulation and attention in the critical teen years.
It's a predictable and persistent phenomena that women themselves recognise in other women.
Yet, ostensibly lack the faculty of reflection.
Presumably due to high affect, making the ego defence of projection preferable to wrestling with reality to get results as men must.
There are Borderline men as well. They are under diagnosed though, because things like unprovoked rage and need to dominate orgers seems less abnormal in a man.
Probably due to feminization. The woke mind virus. But a man is defined as someone who produces more than they consume. Structurally men cannot be on the BPD spectrum because they must adapt to reality to succeed.
That sentence you quoted nails it. I had the extreme misfortune of getting into a relationship with a man borderline man many years ago. The proper relationship itself was rather short, but he didn't actually let me go that quickly. It took me YEARS before I was able to fully rid my mind of him. Simultaneously addicted and terrified was exactly it.
This article could’ve been written about my mother. Oddly enough she quoted this Little Girl with the Curl’ poem regularly with a giggle during my youth, almost as if she was proud of her work. We rarely talk any longer and my life is far more peaceful now.
Dr. Spier, thank you for your writings. My stepdaughter age 33, whom I've known since she was 7, is an undiagnosed BPD. She is dangerous in my opinion. Currently we have no contact with her except when she is stalking us, at the same time screaming for her dad and I to leave her alone. She is welcome to spiral without me in the mix. Currently my husband is declining in health due to AML, which she says (online) he made up. Just baffling behaviors, but I know enough to pray for her return to sanity while keeping her out of my life.
Thanks, Hannah, that’s a really great article, I recognise its contents all too well 😢. When I first understood what NPD was from Sam Vaknin’s videos in 2015 it shocked me to the core and I was forced to reassess everything I thought I knew about human nature and life. As I’ve said previously, my ex had bipolar then NPD and the 24 year ‘marriage’, with 2 abused-to-their-core children, was a living nightmare. Every aspect of family breakdown from the abuse from the children’s ‘mother’ occurred (alcoholism, drugs, truancy, self harm, depression, sexual promiscuity) and there was *no* help. The procession of ‘professionals’ that were involved in our family tragedy knew nothing, wanted to know nothing, were easily manipulated by the children’s ‘mother’s lies and blame shifting.
Anyway, her sister by 2015 knew there was something very wrong with my ex, beyond the bipolar she’d admitted to me (and lied she was recovering from) and pegged it at Borderline Personality Disorder. So I read her recommended book, supposedly a gold standard, Stop Walking on Eggshells, Mason and Kreger. Terrible book, just enabling further abuse by shifting accountability off the BPD abuser. That the BPD’s modus operandi is abuse is not acknowledged, their abuse is barely mentioned, instead it’s all about their suffering. Your analysis, OTOH, is spot on accurate. Thank-you again, let’s hope your analysis begins to make headway against the woke (covert narcissistic) captured therapy and psychology professions. We sufferers from the abusers know the reality, at some point that reality has to override the reality- denying ideology of these people.
Thanks, love EP, she’s definitely a hero for truth. Founded the first women’s domestic violence shelter then the Honest Ribbon anti domestic violence organisation as a protest against the corrupt misandrist feminist White Ribbon version. She said both men and women committed DV about equally and was attacked by the feminists , who it’s said killed her dog and who took over her shelter movement : she had to leave for Australia .
I’d never heard of the diagnosis Borderline PD until I was recovering from cancer treatments. A year before my cancer diagnosis an eldest sister became angry at me over bizarre issues related to our mother’s Will and was estranged. Due to her misplaced anger, this sister (a retired nurse but emotionally fragile person) did not want to be inconvenienced in any way by providing me any support. She received criticism from another sister and was desperate to protect her self-image and cope with her guilt and paranoia. So she decided to phone the Mental Health Crisis Line and falsely claim I was “suicidal” and also falsely claim I “had been diagnosed with BPD and SHE wanted me assessed”. It would later become known her agenda was to get me thrown in a psych ward so that I “could get my meals and other daily needs there.” Then she could wash her hands of any guilt or criticism.
