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In my previous article Extreme BPD / NPD Behaviors Are Internally Triggered, I discussed the puzzling ways in which normal circumstances seem to trigger abusive behaviors from Borderlines, Narcissists, and other personality disordered abusers. My advice to those who can do so is to get away and stay away from these people as they are a serious danger to your own mental health, even your freedom and your life, if you continue to have anything to do with them.

Unfortunately, not everybody can easily extricate themselves from the abuse without severe consequences. This is particularly true for parents of children whose other parent is a Borderline or Narcissist. Staying in the children’s lives means staying in the line of fire of the abuser. Leaving is likely to subject the children to even more abuse. Often the abuser has focused most of her or his rage against their former partner or spouse. But if that parent leaves, the rages, abuses, and emotional manipulations are not going to stop. They will probably be redirected at somebody else close to the abuser as loved-ones are the tops targets for these sick people. The children are a likely target for even more abuse than they have already received. This chronic abuse with no escape (as the healthy parent has disappeared) is likely to create severe psychological damage, even personality disorders, in these children as they have even less means to defend themselves against one of these sociopaths than an adult does.
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Recently a reader of our site wrote a comment about our article Talking With A Borderline citing how it didn’t show how non-Borderlines trigger the negative behaviors associated with Borderline Personality Disorder. The comment seemed to be intended to place some of the blame for Borderline behaviors on the people around them, particularly people who are essentially the targets of Borderlines who do not suffer from a personality disorder or engage in abusive behaviors themselves. This is mostly a mistake in my view. It also makes me wonder if the comment came from somebody with a Borderline son or daughter or who is personally suffering from BPD and therefore may be prone to blame-shifting as a means of coping with his or her own guilt or shame.

Most of the people around a Borderline are not abusive, yet they may trigger reactions in Borderline akin to an actual abuser even when they aren’t displaying an iota of aggression or hostility. In most of these situations, the Borderline perceives aggression or abuse in their own minds, even when a neutral disinterested person would say none is present, and then launches into a reaction that is similar to what they might do if there actually was an abuser trying to harm them. The trigger is much more internal, in the mind of the Borderline, than external. This is what makes is so difficult for others to understand why the sociopathically inclined individuals, be they Borderlines, Narcissists, or something else, behave as they do.

Extreme Reactions Product of Child Abuse

Borderlines are sometimes said to suffer from “emotional dysregulation” because they react in extreme ways to normal stimuli. This extreme reaction in many cases developed from their experience as child abuse victims, an experience most of them share, and trying to find ways to avoid being abused again. Many of them have found that extreme reactions including false blaming, projection, lying, and other behaviors associated with Borderlines and Narcissists alike are reasonably effective at either drawing fire away from them and making somebody else the target of their abuser. Other times, their extreme behaviors may somehow justify in their own minds why they are deserving of abuse, perhaps giving them some delusional feeling of control over the abuse. Over time, many of them may generalize these maladaptive behaviors by applying them to people who are not abusing them but by whom they are reminded of what it feels like to be abused.
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Dr. Tara Palmatier’s Shrink4Men website has recently been bombarded with abusive comments from somebody who sounds like she has BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) with malicious acting out behaviors, or as I’d call her, a personality disordered abuser (PDA). The good psychologist is hoping to help identify the attacker and perhaps help her victimized ex in the process.

(from Lost and Found: Does Anyone Have an Ex-Borderline Girlfriend or Wife in the West Hempstead-East Northport-NYC Vicinity Whom You Told about Shrink4Men During the Break-Up?)

Perhaps this is not the best way to go about doing this, but I’m a big believer in implementing consequences for crazy and malicious BPD behavior, so here we are. Beginning late last week, a woman, whom I assume is the former spouse or girlfriend of a man who frequents this site, began spamming my site with puerile comments in which she engages in name calling and other typical BPD verbal attacks against Shrink4Men readers/commenters and me.

None of these comments have been approved nor will they be approved because they’re nothing more than lame attempts to hurt my readers feelings and my feelings and they would only distract from the meaningful dialogue, sharing and support that takes place here. The irony is that her attacks don’t hurt my feelings. In fact, my thoughts are, “Gee, I can see why her ex broke up with her” and “I wonder how many texts and voicemails the poor bastard who was dating/married to her is getting everyday?” If anything, her spams only reinforce my beliefs about BPD and the information presented on this site.

