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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.
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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 Anderson wrote ”Red Flags of Love Fraud – 10 Signs You’re Dating a Sociopath” to explain how to detect if your romantic relatioship might be with a sociopath. If you didn’t realize this soon enough and had a child, she’s got some other advice for you on how to cope with the problems of trying to co-parent with such a person.

On her website, 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 what I want or will hurt somebody I don’t like, it’s A-OK.
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Eric Moelter has started to speak up a bit about what has happened in the false sexual abuse and child custody abduction case of Cindy Dumas v. Eric Moelter now that all three boys are living with him once again. He believes their mother Cindy Dumas suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder and has been waging a distortion campaign against him for years.
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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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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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