After my sister’s manipulative lies were put onto my records I was told by Drs I saw for cancer treatments I can see ‘someone’ “for help with sleep medications” as chemo and steroids caused sleep issues. The ‘someone’ turned out to be a young female psychiatrist and this sister then placed a call to this psychiatrist. Unbeknownst to me this sister made up more manipulative and outrageous lies to try validate her lie claiming I 'had been diagnosed with BPD'. The psychiatrist would only tell me this sister called her and angrily refused to tell me why my sister called or what she said. After seeing me very briefly during cancer treatment the psychiatrist also did not inform me she was putting diagnoses of “Severe and Persistent BPD”, “Somatization Disorder” and “MDD” on to my province-wide electronic records.
I was age 56 when this injustice occurred. I had always been a hard worker, self-reliant, lived my life very responsibly and independently. I had always helped and supported my family members my entire life. I had never had any of these diagnoses before and not once over my entire life had I ever been "suicidal". As these diagnoses have had horrible repercussions on my health care I have tried for many years to get my records corrected. I have very supportive letters from my long time family doctor, from friends, neighbors, my long time partner, also 2 psychologists, and a seasoned Psychiatrist (Director at the same clinic as the young psychiatrist I saw) who called this “a horror story”, stated I “do not have these diagnoses”, “the system has failed” and “the psychiatrist needs to issue a Retraction but he can’t make her”. I ended up suing my eldest sister for her damaging lies and she issued a Legal Retraction of her lies. However the psychiatrist refuses to change her opinion and therefore the system will not let me correct my medical records.
Your article is very informative as to behaviors with Borderline PD but I also have to disagree with the sentence “This is precisely why your sister and your mother are your most effective screening tools for the borderline woman”.
As it turns out the “sister” or even a mother can be the one who has serious personality issues.
You should have sued the psychiatrist first of all. It is wrong in every conceivable way to make a diagnosis upon hearsay from a third person. No real professional would fall for that. They would know instantly what a red flag it is when a relative calls the professional to tell her "what is wrong with her patient".
That psychiatrist should have her license removed for doing a thing like that. There is something seriously wrong with her. Was she perhaps bribed?
And to a cancer patient in the bargain! She could have killed you!
If you have the energy, you should sue her for all she's worth. She's dangerous and should not be allowed to practice.
Maria, thank you, I really appreciate your comment! I live in Canada and we have an organization called Canadian Medical Protective Assoc. (CMPA) The CMPA is funded with taxpayer dollars to provide free high-end lawyers to doctors to fight any patient complaints or lawsuits. The CMPA has accumulated a war chest of 6 Billion for this purpose so lawyers in Canada do not want to take medical malpractice cases unless it's worth millions and is a guaranteed win. I called numerous lawyers but the second I explained my case involved a fabricated label of BPD they would no longer speak with me and hung up. I even had trouble to find a lawyer to sue my sister because the minute they hear about BPD label I was pre-judged and written off.
You are so correct in saying this young psychiatrist is dangerous. And yes my sister's vitriol should have been a huge red flag. My sister even told the psychiatrist the adverse effects of 3 chemo drugs (i.e profuse nosebleeds, tinnitus and vertigo caused by damage to my inner ears from carboplatin) was "bizarre and had ZERO basis" and that's why the psychiatrist gave me the additional label of "Somatization Disorder". The College of Physicians dismissed the complaint as well as my Appeal. The College actually had a psychiatrist on their Board claim this psychiatrist "not only met standard of care, she exceeded it". We were gob smacked by the corrupt cover up.
I wanted to try warn others so I put up a review on Rate MD. I did not disparage her, I simply stated what happened and suggested people ask for a copy of their medical records as soon as they see her so they will not be blindsided later. My review was up approx 2 weeks and then removed. So I tried again and again. I tried 4 times to post a review and each time it was up for a couple weeks and then removed. That is interesting. There is more traumatic bodily harm that was inflicted on me because of these fabricated labels and I hope to at least write a Substack blog as a way to warn people.
I see you're up against systematic and deep corruption. I'm not surprised, sadly. I have several friends who are medical doctors and psychotherapists, they have told me about horrific cover-ups they have been witnesses to. The medical profession unfortunately is a psychopath magnet. And psychiatry in particular seems to have a dark attendance. It is deeply tragic.
A Substack article may be your best bet at present, then. The more word gets out, the more chance that other victims come forward and there may be a snowballing effect that could lead to someone being finally brought to account.
Best of luck and stay strong. May true justice be done.