Now, the reason I am posting this rather than something more productive: Gentlemen, if you believe this is your ex/gf/wife, please contact me and I will send you all of her spam comments with the date, time stamp and multiple IP addresses, so that you can include them as evidence of her unstable/stalker/harassment behavior in any pending divorce/restraining order cases. If need be, I have access to an Internet security expert who can trace pretty much anything directly to the source.

Information warfare by a nasty PDA, often one who suffers BPD or NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), is a frequent feature of the ending of a relationship involving such a person. But the comment spamming mentioned above is really among the less serious of attacks.

Distortion campaigns can become ruinous and virtually unfixable, especially if there are children involved. Some might call it a catch-22 situation in which anything you do to try to fix the disaster only makes it worse. When the Internet becomes involved, the risks of this may be even higher as I’ll discuss below.
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Some emotional abusers are particularly adept at using a technique called “gaslighting” (from a movie starring Ingrid Berman and Charles Boyer) to drive their victims to question their own grip on reality and even to make them feel like they are going insane. The essence of gaslighting is to make somebody believe a falsehood and to wonder why they didn’t remember or recall it previously. It is a mind game often used to distract from their own problematic behaviors and to create self-doubt in their target of abuse. Many Borderlines and some with related personality disorders from the DSM-IV Axis II Cluster B group (including Borderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial, and Histrionic) personality disorders are particularly skilled and prone to using gaslighting on their partners and people close to them.

In The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, Dr. Robin Stern sums up the behavior like this:

Gaslighting is when someone wants you to do what you know you shouldn’t and to believe the unbelieveable. It can happen to you and it probably already has.

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Some of the most emotionally abusive relationships and traumatic divorces involve the mentally ill. One of the most difficult of these mental illnesses is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) because it is not easily diagnosed. Behaviors can range from extreme violence to subtle patterns of emotional blackmail and projection. On top of that, many Borderlines tend to live in denial, constantly avoiding their own feelings of emptiness, insecurity, anger, disappointment and fear that more often than not stems from an abusive childhood. It is hard to treat and help someone if they don’t want to face their own abuse — abuse that they themselves suffered or the abuse that they themselves do.

Classifying Borderlines as “Acting In” or “Acting Out”

Not all borderlines are focused on harming others. Some are so busy with their own inner demons that they are trapped in a realm of substance abuse, suicide attempts, and self-hate that for most can be traced back to child abuse or neglect. They are often known as the “acting in” type. If this is the kind of Borderline in your life, count yourself lucky. That’s because they are both more likely to recognize their own problems and work on them and less likely to focus on destroying other people in a desperate attempt to portray themselves as worthy people who are victims in need of assistance.

The other group of Borderlines, sometimes called the “acting out” group, are narcissistic sociopaths with little sense of guilt or remorse. They often have little limit to what they will do to make themselves “win” and you “lose” and don’t care who else they hurt in the process. If you have been in a relationship with a person suffering Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), be aware that much of what is written about “acting out” Borderlines applies equally to Narcissists.
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CCFC co-founder Cole Stuart was recently wrongfully arrested due to what appears to be manipulation of the police by his ex-wife Lynn Stuart and possibly various elements of the San Diego family law system. While malicious alienating parents using courts and police to abuse their children’s other parent is commonplace particularly in a broken family court system such as that in San Diego, she has been aided at this by a particularly dirty San Diego lawyer. Lynn Stuart hired Jeffrey Fritz. He has earned a reputation as an attorney who is a “shark” who will resort to all manners of abusive and unethical tactics to “win” cases for his clients while driving up huge billings that severely damage the finances of all but the very wealthiest. He typically attracts high-conflict clients such as Lynn Stuart.
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A study conducted by Rhode Island Hospital has shown that the common Mood Disorder Questionnaire (MDQ) test used for screening for bipolar disorder often results in a person who appears to be suffering from BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) being diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. Yet despite this confusion, these two conditions are very different. For one, there are no approved medications for BPD at present whereas there are medications approved for treating bipolar disorder. Additionally, psychotherapy programs such as DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) which have been developed for use with BPD patients and shown to be effective are not commonly used with bipolar patients. Consequently, there is a significant risk that people wrongly diagnosed with bipolar disorder who are actually suffering from BPD may be prescribed ineffective medications that may have adverse side effects and will not receive psychotherapy that could help them manage their BPD.
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Donna Andersen