Gosh, yes you speak words of wisdom! I had put medical professionals on a pedestal and gave them unwarranted trust. I certainly know better now. I do believe the medical profession attracts psychopaths. Psychiatry in particular has many questionable and harmful practices. If you are interested check out the website of Mad in America sometime. They regularly post personal stories of the many who thought they would receive ‘help’ but instead were gravely harmed.
All the best to you, thanks again for your kind and supportive words. 🙏
And, the fact that she had the guts to stalk the doctors and call! These people are so dangerous and destructive because they are usually so charming and smart, but they have actually no sense of self-editing or what they want to do is wrong, because they rationalize it as evening the score, or some similar reason.
Oh, I so relate to this personal destruction, and I feel the tears for you brimming. I'd actually forgotten some of this horrific behavior from my own sister until I read your experience. I hope you are insisting that your medical records be fixed. This is a terrible injustice that you do not need to keep living with. Stay far away from that woman, sister or no. I hope you are living well these days. God bless.
Thank you for your kind words Laura. I am so sorry to hear you also relate to a horrible situation like this with a sister. 💔 It is so deeply painful.
It's been a difficult injustice to live with my sister's lies on my medical records as it has meant compounding abuse and traumas whenever I have needed medical services. I have been repeatedly denied health services (even for a torn bleeding retina!) and treated like a piece of trash by medical personnel after they read her lies and labels on my records. Years later it still feels surreal my sister actually did something this nefarious (while I was bald, very thin and very ill from chemo drugs) - and she got away with it! I only had a bit of limited contact with her and knew she had no wish to support me. I didn't ask her for anything nor did I expect any help. I had not done anything or said anything to her to deserve what she did. I was just minding my own business and getting through the treatments. She needed to destroy my reputation to try make herself look better to others. She projected her own darkness onto me as she was desperate to protect her fragile image. For sure she has justified it in her own mind for whatever reason she tells herself. Yes for sure, I stay far away from her! She has shown me who she is and I believe her. Take care and God bless you too. 🙏
Thank you for this - I have worked with a number of highly destructive women, whose power and persistence rests entirely on them being seen as a victim.
Crybully is a good word for it.
I was raised by three. The psycho-emotional abuse since born has wired me in ways i am working on changing. As a child looking to my mother or her female relatives as loving, nurturing and supportive has deeply harmed me. This clear article shows what a child would get, if one can imagine. I don’t need to imagine. I lived it. And this article is so descriptive it is visceral to me.
Thank you for your candor here. It’s rare when it comes to BPD. What’s coming up for me is that there really is a myth in our field that therapists themselves cannot be harmed by these dynamics ie somehow training confers invulnerability, as if our insight functions like literal
armor in the clinical room. The fantasy runs like this: with enough supervision, enough theory, enough personal work, one becomes structurally immune to repeated transference/relational injury. Yet therapists remain embodied persons with nervous systems, attachment histories, and moral intuitions. Knowledge refines my clinical lens but doesn’t abolish affect, a part of me wishes it would! Thanks again for this piece.
Yeah, I have heard a lot of therapists don’t like working with BPD people.
Same goes for addiction recovery coaches. I’ve had a BPD client but she was so passive-aggressive I had to pass her on to a BPD specialist. She avoided doing anything that would help her get better and kept trying to manipulate my emotions. I never fell for her manipulation, but I couldn’t get anywhere with her. Hope she found treatment that works.
Outstanding work, Doc. You are exceptionally skilled at communicating these concepts to your readers.
"No one asks a victim to locate a male predator’s behavior in his childhood pain or expects society to organize its life around his inner suffering."
Sometimes they do:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/iraqi-refugee-raped-10yearold-boy-swimming-pool-vienna-austria-sentence-conviction-overturned-supreme-court-a7377491.html
Earlier articles on this case stated that the court overturned the conviction with reference to the perpetrator being from a different culture, which, they argued, meant that he should be excused for not realizing that the child was against having sex with him. Absurd and horrifically evil court.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of whitewashing of psychopathy going on these days.
But you are right that the refusal to see female psychopaths for what they are is endemic.
In my experience, they are not rare. And they are terrifying.
Women and men are a lot more equal by nature than some people like to realize.
Yes that was quite shocking
I can’t forget that little boy.
That immigrant has been effectively feminized as a victim. That's what intersectionality does: it erases agency and assumes a criminal like that couldn't possibly be culpable.
It is classical Marxist doctrine that the criminal is the truest revolutionary as he better than anyone helps to break down the old society. Therefore he should be excused and cosseted, even treated as a hero. That's what's behind this attitude, I believe: Decades of romanticizing Marxism in the West.
I can't agree with the use of the verb 'feminized' to describe this action, though. Women do have agency and can be culpable of wrongdoing; they should be held fully responsible for their actions and tried for crimes on an equal footing with men.
I do appreciate that you’re restoring the notion of integrity to women which is the right thing to do. My use of the term is to flag how often women get away with hyper emotional behavior, but of course this shouldn’t be tolerated.
Of course not. Emotional violence is violence too, as the article points to.
Massive elephant in the room Anglosphere cultures nowadays is that localizing a male predator's pain in his childhood and organizing societal life around his suffering - this is OK to the ruling elite as long as the predator is not a western Christian man.
Western Christian men do not get empathy based on dominant cultural energies. But BPD/narcissitic/manipulative women and non-western men who rape little boys do merit empathy, it seems.
Makes me think of Will Ferrell's SNL comedy skit where he is dressed like a teenage girl and screams "You just don't understand!!"
Wish western courts would just do that since it is what they do anyway when they insult the population - shaming us that we should have more empathy for the foreigner who rapes our kids. Eff off.
I wish Western courts would uphold real justice. Equal justice for all and proper action taken against predators. We are starved of justice, but it is a fundamental human need.
"Dominant cultural energies" - well, that is a Marxist belief - that only certain classes are worthy of empathy, and that the real hero of society is the criminal, because he helps to break down the extant structures and pave the way for a violent revolution. Early socialists wrote openly about this. Present-day marxists just quietly practice it.
This is why Christians need to be got rid of more than anything else, in their view: Because Christians keep the extant society (Western civilization) alive and functioning.
It all makes sense within the system of Marxist thought. Not a bug, but a feature.
Really liked this piece. Thank you. I am a GenX physician (cardiologist) who was encouraged by the system in our training to always interpret the psychologically suffering as victims. My gut over the years has told me that something deeper is often going on, particularly with the emotionally neurotic, volatile, and hypersensitive. But the psych/therapy field seems to refuse to budge on that stance that such a person is always the victim.
Your description - that these traits may be "a Machiavelian drive to regulate the environment through emotional volatility"..... Man. On the money. "The manipulation may not be helplessness so much as it is cold, detached calculation".... I am going to keep these words and use them and will cite you as the source! :)
The healthcare system often expects docs to have no self-standards - to be needless/wantless during training and beyond, to abandon ourselves for the sake of the patient, to always accommodate above and beyond.
The older I get, the less I enjoy being manipulated "for the sake of the patient." Thank you for encouraging us to reclaim agency. The system needs standards - though as long as the healthcare system is run by the woke, I don't have much hope that it will ever maintain healthy standards. You are correct: the most emotionally/psychologically broken person holds the most social power nowadays.
Thank you sharing your experiences, sounds like ours are quite similar. That’s what had me going from loving the field to growing angry. So many doctors and psychologists are just puppets for the progressive woke ideology! And they don’t see how it contributes to dysfunction.
Many in medicine are those whose goal is to rise to the top of the system they’re in. This is often the cohort who is accepted to med school to begin with - institutional system achievers who love positive feedback from the system to feel good about themselves. Courageous independent thinkers often don’t thrive in woke corporate medical systems where lip service is paid to DEI but where they have zero interest in diversity of thought or opinion. They want what drives profit - anything that might hamper profit is suppressed. The entire system is overwhelmingly superficial.
Ultimately it becomes a self selecting group - those who stay are the useful tools.
Covid put this phenomenon into the limelight - doctors who disagreed with what was at the time the party line on Covid treatment, for example, were shunned and disciplined. Puppets put in positions of power.
To maintain courage one needs to know how to thrive in spite of the dominant systems.
DEI Stochastic entryism and True that “Ultimately it becomes a self selecting group” and deliberately so when, offering land acknowledgments, and stating one’s pronouns become signifiers of cultic adherence. Only the woke, elevated victim class need apply. Especially rampant after 20+ years of one party rule in California. e.g. the “unhoused”/“safe use” parasitic bureaucracy complex.