I happened across a very good posting on LoveFraud.com titled LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: Tips for co-parenting with a sociopath containing advice on how to co-parent with a sociopath. Sociopaths are people who manage to portray themselves to the general public as friendly, caring, nice people but in reality they are manipulative, deceitful, and endeavor to hurt others to get what they want. Some of the common sociopaths you are likely to find in family law courts are people who are “acting out” Borderlines, Narcissists, and Antisocials. Their morality can be summed up in one sentence: If it gets me want I want or will hurt somebody I don’t like, it’s A-OK.
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(Note: This article was published together with Personality Disordered Abusers in Psychological Evaluations. That article focuses on problems encountered when psychological evaluations are used in an attempt to deal with a personality disordered abuser in a family law dispute.)

William Eddy is an attorney and licensed clinical social worker who has written many excellent books on personality disorders and how they manifest in family law battles. In his recent books, he has taken to calling people with personality disorders who engage in extensive and unreasonable litigation as High Conflict Personalities (HCP). He’s stated that a large part, possibly as much as 40%, of the litigation in family courts involves HCPs.

Yet despite the prevalence of these psychological problems in family law courts, judges often fail to understand the problems and are prone to reward the abusers for their conduct. This is likely to intensify the abuses because they have been positively reinforced with rewards such as sole physical and/or legal custody, financial awards, or simply emotional satisfaction of seeing the hated target being berated by a judge the abuser manipulated.
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(Note: This article was published together with Personality Disordered Abusers in Family Law Courts. That article focuses on the more general problems encountered in family law disputes involving personality disordered abusers.)

A common opinion of many people suffering harm due to a current or former partner who is a personality disordered abuser is that a psychological evaluation performed for a family law case will describe and label the personality disorder and help protect the victims, including the children and spouse, from the abuser. Disturbingly, this seldom occurs. Instead, what often happens is that the evaluation leads to more conflict and poor outcomes in family law courts that put children and the target parent and their extended family at increased risk of continuing abuse at the hands of the personality disordered abuser and her or his associates.
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Kevin “Jackal” Johnson has put together a series of animations about a hardworking unassertive “nice guy” named Joe and his demanding abusive spouse. While he’s not yet stated this animated woman is a narcissist or borderline, she certainly acts like one. He may not be right about her being a psychopath — sociopath is more the ticket — but the style of her emotional and verbal abuse is just the kind of garbage coming out of mentally ill abusers.

Check out Poor Married Joe for more episodes.

More “Psycho Abuse” Videos

Talking With A Borderline

Psycho Girlfriend: Episode 1

Parental alienation is a form of emotional abuse in which a normal positive parent/child relationship is damaged or destroyed by another party using emotional manipulation, threats, false accusations, and other means. It involves at least two basic elements. The first is an alienator engaging in access blocking to keep a child from seeing a parent. The second is a pattern of denigration and destruction of reputation to make the child dislike the parent. When parental alienation becomes severe and/or extended in duration, the child may start to avoid seeing the target parent, repeat the statements of the alienator as if they were the child’s own, and even make up new “reasons” to dislike having contact with the target parent. Often these “reasons” are complete nonsense and have little to no accuracy.

If you’re suffering as a target parent and are aware of parental alienation, probably none of this is news to you. However, what may be news to you is that parental alienation isn’t limited to the most commonly discussed situation of parents involved in divorce or child custody battles. For starters, you may be alienated from your children by your spouse while married.
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Borderline Mom: A Quick & Dirty Manual of Emotional Self Defense for Children is a new title by Georgiana Wright for people dealing with a mother suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), whether formally diagnosed or simply suspected. One of the key decisions children of Borderlines eventually must make is whether the destructive relationship with their mother can be fixed by setting boundaries or whether it is better to cut off all ties and write their mother off. Author Georgianna Wright explores both choices in her new book.