Yes. But that's the correct way. The most psychologically broken person should be listened to.
This is such an important piece and totally on the money. The relational aggressive techniques are lethal in their own way. As you say, an easy case can be made that they are also anti social. Could it be gynocentrism that keeps therapists from seeing the lethality that you describe. I wonder.
My favorite part of this was "The resulting state of intermittent reinforcement keeps the partner addicted to the “good” version and terrified of the “bad” one." Very well said. I have seen this repeatedly and it is the cornerstone to understanding the manipulative nature of these behaviours. Meanwhile the "good" version simply does not exist.
Thank you Hannah!
I think BPD spectrum disorder describes women. Some are low.
I remember my infant son begging for good Mummy and not bad Mummy.
Women lack the objectivity and persistence of identity to prepare for adulthood while their secondary sexual characteristics grant them immense power of manipulation and attention in the critical teen years.
It's a predictable and persistent phenomena that women themselves recognise in other women.
Yet, ostensibly lack the faculty of reflection.
Presumably due to high affect, making the ego defence of projection preferable to wrestling with reality to get results as men must.
There are Borderline men as well. They are under diagnosed though, because things like unprovoked rage and need to dominate orgers seems less abnormal in a man.
Probably due to feminization. The woke mind virus. But a man is defined as someone who produces more than they consume. Structurally men cannot be on the BPD spectrum because they must adapt to reality to succeed.
🤣
That sentence you quoted nails it. I had the extreme misfortune of getting into a relationship with a man borderline man many years ago. The proper relationship itself was rather short, but he didn't actually let me go that quickly. It took me YEARS before I was able to fully rid my mind of him. Simultaneously addicted and terrified was exactly it.
That’s the problem with diagnosis and labels. It excuses behaviour.
What a useful essay. Helped me recognize this in some women in my life. Thank you.
It is vital to all of our well-being that this behavior face extremely harsh stigma.
Instead, we've normalized it as a mainstream political movement.
Honestly, even gentle but firm and unyielding boundaries would be an extraordinary show of progress!
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This article could’ve been written about my mother. Oddly enough she quoted this Little Girl with the Curl’ poem regularly with a giggle during my youth, almost as if she was proud of her work. We rarely talk any longer and my life is far more peaceful now.
This is an excellent read and shines a light on dangerous relationship dynamics that get swept under the rug in psychology.
Thank you for this. I just shared it with my son, whose (diagnosed) BPD girlfriend moved out with their five month old baby boy yesterday afternoon.
I’m so sorry to hear that. Please give him my best. I hope he keeps up his strength
Dr. Spier, thank you for your writings. My stepdaughter age 33, whom I've known since she was 7, is an undiagnosed BPD. She is dangerous in my opinion. Currently we have no contact with her except when she is stalking us, at the same time screaming for her dad and I to leave her alone. She is welcome to spiral without me in the mix. Currently my husband is declining in health due to AML, which she says (online) he made up. Just baffling behaviors, but I know enough to pray for her return to sanity while keeping her out of my life.
There's nothing else to be done in such a case. God keep you, and heal your husband.
I have an ex-wife and a daughter who both fit this description. Great job on the column. Sounds like you met them.
Thanks, Hannah, that’s a really great article, I recognise its contents all too well 😢. When I first understood what NPD was from Sam Vaknin’s videos in 2015 it shocked me to the core and I was forced to reassess everything I thought I knew about human nature and life. As I’ve said previously, my ex had bipolar then NPD and the 24 year ‘marriage’, with 2 abused-to-their-core children, was a living nightmare. Every aspect of family breakdown from the abuse from the children’s ‘mother’ occurred (alcoholism, drugs, truancy, self harm, depression, sexual promiscuity) and there was *no* help. The procession of ‘professionals’ that were involved in our family tragedy knew nothing, wanted to know nothing, were easily manipulated by the children’s ‘mother’s lies and blame shifting.
Anyway, her sister by 2015 knew there was something very wrong with my ex, beyond the bipolar she’d admitted to me (and lied she was recovering from) and pegged it at Borderline Personality Disorder. So I read her recommended book, supposedly a gold standard, Stop Walking on Eggshells, Mason and Kreger. Terrible book, just enabling further abuse by shifting accountability off the BPD abuser. That the BPD’s modus operandi is abuse is not acknowledged, their abuse is barely mentioned, instead it’s all about their suffering. Your analysis, OTOH, is spot on accurate. Thank-you again, let’s hope your analysis begins to make headway against the woke (covert narcissistic) captured therapy and psychology professions. We sufferers from the abusers know the reality, at some point that reality has to override the reality- denying ideology of these people.
Truth is the only antidote.
You might like Erin Pizzey's "The emotional terrorist and the violence-prone":
https://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Terrorist-Violence-Prone-Erin-Pizzey-ebook/dp/B003Y5H7YK
Thanks, love EP, she’s definitely a hero for truth. Founded the first women’s domestic violence shelter then the Honest Ribbon anti domestic violence organisation as a protest against the corrupt misandrist feminist White Ribbon version. She said both men and women committed DV about equally and was attacked by the feminists , who it’s said killed her dog and who took over her shelter movement : she had to leave for Australia .
Yes, her life story is really interesting. And scary, the way she was/is persecuted.
I’d never heard of the diagnosis Borderline PD until I was recovering from cancer treatments. A year before my cancer diagnosis an eldest sister became angry at me over bizarre issues related to our mother’s Will and was estranged. Due to her misplaced anger, this sister (a retired nurse but emotionally fragile person) did not want to be inconvenienced in any way by providing me any support. She received criticism from another sister and was desperate to protect her self-image and cope with her guilt and paranoia. So she decided to phone the Mental Health Crisis Line and falsely claim I was “suicidal” and also falsely claim I “had been diagnosed with BPD and SHE wanted me assessed”. It would later become known her agenda was to get me thrown in a psych ward so that I “could get my meals and other daily needs there.” Then she could wash her hands of any guilt or criticism.
After my sister’s manipulative lies were put onto my records I was told by Drs I saw for cancer treatments I can see ‘someone’ “for help with sleep medications” as chemo and steroids caused sleep issues. The ‘someone’ turned out to be a young female psychiatrist and this sister then placed a call to this psychiatrist. Unbeknownst to me this sister made up more manipulative and outrageous lies to try validate her lie claiming I 'had been diagnosed with BPD'. The psychiatrist would only tell me this sister called her and angrily refused to tell me why my sister called or what she said. After seeing me very briefly during cancer treatment the psychiatrist also did not inform me she was putting diagnoses of “Severe and Persistent BPD”, “Somatization Disorder” and “MDD” on to my province-wide electronic records.
I was age 56 when this injustice occurred. I had always been a hard worker, self-reliant, lived my life very responsibly and independently. I had always helped and supported my family members my entire life. I had never had any of these diagnoses before and not once over my entire life had I ever been "suicidal". As these diagnoses have had horrible repercussions on my health care I have tried for many years to get my records corrected. I have very supportive letters from my long time family doctor, from friends, neighbors, my long time partner, also 2 psychologists, and a seasoned Psychiatrist (Director at the same clinic as the young psychiatrist I saw) who called this “a horror story”, stated I “do not have these diagnoses”, “the system has failed” and “the psychiatrist needs to issue a Retraction but he can’t make her”. I ended up suing my eldest sister for her damaging lies and she issued a Legal Retraction of her lies. However the psychiatrist refuses to change her opinion and therefore the system will not let me correct my medical records.
Your article is very informative as to behaviors with Borderline PD but I also have to disagree with the sentence “This is precisely why your sister and your mother are your most effective screening tools for the borderline woman”.
As it turns out the “sister” or even a mother can be the one who has serious personality issues.
You should have sued the psychiatrist first of all. It is wrong in every conceivable way to make a diagnosis upon hearsay from a third person. No real professional would fall for that. They would know instantly what a red flag it is when a relative calls the professional to tell her "what is wrong with her patient".
That psychiatrist should have her license removed for doing a thing like that. There is something seriously wrong with her. Was she perhaps bribed?
And to a cancer patient in the bargain! She could have killed you!
If you have the energy, you should sue her for all she's worth. She's dangerous and should not be allowed to practice.