Recognizing Borderline Women

Borderline women are generally abusive to those around them, particularly to their husbands, boyfriends, partners (including women partners — lesbians and bisexuals can be Borderlines just as heterosexuals can), and children. It is important to realize that many Borderlines were abused as children, some have genetic tendencies for extreme emotional behavior, and some have both characteristics. Recognizing a Borderline often depends upon noticing how they affect the people who are their close family and friends. These people often are afraid of the Borderline and can spend years being manipulated and controlled via abusive tactics, rages, and false blaming. The Borderline will often have endless complains about all of these people, seemingly justifiable unless you have actually met and seen them and therefore know that they are not the source of the problems.
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Do you ever have guests in your home? Not to be antisocial, but your guests could inadvertently help land you in a heap of trouble, even if they do nothing illegal or immoral and have no ill intentions towards you. That’s because of America’s blatant disregard for its Constitution. If this doesn’t make sense to you, read on because you need to know about this threat to your family, your freedom, and even your life.
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Reading through Dr. Tara Palmatier’s excellent and entertaining website A Shrink For Men, one can see how men are frequently abused by mentally ill women. The women may have grown up in abusive homes, have hormonal imbalances, or just are “plain crazy” perhaps with a personality disorder (especially the DSM-IV Cluster B ones including Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Antisocial) or two mixed in. Add in some other disorders, such as common co-morbid conditions including bipolar disorder, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and an eating disorder and you’ve got almost a purpose-built “killing machine” who can and will attack and ruin anybody who gets in her way. She’ll likely get away with it, too.

Our society enables and encourages women to abuse others. From domestic violence to child abuse to psychological terror, women are treated as if they are authorized to ruin the lives of others with no repercussions on themselves. Amazingly, they often are able to recruit “professionals” to help them conduct their abuse campaigns against men. Besides the typical gender biased CPS social workers and other government servants, one of the most notable of these abuse allies are incompetent mental health professionals.
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In my previous article How to Win Custody by Framing Your Ex for Child Sexual Abuse, I discussed how a significant number of malicious moms in divorce and child custody battles resort to framing their ex-husbands for child sexual abuse. While good mothers won’t stoop to such destructive stunts, malicious moms will often do this after the failure of other false allegations and attempts at parental alienation, harassing, and scaring their ex-husbands to gain sole custody of the children. This means that the defense against false child sexual abuse allegations must start long before the allegations are ever made as they are but one highly damaging step in a much longer escalating series of attacks.
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It’s the dawn of a new age. In America, it’s now socially acceptable for married people to not only intentionally seek out extramarital sexual affairs but even for businesses to promote and profit from them doing so. Seedy whorehouses and call-girl services now seem both outdated and out-of-touch as married women want to jump in the sack with men (or women) other than their spouses and can quickly hop on the web to help them quickly hop on top of their next sexual conquest.

While prostitution is still illegal in most of America, the legal business of adultery assistance now features high-tech entrepreneurs who legally make a profit helping their customers to initiate, arrange, and manage those extramarital affairs. AshleyMadison.com is one of them which will help you do it. As I’m writing this article, they claim to have more than 26,000 members online “right now” and over 4 million members signed up. I’m not against profit, but as for this way of doing it — YUCK!
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In 2008, West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin signed into law House Bill 3065 that permits prosecutors to pursue misdemeanor criminal charges against people filing false child abuse reports. It also allows the victims of false child abuse reports to file for civil damages, even if criminal prosecution has not been pursued. Although the law is a step in the right direction, it does not go far enough.

Criminal Penalties

As a misdemeanor crime, the criminal penalties are rather weak, but are better than nothing. Perhaps they may be enough to keep a few malicious parents from making false accusations of child abuse during child custody battles.
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Are you concerned you may have a personality disorder? Or do you think that a friend, family member, or ex-spouse may?

There are many comprehensive tests that have been designed for detecting personality disorders. Unfortunately, few are available for online use by the general public.

A couple of weeks ago, I found an online personality disorder test and spent some time examining and experimenting with it. Knowing what I’ve learned about personality disorders, I can see the point of a lot of the questions on the test. So at first glance, it seems like a genuine effort and not a joke or half-brained effort.
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I ran across some excellent posts by Dr. Tara Palmatier today on her website Shrink4Men. She’s chosen to focus on helping men deal with personality disordered women and the destruction they cause. Most of her writings apply very similarly to women who have been in relationships with personality disordered men. If you’ve been in a relationship like this or know somebody who has, please take a look at her website and pass it around.

Can a Target of Personality Disorder Abuse Learn to Love Again?

Dr. Palmatier’s article Can a Man Who Was Emotionally Abused By His Narcissistic or Borderline Wife or Girlfriend Have a Relationship with a Healthy Woman? struck a personal chord for me for I wondered the same thing for a long time. Today I know the answer is yes, but for a while I wondered if I would ever be able to trust another woman again.
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