Maria, thank you, I really appreciate your comment! I live in Canada and we have an organization called Canadian Medical Protective Assoc. (CMPA) The CMPA is funded with taxpayer dollars to provide free high-end lawyers to doctors to fight any patient complaints or lawsuits. The CMPA has accumulated a war chest of 6 Billion for this purpose so lawyers in Canada do not want to take medical malpractice cases unless it's worth millions and is a guaranteed win. I called numerous lawyers but the second I explained my case involved a fabricated label of BPD they would no longer speak with me and hung up. I even had trouble to find a lawyer to sue my sister because the minute they hear about BPD label I was pre-judged and written off.
You are so correct in saying this young psychiatrist is dangerous. And yes my sister's vitriol should have been a huge red flag. My sister even told the psychiatrist the adverse effects of 3 chemo drugs (i.e profuse nosebleeds, tinnitus and vertigo caused by damage to my inner ears from carboplatin) was "bizarre and had ZERO basis" and that's why the psychiatrist gave me the additional label of "Somatization Disorder". The College of Physicians dismissed the complaint as well as my Appeal. The College actually had a psychiatrist on their Board claim this psychiatrist "not only met standard of care, she exceeded it". We were gob smacked by the corrupt cover up.
I wanted to try warn others so I put up a review on Rate MD. I did not disparage her, I simply stated what happened and suggested people ask for a copy of their medical records as soon as they see her so they will not be blindsided later. My review was up approx 2 weeks and then removed. So I tried again and again. I tried 4 times to post a review and each time it was up for a couple weeks and then removed. That is interesting. There is more traumatic bodily harm that was inflicted on me because of these fabricated labels and I hope to at least write a Substack blog as a way to warn people.
You're welcome.
I see you're up against systematic and deep corruption. I'm not surprised, sadly. I have several friends who are medical doctors and psychotherapists, they have told me about horrific cover-ups they have been witnesses to. The medical profession unfortunately is a psychopath magnet. And psychiatry in particular seems to have a dark attendance. It is deeply tragic.
A Substack article may be your best bet at present, then. The more word gets out, the more chance that other victims come forward and there may be a snowballing effect that could lead to someone being finally brought to account.
Best of luck and stay strong. May true justice be done.
Gosh, yes you speak words of wisdom! I had put medical professionals on a pedestal and gave them unwarranted trust. I certainly know better now. I do believe the medical profession attracts psychopaths. Psychiatry in particular has many questionable and harmful practices. If you are interested check out the website of Mad in America sometime. They regularly post personal stories of the many who thought they would receive ‘help’ but instead were gravely harmed.
All the best to you, thanks again for your kind and supportive words. 🙏
You’re welcome, and thank you for the recommendation of that website!
And, the fact that she had the guts to stalk the doctors and call! These people are so dangerous and destructive because they are usually so charming and smart, but they have actually no sense of self-editing or what they want to do is wrong, because they rationalize it as evening the score, or some similar reason.
“Evening the score”… how chilling, and one fears, realistic.
I think its actually more common than we think. Im sorry this happened to you.
Oh, I so relate to this personal destruction, and I feel the tears for you brimming. I'd actually forgotten some of this horrific behavior from my own sister until I read your experience. I hope you are insisting that your medical records be fixed. This is a terrible injustice that you do not need to keep living with. Stay far away from that woman, sister or no. I hope you are living well these days. God bless.
Thank you for your kind words Laura. I am so sorry to hear you also relate to a horrible situation like this with a sister. 💔 It is so deeply painful.
It's been a difficult injustice to live with my sister's lies on my medical records as it has meant compounding abuse and traumas whenever I have needed medical services. I have been repeatedly denied health services (even for a torn bleeding retina!) and treated like a piece of trash by medical personnel after they read her lies and labels on my records. Years later it still feels surreal my sister actually did something this nefarious (while I was bald, very thin and very ill from chemo drugs) - and she got away with it! I only had a bit of limited contact with her and knew she had no wish to support me. I didn't ask her for anything nor did I expect any help. I had not done anything or said anything to her to deserve what she did. I was just minding my own business and getting through the treatments. She needed to destroy my reputation to try make herself look better to others. She projected her own darkness onto me as she was desperate to protect her fragile image. For sure she has justified it in her own mind for whatever reason she tells herself. Yes for sure, I stay far away from her! She has shown me who she is and I believe her. Take care and God bless you too. 🙏